Over the past several years, I've started to notice this trend in films that features objects that could surely be called art. They are the journals of Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon, the journals and pictures drawn by witnesses in The Mothman Prophecy, the journals and notebooks of children and teen girls in The Ring and the film footage that will kill you that is inside the film in The Ring, and the sheer madness of the wall and window art created by John Nash in A Beautiful Mind.

Those just off the top of my head. In each case, the journals, writings, films and other images add another dimension to the film - one that takes us deeper and more inside, revealing to us the soul of the desperate as it journeys its private and dark night.. Each object goes to creating an aura on which the rest of the film will hang. Such journals and films are at the very core of each film - they are the key, the answer, the door waiting to be flung open to reveal that deeper understanding.

What is it about any film that one finds truly terrifying. We may be terrified as viewers, but imagine being a victim and not just a witness. How much more frightening is that? Directors and authors have found a device, a trick, that brings us deeper into any horror film; help us see behind the eyes of both killer and victim. What is it to be in the head of a person when they are about to die? Don't we all wonder, at some point, what happens then? Using a journal or film as a device, directors and writers offer an opportunity, an advance viewing of how the mind churns dark and confusing thoughts, how we process our fear so different, yet in so many ways, remarkably alike.

Who can forget the fat and fabulous journals of Frances Dolarhyde, bound in thick leather and bearing oversized 9 x 11 velum pages onto which Frances has pasted what seems to be essentially an entire inner world, beginning in early childhood through the present. Inside you find pictures of grandmother D, an abusive woman who raised him and is always threatening to "cut it off" because he's a "filthy little beast" bed-wetter. Mostly though, because he's just a little boy and one gets the sense that she didn't sign up for this. Where his parents are remains a mystery, all we know is that it is she who raised him and it wasn't good.

Dolarhyde's journal bears old photographs of his deceased and wicked grandmother, her face scribbled out, cut-up rearranged, her eyes replaced with repeating butterfly wing spots, her teeth emphasized for we know that it is biting that really gets Dolarhyde off. . There are photographs of Frances as a young boy, his face overdrawn, his cleft-palette mouth especially darkened by black pen, and news clippings that detail his own killings in which he is dubbedc "The Tooth Fairy" by the soon to be dead Freddie Lounds at Tattler magazine. More, clippings of our old friend Hannibal Lecter, fellow serial -killer and inspector Will Graham (Ed Norton), laid up in the hospital after Hannibal tried to kill him. And in between all of this is page upon page of text, in it's rather interesting handwriting - legible and definite This journal is nothing less than a work of art.