- The horror movie has risen from the grave.
Christopher Goodwin examines why today's audiences are baying for blood
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- Just a few years ago, Hollywood had all
but declared the horror movie dead, the last drop of blood drained from
its lifeless corpse. Even modern masters of the genre such as Wes Craven,
who had terrified two generations of audiences with films like The Last
House on the Left (1972), The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and A Nightmare on
Elm Street (1984), had veered into parody - even self-parody - with Scream
(1996) and its sequels. Young audiences, it seemed, had become far too
wise to the tricks of the trade to be scared any more. Horror had become
a laughing matter.
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- It's not funny any more. This week sees
the release of the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, produced and co-written
by Craven, and directed by Alexandre Aja, who made the cult French slasher
movie Haute Tension. And in two weeks, Hostel will be released, directed
by the American film-maker Eli Roth, with Quentin Tarantino as executive
producer.
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- What most distinguishes these two films,
and a crop of others such as Saw and Wolf Creek, is their astonishing goriness
and unrepentant sadism, the degree of which has not been seen on screen
since the British Board of Film Classification banned so-called "video
nasties" such as The Driller Killer and I Spit on Your Grave in the
mid-1980s. The characters in these films use and abuse saws, drills, gouges
and any other device they happen upon, inflicting literally eye-popping,
bone-cutting, artery-squirting, toe-crunching violence on those to whom
they have taken a dislike. The difference these days, though, is that the
kind of horror films that were once sold under the counter in Soho are
now mainstream cinematic fare, often distributed by divisions of the major
Hollywood studios.
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- And young audiences all over the world
can't get enough of them. Saw had a $1m budget and grossed $55m in the
USA and $47m internationally; Saw II cost $4m and grossed $87m in the USA,
and nearly as much overseas. Hostel, which cost less than $5m and features
scenes of astonishing and unrelenting cruelty and brutality, has taken
nearly $50m in the USA since its release at the beginning of January. The
film tells the cautionary tale of two young American men and one Icelander
who end up in Bratislava because they're told the Slovak girls are crazy
for foreign guys. They are, but not in the way they think.
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- Even the makers of this new breed of
celluloid gore are happy to acknowledge the baseness of their intent. "The
best part of seeing Hostel with an audience is seeing people pass out and
vomit," Roth said recently.
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- Why has horror made a comeback, and why
is the new ultra-gore so attractive to adolescents today? Adam Simon, who
directed the documentary The American Nightmare (2000), believes it's impossible
to understand horror films without looking at the social context in which
they are made. In The American Nightmare, the leading horror directors
of the 1970s and 1980s - Craven, George A Romero, John Carpenter, Tobe
Hooper and David Cronenberg, all of whom came of age in the 1960s - make
it clear how many of the most horrific visions in their films were informed
by images they had seen on television: of lynchings, brutal police attacks
on civil-rights marchers, the slew of televised violence that Vietnam became,
the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Their films
fed on and translated into terrifying fantasy the dread and anxiety of
those times, and their sense that the American dream their parents had
believed in proved to be just so many dangerous and bloody lies.
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- "I think there is something about
the American dream," says Craven, who started his working life as
a literature professor, "the sort of Disneyesque dream, if you will
- of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white picket fence, mom and
dad and their happy children, God-fearing and doing good whenever they
can - and the flip side of it, the kind of anger and the sense of outrage
that comes from discovering that that's not the truth of the matter, that
gives American horror films, in some ways, kind of an additional rage."
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- That rage and intensity had dissipated
by the time the likes of Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on
Elm Street had spawned their numerous sequels. They became tired, exploitative
and far less terrifying. Hence the success of the Scream parodies from
the mid-1990s.
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- Many people credit M Night Shyamalan,
with films such as The Sixth Sense, Signs and, most recently, The Village,
with bringing horror back into the mainstream. Tarantino, though, has been
far more influential. He made ultra-violence ultra-cool again, and paved
the way for the latest bucketfest of horror gore. More important, he has
also championed some of the Asian horror directors whose films seeped into
the video underground in the 1990s. Mainly from Japan, but also from Korea,
these directors have been the most important stylistic influence on American
horror directors in the past decade. One is Hideo Nakata, whose Ringu was
remade by DreamWorks as The Ring (2002) and took $130m at the US box office,
and as much overseas. Nakata directed last year's sequel, and Dark Water
(2005), directed by Walter Salles, was also based on one of his films.
Another is Takashi Shimizu, whose Ju-On was the basis for The Grudge, which
took $110m in the US.
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- Many of these American remakes featured
starry actresses: Naomi Watts in the Ring films, Sarah Michelle Gellar
in The Grudge, Jennifer Connelly in Dark Water. And other A-list Hollywood
actresses have parlayed their thespian credentials into leads in horror
films, including Halle Berry in Gothika (2003), and Nicole Kidman in The
Others (2001). These actresses have helped bring about one of the most
important revolutions in horror in the past decade: they have brought young
women into the cinemas to watch films that used to be the domain of the
adolescent male. They come to see, and learn, how these female characters
fight back against the terrors that confront them. Fifty-five per cent
of the American audience for The Grudge was female, for example.
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- "I remember going to theatres showing
the first Ring," Walter Parkes, who produced the film for DreamWorks,
told Variety last year. "You would see groups of three and four teenage
girls all peering out from under one overcoat over all of their heads.
It was a surprise to me."
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- Adam Simon believes much of the appeal
of horror, particularly the new, extremely bloody kind, for western adolescents
is that these films "have always been the equivalents of tribal rites
of passage, of psychological endurance. But the traditional rules of horror
films, from how to safely kill a vampire to the slasher guidelines parodied
in Scream, made the audience feel safer. This new generation of horror
films doesn't play by those old rules". The Asian originals, and sometimes
their American remakes, are disturbing principally, as the writer Mike
D'Angelo suggests in Esquire, because of their "sense of uncertainty,
the unnerving feeling that rationality is a luxury we can no longer afford".
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- Simon believes this latest profusion
of blood and gore can in part be attributed to the horrific and appallingly
graphic images easily accessible on the internet today. We have all seen
the images of brutality, sexual sadism and torture from Abu Ghraib, and
the execution videos, which have featured on-camera beheadings, put out
by the insurgents. "The renewed emphasis on physical torture in these
films seems to directly restage these images," he says. "The
same kids lining up to see Saw II or Hostel know exactly where to go online
to see execution videos from Iraq or uncensored footage of bodies falling
on 9/11. In a world where both sides in a potentially endless war have
tossed out the rule book, it certainly shouldn't be a surprise that the
new breed of horror film mimics this rulelessness and sadism."
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- But this kind of extreme violence, believes
Simon, presented within the safe confines of the four walls of a cinema,
has a tangible benefit: it allows adolescents to begin to figure out how
they can confront their own psychological fears, and the dangers and violence
the world seems to want to inflict upon them.
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- "It's cultural homeopathy,"
he says, "a little dose of poison to protect you from the real poison.
Suicide bombers don't watch horror films for inspiration or comfort; their
potential victims do." Or, as Tobe Hooper, director of The Texas Chain
Saw Massacre, puts it in The American Nightmare, these horror films allow
us - and, in particular, adolescents searching for their own identities
- to begin to face "the stuff in the darkness, the stuff in the shadows
and in particular the stuff that we don't open the door on".
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- And it's all bloody good fun, of course.
Or is it?
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- Copyright 2006
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- The Horror Film -
- Genius, Garbage & Everything
Else In Between
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- By Marty Murray
- 3-18-6
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- The other night I was talking with a
couple of my co-workers about movies, and we got onto the topic of horror
films. I pointed out the fact that many movie critics are seldom kind to
this genre, mainly because really good horror films are very few and far
between. One fellow, who is a big fan, felt that this was just a result
of snobbishness, and the fact that people are entertained by these movies
and enjoy them, and show those results at the box office, are reasons enough
to prove those critics wrong. As with many artistic endeavors, I think
it's all a matter of personal taste and quite subjective, but I'm going
to lay out my ideas of what makes a truly good horror film, and what doesn't,
and play Stephen King here for a little while.
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 I'm a boomer, so I grew
up with the "classic movie monsters" - Frankenstein, Dracula,
the Wolf Man, even Godzilla. To tell you the truth, I never found any of
these creatures particularly frightening, though I suppose if I met one
of them in real life I would have been terrified. It was more the atmosphere
of the films, the fact that they contained otherwordly beings, and that
they were an escape, that appealed to me.
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- I guess the first true horror story was
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." Written when she was only a teenager,
as the result of a contest between herself, her husband, the poet Percy
Shelley, and the equally infamous poet Lord Byron, to see who could come
up with the most frightening story, she wrote her terrifying tale of a
dead man brought back to life after a horrible nightmare. Soon she would
be followed by the Irish author Bram Stoker, with his "Dracula,"
based on the bloodthirsty life of the Romanian Count Vlad Dracul, and adventure
writer Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckll and
Mr. Hyde." The thing that all three of these stories have in common
is their depth, and the disturbing nature of their subject matter.
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- The thought of the dead being somehow
able to come back to life, but without a soul and thus being unconscienable
killers or little more than human predators, was no doubt very frightening
at the time, and remains so, and has been mined in modern films such as
George Romero's "Living Dead" series. The vampire myth and its
surrounding culture is more popular today than ever, in part due to its
combination of sex and the supernatural. Author Ann Rice built an entire
empire upon it, and now we have people walking around who really think
that they are actual vampires. Stevenson's Dr. Jeckyll was based on a real-life
Scottish criminal who lived a double life - one of priviledge and respect
during the day, and one of a thief and decadent hedonist at night. Basically
the story spoke to the fact that all of us have the capacity for evil and
violence inside of us, and the scary aspect of it was what would happen
if we were unable to keep that darker part of ourselves safely locked up
and under control.
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- To me a truly great horror story, or
horror film, is something that touches the hidden parts of ourselves -
something that reaches for our inner fears and that disturbs our thoughts
and our illusion of a normal day to day life. So much of today's so-called
"horror' is nothing more than displays of brutal violence, usually
directed against women. I'd be just as afraid of some psychopath trying
to kill me with a big knife every time I was getting undressed or having
sex as the next guy, but does this truly qualify as horror? Roller coasters
are scary too, and so is flying down some back country road late at night
with a buddy at the wheel who's drunk out of his mind, but can you call
either of those things "horror?" We all have fears, and the fear
of being killed in a violent manner is no doubt one of the biggest ones,
but I think a good horror movie should be more than that.
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- To me, most modern films of the genre
are simply cop-outs, playing on the most basest of fears and that strange
combination of sex and violence that so many people seem to find compelling.
Sex is a sin, and so it must be punished. It's a result of our unique North
American upbringing, no doubt based on our Victorian and Puritan ancestors,
that for years allowed films to show, for instance, a person being shot
in slow motion with a machine gun, or a person's head exploding, but wouldn't
show a couple making love. No, that's "dirty," and you can't
look at it, because you might get ideas!
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- Myself I've always felt that sex was
a more healthy outlet for my feelings than wanting to blow somebody away
with a shotgun, or murdering my wife with a huge knife, but maybe it's
just me?
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- The fact is that there is nothing "cool"
about violence as it occurs in real life. Movies make it look exciting,
thrilling and sexy, but in reality it's just plain ugly, brutal, and affects
peoples' lives for years to come. If all I wanted to see was people being
killed in horrible and inventive ways, all I have to do is switch on the
evening news.
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- I have a couple of friends who are film
buffs, and some of us have said that the last truly good horror film that
we saw was "The Blair Witch Project." Everything really scary
about this movie existed in your mind. There was little, if any, actual
graphic violence. It was the idea of what was happening to the characters
that made the story get inside your head, and had you thinking about it
for days afterwards. Hitchcock's "Psycho" was like that, and
so was "The Exorcist" and more modern fare like "Angel Heart"
and "Jacob's Ladder." I guess the first great horror film of
the modern age was George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead,"
featuring not only disturbing ideas and imagery, but also graphic violence
for its time. Some films, such as "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers,"
have combined science-fiction and horror, as well as a socio-political
slant, into a separate sub-genre. The fear of falling asleep has been mined
since, in the Freddy Krueger "Nightmare On Elm Street" series,
to great effect. Another fairly recent horror film I myself enjoyed immensely
was the first "Hellraiser." A great yarn, though very violent,
and once more, disturbing on a psycholgical level.
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- As for films I've seen lately that have
caused a bit of a stir, "The Ring" was visually interesting,
but the story really made little sense, and "28 Days Later" exists
as an interesting variation of the end of the world myth, but again, there
were aspects of the story that were so implausible, I just couldn't accept
it. The remake of "Dawn of the Dead" was a good action flick,
but it was more exciting than it was scary. The zombies in these movies
are nearly comical figures in many ways, and I suspect there is an underlying
theme of social commentary in some of them.
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- As I have said to a number of friends,
the scariest "monster" I think I've seen in any movie was Dennis
Hopper's portrayal of the criminal psychopath Frank Booth in "Blue
Velvet." Why? Probably because I've known a person or two who reminded
me of him, and so one is constantly reminded that such people do indeed
walk this earth. That is truly disturbing!
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