Think of any adjective - especially any negative adjective - and you can pretty much guarantee it has been used at some time or other to describe some horror film, if not the entire genre. And you know something? It's not without merit. On the whole, horror films are really bad. The plotlines are dull, uninspired, and predictable, the "style" is often excessive, flashy, more interested in guts than grit, and the "characters" are generally just one-dimensional means to increase the film's body count... so, really, I get the near complete critical disregard of the genre, I do.
And yet...
Year after year... after year after year... I am continually drawn back. Hoping to find something new, something interesting, something exciting to reinvigorate my opinion of the horror film. More often than not I leave dissatisfied. But every once in a while, I find something truly special and extraordinary, something which gives the genre hope.
It is this search and this yearning I want to explore in these next few posts.
Part I - An Army of Skeletons:
Or, How Bruce Campbell Changed My Life
I was never big on horror films. My mother and sister didn't really watch anything beyond a PG rating (although my mother was a big fan of Psycho and Misery, not sure how to reconcile that); my dad all but forbade the genre; I was the one in the family seeking out the more extreme and unusual titles, and I was all too happy to leave out the horror stories. I really enjoyed cheesy action movies (as a kid my movie diet consisted mostly of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger), but once you started adding in the gore and the ghosts, my mind started to say, "No no, that's enough."
It's really kind of an unfair prejudice. I mean, what did I know of horror movies? Other than repeatedly watching Misery with my mother (and cringing every time Kathy Bates picked up that sledgehammer) I hadn't really seen any horror movies... unless you count the occasional glimpse of edited-for-TV versions of titles like Hellraiser or Child's Play, which I don't.
It was at age sixteen when I really started to pay attention to movies and finally seek out titles other than what was playing at the local cinema, when my cinematic apetite started to become insatiable. All in one year I watched (and fell in love with) Annie Hall, Magnolia, Dogma, and so on. I still went and watched titles like The Sixth Sense, There's Something About Mary, and other popular fair, but finally I was challenging myself, changing my viewing habits.
And yet...
I still wasn't watching horror movies.
Enter Jasen. A co-worker and fellow movie-lover, we bonded immediately over directors like Kevin Smith, Stanley Kubrick, and Quentin Tarantino... but Jasen had a leg up on me: he would watch anything. He had actually seen titles like Hellraiser and Child's Play in their entirety! He had seen something like Natural Born Killers at our local theater, a place where most people walked out and complained, whereas I had to discover it on video.
It was Jasen who really introduced me to horror movies, and he used the perfect tactic: he started with horror-comedy. (Baby steps, right?) One night while we were closing at work, he brought in Army of Darkness; and while I was laughing hysterically, something clicked. "Ah ha!" I told myself. "This is why horror movies are so popular - they don't take themselves so seriously, they're trying to have fun!" From there, it was really kind of inevitable: I saw (and fell in love with) the rest of the Evil Dead series; I borrowed his Nightmare on Elm Street collection to bone up for Freddy v Jason... I started to seek out "the classics," and you know what? Yes, there is a lot of garbage, but no more so than any other genre - just garbage of a different sort. The stigma had vanished.
Now, maybe ten years after that first experience, I'd call myself a horror movie fan. Not an undiscerning fan, mind you (I do have standards, after all), but a fan nonetheless. And when it comes to finding a great movie to reinvigorate my love of movies, there are few genres I would rather dig through.
It's really kind of an unfair prejudice. I mean, what did I know of horror movies? Other than repeatedly watching Misery with my mother (and cringing every time Kathy Bates picked up that sledgehammer) I hadn't really seen any horror movies... unless you count the occasional glimpse of edited-for-TV versions of titles like Hellraiser or Child's Play, which I don't.
It was at age sixteen when I really started to pay attention to movies and finally seek out titles other than what was playing at the local cinema, when my cinematic apetite started to become insatiable. All in one year I watched (and fell in love with) Annie Hall, Magnolia, Dogma, and so on. I still went and watched titles like The Sixth Sense, There's Something About Mary, and other popular fair, but finally I was challenging myself, changing my viewing habits.
And yet...
I still wasn't watching horror movies.
Enter Jasen. A co-worker and fellow movie-lover, we bonded immediately over directors like Kevin Smith, Stanley Kubrick, and Quentin Tarantino... but Jasen had a leg up on me: he would watch anything. He had actually seen titles like Hellraiser and Child's Play in their entirety! He had seen something like Natural Born Killers at our local theater, a place where most people walked out and complained, whereas I had to discover it on video.
It was Jasen who really introduced me to horror movies, and he used the perfect tactic: he started with horror-comedy. (Baby steps, right?) One night while we were closing at work, he brought in Army of Darkness; and while I was laughing hysterically, something clicked. "Ah ha!" I told myself. "This is why horror movies are so popular - they don't take themselves so seriously, they're trying to have fun!" From there, it was really kind of inevitable: I saw (and fell in love with) the rest of the Evil Dead series; I borrowed his Nightmare on Elm Street collection to bone up for Freddy v Jason... I started to seek out "the classics," and you know what? Yes, there is a lot of garbage, but no more so than any other genre - just garbage of a different sort. The stigma had vanished.
Now, maybe ten years after that first experience, I'd call myself a horror movie fan. Not an undiscerning fan, mind you (I do have standards, after all), but a fan nonetheless. And when it comes to finding a great movie to reinvigorate my love of movies, there are few genres I would rather dig through.
the horror... the horror
ReplyDeleteHorror films have always fascinated me. When I was a kid, it was slasher films more than any other. Although my parents would never let me watch them, the Friday the 13th and Elm Street series in particular always sparked my imagination (although, in the case of the Friday series, I was disappointed to find out how much better my imagination was). There was something about the unkillable killer that I loved. To this day, I still don't quite know what it was.
ReplyDeleteThe reason, I think, that the horror genre seems to produce a disproportionate amount of stinkers is that it is the easiest genre to get something made in. Studios know that even a low budget toilet of a horror film will be able to turn a profit
Freddy is still a classic. It's the sense of humor. If he wasn't a sadistic clown, then we'd remember he's a sadistic pedophile and no worthy of our attention. Jason... well, you know how I feel about him... though I'll stand by Freddy v. Jason to this day. Kick-ass flick.
ReplyDeleteIt's the easiest genre to do, but it's the hardest genre to do well. That sums things up very well I think. Some talented people can really show their chops, but more often than not they're simply exercises in scream and technique.