Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let me welcome you to Dementia of the Damned!, a monthly look at the genre that causes you to sleep with the lights on and look over your shoulder – Horror. The Cinema Blend crew is fed up with empty and pointless horror films that invade theaters every week. So, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to help guide you through the blood and guts to horror films that are truly terrifying. From the bloody and brutal to the outlandish and obscure, no horror stone will be left unturned. This month, we take a look at where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re going. So all aboard the ghost ship on its way to the land of the dead!
Bump in the Night
When you’re a kid, irrational fears come to life at night as you lay in bed. You see a clawed hand coming out of your cracked closet door or a pile of clothes on the chair come to life as a shadow of a person watching you sleep. Despite these nerve-racking visions, we are drawn to horror movies at a young age, even though we know that these movies will only add to our imagination. Halloween excited our curiosity of ghouls, ghosts and monsters; by the time we hit puberty, our lust for horror movies is at an all-time high. There’s something about those R-rated shriek shows that had us huddled in a friend’s dark basement watching a horror movie he magically procured and that our parents definitely wouldn’t let us watch. They seem harmless enough, and it’s exciting to be watching something you know you shouldn’t be.
As adults, we become jaded and skeptical. Now, there is nothing we can’t watch, but every thing we do seems less interesting and more disgusting. The irrational fears are still there though. We find ourselves, on occasion, looking in the closest, pulling back the shower curtain and locking our bedroom doors in the middle of the night. But as we mature, horror movies become less effective. Dulled by years of exposure to graphic horror violence, the cheap scares and incoherent plots leave an empty feeling in our stomachs where the excitement used to be. We begin to realize that what truly scares us isn’t the gore we see on screen, but the idea of something we wish never existed.
While there will always be room for a classic storyline and horror icon, we scour theaters for films that evoke a sense of terror through implication and atmosphere. The occasional gore glory shot is merely the icing on the cake -- the release of pent-up tension and suspense – not the main attraction. We don’t lay awake at night afraid of a gore shot, we lie there afraid of the possibility of the cinematic evil springing to life in our bedroom.
No Guts, No Gorey
It’s a rare condition, in this day and age, to see a satisfying horror film on the silver screen. Blood and degradation are today’s horror films’ design, making outstanding contemporaries harder to find. With the current swarm of remakes, sequels and remake sequels, not to mention faux snuff-films, it’s easy to lose hope in the genre. Remakes and reboots are so prolific that the most terrifying aspect of these films is that there is a younger generation of soon-to-be horror hounds that aren’t even aware of the original films. When a 15-year old puts down The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for being “boring” in favor of the slick, Abercrombie and Fitch-style remake, you know that the future of horror is in serious trouble.
Although it’s easy for horror junkies to hang their heads in shame, the popularity of remakes and gore exploitation is hardly a surprise. Born from Alfred Hitchcock’s shocking 1960 Psycho, the Slasher subgenre only grew in the following decade with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween. The Slasher continued strong in the ‘80s thanks to Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street, but in the 1990s, the lone knife-wielding maniac gave way to the intelligent serial killer hunted by a diligent detective. Silence of the Lambs captured our psychological interest, while Seven peaked our philosophical fascination and pushed the boundaries of mainstream graphic gore, despite never showing a murder in the act.
Which brings us to Saw, the grandfather of popular gore. Aside from earlier subversive guinea horror, rape revenge, and Faces of Death-style documentary, Saw was what put MTV/ADD-style gore on the screen for the masses (which then Hostel only cemented). Yet, what brought the crowds into the theater for Saw wasn’t the intense blood and guts. It was the simple concept of chaining up two people in a room and giving them a handsaw and a choice. In addition to finding out what circumstances would motivate a person to hack off a leg, Saw also delivered in creativity and atmosphere; despite the graphic gore, the torture device that scared us the most was the reverse bear trap, which never went off.
It’s no wonder that the genre has devolved into characterless mutants killing and raping for box office cash. To add insult to injury, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was given a slick coat of Y2K gloss, along the way, which sparked the re-make trend -- sending studios to the archives to find the classic horror they could repackage in gore-exploited trash. To end this regime of horribly-made horror films, we have to look past the Now Showing sign at the multiplex and dive into uncharted waters.
It’s Alive! Barely
Today, our neighbors to the East are producing atmosphere-drench horror that is, unfortunately being dumbed down in remakes for American audiences. With Japanese directors such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) and Takashi Miike cranking out horrific thrillers, it’s a shame that their remade counterparts overshadow the greatness of the original films. Luckily, Kurosawa’s Cure and Miike’s Audition have not been touched by American studios, leaving them as a great starting point and free of remake-comparison stigma. Both films are patiently brutal and leave a lasting impression through their use of imagery and atmosphere. You’ll never forget the X from Cure, and you’re not likely to forget the taunting singing of “Deeper, deeper” from Audition.
In English-speaking territories, Neil Marshall’s terrific The Descent took genre conventions to an all-time high in 2005, while David Lynch’s surrealist works -- Eraserhead and Lost Highway -- break through conventional genre restraints and scare us on a purely psychological level. Newcomer David Slade also made an impressive debut with his flawed, but interesting indie-horror Hard Candy, in which a young teen girl picks up a pedophile. Not to mention the likes of horror gurus George A. Romero and Dario Argento, who are still making horror movies in an attempt to recapture their glory days while injecting new terror into their projects.
Meanwhile, up-and-coming horror directors such as France’s Alexandre Aja and South Korea’s Joon-ho Bong continue to show potential. Although Aja crossed a moral and ethical filmmaking line in 2006’s The Hills Have Eyes remake, his 2003 High Tension produced the best horror/suspense material in the past five years in its first 30 minutes. Unfortunately, due to a lame story twist, High Tension fails as a film, but that first 30 minutes is solid horror gold. Joon-ho Bong, on the other hand, delivered a powerful sophomore film with 2006’s The Host, a monster horror movie that sets a new standard. With his second feature, Joon-ho Bong topped his solid 2003 debut Memories of a Murder, proving that there’s no place to go but up for Joon-ho Bong.
The fact of the matter is that the marketing moguls of U.S. films overshadow the smaller or (gasp!) foreign frightfests that push the boundaries of the genre to explore new fears. Instead of releasing the Japanese horror (J-Horror) as is, subtitles included, they are remade for American audiences – robbed of their psychological and thematic power in favor of lame jump scares. Both Japanese and American remakes alike should be banned in favor of actually watching the originals.
The problem is that desensitization leads younger generations to view older films as tame and boring. The likes of Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street are no longer exciting in the shadow of Saw and Hostel. Exploitive and amoral, today’s popular horror isn’t embodying our own personal fears, they are perpetuating violence for the sake of shock value.
It’s something that we continue to strive against and something we can control with the power of the purse. Just remember that although worthwhile new horror movies may come few and far between, there is a back catalogue of films that you probably missed just waiting to be discovered.
This Month’s Horror Picks:
In Theaters
The Host (Joon-ho Bong, 2006)
On DVD
Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)
Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)
The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)
Hard Candy (David Slade, 2005)
Next Month’s Dementia of the Damned!: J-Horror and you.
