| What is wrong with horror these days? Remakes were the trend of last year, remakes of movies that were already perfect to begin with, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn Of The Dead. Even the Japanese-horror world was tainted with the remakes of favourites Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge. It’s not only remakes that are lacking any sort of original story, but video games are also spawning movies. Interpretations of House Of The Dead, Resident Evil and now Alone In The Dark have crawled into the light of day, and all with less momentum in their bite than that of a small kitten.
Are movie executives so desperate to show people what they can do with these older films? To get their names out there to the mainstream movie watcher who has never heard of them before? Predictably, a special-edition DVD of each of the original films comes out with the release of its remake.
This year we get a little bit of originality in the form of a large cornfield of PG-13 movies like Hide And Seek, The Boogeyman and Cursed. Each of these is accompanied by its own groanable tagline like, "come out, come out, whatever you are," "evil awakens," and "you thought it was just a story, but it’s real!" Oooh… scary? Naa… lame.
Instead of the primal glory of makeup effects showcasing wonderful displays of blood and guts in the ’70s and ’80s, today’s viewer is now assaulted with computer graphics trying their hardest not to look like computer graphics. Instead of being disgusted, the viewer is at many times amused and spends their time not talking about the movie at all, but about how unscary the movie was or how fake the monsters looked.
Studios are just too interested in the bottom line – how much money the movie makes – but why are they giving directors like Uwe Boll (Alone in the Dark) the rights to create movies that obviously aren’t of any sort of quality in the least, and by the looks of it aren’t making much money at the box office either? George Romero, the director of Night Of The Living Dead is just now getting the rights to film the fourth chapter of his zombie saga, Land Of The Dead, though it took him nearly 20 years to do it.
I am not totally upset with the horror industry at this moment. I have enjoyed quite a few movies that have come out recently, including Saw and the direct-to-video releases of Love Object and Beyond Re-animator, but there’s still no mystery to what’s coming to get us these days. We know all the old stories – we’ve seen zombies, haunted houses, Alien, Predator and Chucky before. There needs to be a renaissance of totally new and fresh horror characters or versions of Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers to scare and thrill the audiences of tomorrow and there needs to be a back-to-basics movement in the making of horror films.
It’s a lack of controversy and curiosity that plagues the horror creed today. Back in the ’70s, many Italian films were outlawed in several countries after word spread that they depicted realistic scenes of murder, rape and torture. These movies were dubbed video nasties and were either pulled off shelves by concerned video store owners or sought after by collectors. On its initial release in 1973, The Exorcist caused audiences to barf, faint and leave the theatre on several occasions. Some faint-hearted individuals even suffered heart attacks.
Guerrilla cannibal movies like Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Apocalypse along with grimy exploitation movies like Last House On the Left, I Spit On Your Grave and Driller Killer quickly became feared and had a special sort of notoriety to them. That notoriety is what horror today lacks. If they really need to release the movie independently to have it completely under their control, then by all means do it, just stop with this mediocre rubbish. |
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