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And What's the Deal With American Horror?
Glyph
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Among the scant scary movie ads we're being pitched in recent months, two have featured prominently - the first being the seemingly run-of-the-mill One Missed Call and other being The Orphanage, imported from overseas. Obviously the latter boasts considerable creative integrity whereas anyone can tell that Call, itself being an American remake of a Japanese film, feels depressingly like a haphazard splice between Final Destination and The Ring.
It seems that when we aren't cranking out scary movies that simply aren't scary, we're importing or remaking our horror from works abroad. And when we're not doing that, we're spawning inferior remakes of our own classics. Sure, The Fog from 1980 wasn't spectacular... but its remake was beyond abysmal.
(Hint: computer generated poltergeists, however elaborate, will kill any suspension of disbelief unless it blends seamlessly into the environment. One needs but watch The Haunting or The Ring 2 to witness the ultimate failure of CGI run amok.)
And on those rare occasions when we do spawn something that's a margin above mediocre - notably Saw, Halloween, Scream, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alien(s) - its namesake is inevitably bled into the ground through swath of deplorable sequels and prequels. This isn't always the case, with such films as The Others and The Sixth Sense becoming modern standalone classics and Romero's "_____ of the Dead" series remaining strong throughout its franchise. But these triumphs seem too few and far between.
So what happened? When did we become more obsessed with special effects, thematic conventions and shock value than with pacing and atmosphere? Because as Ebert puts it, surprise isn't the same as suspense.
It seems that when we aren't cranking out scary movies that simply aren't scary, we're importing or remaking our horror from works abroad. And when we're not doing that, we're spawning inferior remakes of our own classics. Sure, The Fog from 1980 wasn't spectacular... but its remake was beyond abysmal.
(Hint: computer generated poltergeists, however elaborate, will kill any suspension of disbelief unless it blends seamlessly into the environment. One needs but watch The Haunting or The Ring 2 to witness the ultimate failure of CGI run amok.)
And on those rare occasions when we do spawn something that's a margin above mediocre - notably Saw, Halloween, Scream, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alien(s) - its namesake is inevitably bled into the ground through swath of deplorable sequels and prequels. This isn't always the case, with such films as The Others and The Sixth Sense becoming modern standalone classics and Romero's "_____ of the Dead" series remaining strong throughout its franchise. But these triumphs seem too few and far between.
So what happened? When did we become more obsessed with special effects, thematic conventions and shock value than with pacing and atmosphere? Because as Ebert puts it, surprise isn't the same as suspense.
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My guess is that special effects are more predictable profit producers than pacing and atmosphere.
I think that’s what producers think, but I think it has fuck-all to do with reality.
Frankly I think this can be cross-applied to almost all genres of film: Producers underestimate the tastes of American audiences, determine (entirely unscientifically and basically by being condescending assholes) that a “safe bet” movie is anything with lots of sex/violence/gore/CGI and plot, acting, direction, editing, and originality are all irrelevant. And then of course they massively over-advertise their safe bets and release them at 6,000,000 theaters whereas intelligent/original films get no advertising money and 12 screens nationwide so the producers’ prophecy magically comes true.
Except that in reality films of quality will actually break through and do enormous business while “safe bet” films routinely flop despite ad blitzes and a massive hype machine.
From what I’ve seen of the industry (both my parents have worked in it, my dad currently does), this is really not true.
Hell, the NYTimes even reported on a study that (essentially) determined that marketing is really far more important to the success of media than anything else. Quality helps, but really marketing is more important than anything. I’d explain it more depth but it’s 5:30AM and I haven’t slept yet.
But basically what that means is that with the proper marketing there’s no reason daring films couldn’t get the same audiences as the mass-produced crap we’re constantly fed.
Daring films are harder to market. Shitty genre movies have a clear agenda that lends itself to being reduced to a 2-minute preview.
AMERICAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNSSSS!!!
Marketing to teenagers is the safest bet in the film business
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
Examples:
Friday the 13th, Halloween, Valentine, Scream - All good movies with interesting deaths meant to give the sheer quick scare terror feeling.
Nightmare on Elm Street (original), Seven, The Bone Collector, Saw (Original) - Has the quick scare and twisted deaths, but also a sense of general creepiness, because (with the exception of Nightmare) there's the chance it could happen to anyone, even you.
I'm biased, because horror is by far my favorite genre. I've wasted countless dollars both in theatre and in the straight to video section at the local Blockbuster.
what this guy said.
thread over.
And when one of those movies does breakthrough the business spends the next 5 years trying to make lightning strike twice by creating bigger high budget versions of that movie's style.
At the moment, Japan is producing the best horror films. Something about the current Japanese cultural zeitgeist is making them amenable to dark thoughts. Aside from the Ring, American copies have missed the point.
But of course I'm an elitist who says most of the "horror genre" is actually slasher movies and splatterpunk sub-genres and don't really count as "Real horror."
Thats pretty much how cinema is these days, a quality film and the rest is crap. You can make the same argument about most genres from sci-fi to comedy.
Lauren
In all seriousness I think we should be concerned with the odd American association of gore with horror. I want a genuinely terrifying experience, not overplayed torture scenes with forced tension. I mean really one of the most terrifying things i've experienced in Film lately came from the first half of the War of the Worlds remake. It was genuinely scary.
Amen. The effectiveness of a given scene in a horror movie is not whether it disgusts or startles you immediately, but whether it can unsettle you days, weeks, years later. It's about concepts, not visceral reactions. Gore has its place, but it is the easiest technique to overuse and the least effective over time. Unlike dread- now dread is whether the party is at.
I really enjoyed The Others, but I didn't know it was considered a classic.
A few, while fundamentally bad, actually do have a clear element of art and crafstmanship to them. It's as if the films are free to do that because they know they only have to play to a very specific audience, i.e. people that collect and obsess over bad horror movies.
The tagline is, "There are 40 million sheep in New Zealand- and they're all pissed!"
It scared the piss out of me as a Japanese horror film.
I am exactly the same way with bad horror movies. For myself, and a couple of friends, they are hilarious comedy. There is definitely a sub-genre of film-makers and fans that love the same thing. I just love the fact that there is a group of film-makers that don't even take the movie they've created seriously. Look at something like Dead Alive or The Mangler 2.0 for good examples.
EDIT: Dead Alive was made by Peter Jackson during his pre LotR phase. He also made Meet The Weevils which is an incredibly deranged muppet-esque movie.
More on topic, a lot of American horror is incredibly lazy in everything except for special effects, as though that sort of thing can tell a story or make the movie better. Horror movies like Day of the Dead or 28 Weeks Later are great because they focus on more than trying to inject cheap scares, and "cool" monsters into a film. Meaning, they actually put time and effort into the movies, rather than sinking to the lowest-common-denominator bullshit.
thank you.. I was hoping someone would say this...... thank you again...
True enough. things have shifted a little over the last decade or two tho.
Right now we really only have two horror genres in the US
The Saw-inspired torture porn movies
and the Scream-inspired teenager horror cheesefests
Slasher flicks are pretty dead and ghost movies are few and far between these days.
Now, the Korean horror seems a little different from the Japanese (olol more hauntings by dead girls with wet hair and some common object that is cursed and will kill you) and American. I guess it's more psychological and less supernatural. It seems better, but that might be because I've only seen a few of them.
Its extremely disconcerting to me, a fan of gore flicks and the horror genre in general, that films like Hostel and Saw and now released as fun, mainstream flicks. I have been watching these movies from a very young age as a fan of this particular genre and movies in general, but i always found a strange kind of comfort in knowing that wider soceity found these movies and their portrayals of depravity shocking and resoundingly rejected them. When the hell did realistic portrayals of torture become aceptable viewing for mainstram audiences?
Another thing is that current Hollywood-produced fear can be found in movies from the strain of Silence of the Lambs, i.e. the biggest thrills come from stuff like The Good Shepard, Munich, Sin City, The Departed, that film with the poster showing a guy holding a picture of the devil in front of his face, Pan's Labyrinth (yes, technically Mexican), and Borat (for its implications for America) rather than full-blooded horror-fests.
This is mostly true but not entirely so. There are horror movies, novels, etc of serious literary and critical value.
I mean, it's taken them 8 years to make Cloverfeild, and besides that, there was the shitty Blair Witch 2, and THAT'S it?
With all of the film makers in the world, no one realized how genius it could be to make a movie like that?
No, actually, Danielewski claimed that he'd never allow anyone to make a HoL movie.
Which is a shame, because I'd love to see a Navidson Record.
Exactly. There are cheep Ballywood (sp?) horrors, probably, but they never make it to America, which is why non-artsy foreign films are often the best bet.