Its safe to say I've grown up with Horror movies, since I was a kid I couldn't get enough of the genre. The first movie I watched was Dawn of the Dead Romero's version, two things would happen that day. One I would find my favourite sub-genre and two I had found something that could get me excited and scared at the same time it was a perfect combination.
I still watched and loved other genres but there was always a special place in my twisted heart for these movies. I remember having to wait till my parents went to bed so I could catch a late night airing of Friday the 13th or The Thing which is and always will be one of my favourite movies with Kurt Russell in it. I loved the classics, all of them and by now I have seen probably 60% of films from the Horror genre that's really not a joke either but this post has little to do with my watching habits. What I really want to take about is what Horror has lost in the so many long years since its inception many moons ago. Its scare factor and edge, maybe I have become desensitised to it which in my case is probably true but in the last ten years I want to say my favourite genre has become nothing more then a bad joke.
Movies like Saw and Paranormal Activity arguably the biggest sellers these past years are terrible Horror movies. Saw because its nothing more then for lack of a better word torture porn, hell if I want that many sequels to a terrible movie I'll watch the Star Trek movies...I digress. The first Saw was okay in my books, it built itself on tension and some suspense and it was overtly over the top it was all right for a modern Horror venture. Paranormal Activity was never a good scare, I hate movies that give a from the camera perspective look (I can't figure out the words for it) Blair Witch did it and that movie sucked. Paranormal Activity was and still is a terrible series of movies. Now you could make the argument that Horror is and was made up of terrible camp movies and that's what made the genre in the first place, that is true but nowadays we have these big companies trying to pass of crap remakes (save for a few) and lack lustre original films.
Don't get me wrong I still watch them all, because I want to see them. I'm not just going to abandon my favourite genre because of a few stinkers okay maybe a lot of stinkers. There just isn't a decent scare to be found anywhere any more and I think the real Horror directors now this and they try to create films that play off of tension and suspense with a few jump scares every now and again. The Japanese do this with their Horror movies, they inject so much tension and suspense that many of their movies get killed by it and end up being just as bad as their American remakes. Case in point Ju-on which is a completely average Horror flick gets bogged down by its own use of way to much tension, The Grudge was just boring. One of the Japanese Horror movies that I thought was pretty good was Pulse it was original and built on tension and suspense, you could tell where the scares would come from so you had been ready but all in all it was a decent flick. The American version in 2006 was just terrible and while it was the exact same move it lost all that feeling from the original. I won't even start on my favourite sub-genre zombies that has just been a disaster.
I'm finding that directors will forgo the tension and suspense to just create a cheap flick and bathe it in tons of gore and nudity and unfortunately that's going to literally kill the genre. There was a recent movie I watched called The Devils Rock which was pretty good, it built up great amounts of suspense and tension and it had minimal amounts of gore. Overall it was a good venture. Before I go this movie seems to be getting a lot of praise, The Cabin in the Woods is supposedly twisting the genre conventions and is actually a really good movie. I don't know too much about the film but I will have my review up this weekend after I see it tonight. I hope you enjoyed this post and until next time, stay out of the woods.
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