I was going to say something, but MacBean hit the nail on the head. I AM a fan of horror movies, and it’s because of the visceral adrenaline rush you get….the movies put you in a physical and emotional state of hyper-awareness, you can empathize with the characters for more than in any other genre of movie. Well, all that is true for a GOOD horror movie, but I will echo the sentiments of many on here…those movies are few and far between these days. Horror has undergone many revolutions, and not all have been for the better. In the 60s, we had Psycho and other Hitchcock (and Hitchcockian) films, and they were about suspense, they were about building an atmosphere that would put the viewer on edge and heighten his or her sense of foreboding. Prior to Psycho, most “horror” movies were about paranoia, horror and sci fi often went hand in hand with the scariest films being about alien invaders and such, or in your more typical horror movies, it was the suggestion of what a particular threat might do to the protagonist. In Psycho, the shower scene was positively revolutionary…to see the murder occurring (even though not in graphic detail)...just seeing the knife, and the stream of blood going down the drain was still just suggestive by today’s standards, but very graphic at the time. And showing more of the violence made it more real, more visceral and less intellectual.
Now the next big step was really the Exorcist. Here much of the gore and violence was still pretty well suppressed, but this one managed fear by juxtaposing the innocence of a small girl with the pure evil of Satan incarnate….and by confronting the idea that a force larger than one’s self could simply inhabit one’s very being was particularly powerful among the religious, but even among non-religious and highly intellectual types, the idea of this not very well understood force assuming the form of an innocent child, and the depths of the depravity were shocking and provoked an empathy for the character (who couldn’t empathize with a child) while providing the threat…the thrill comes in “how would I get out of this?” You feel personally invested in saving this girl as if you are saving yourself.
This theme was turned on its head a few years later with the Omen…the again a couple years later with Boys from Brazil…basically this otherworldly force, posession if you will is not something that happens TO the child inasmuch as it is part OF the child, making the viewer empathize with the parents…which adds an element of the unsuspected (who’s even going to perceive a threat bigger than they’ve ever encountered coming at the hands of a child? All these boil down to the same ultimate goal…to get the viewer to make a connection with a potential victim or group of victims, and then to unleash havoc that would be hard for a rational person to wrap one’s mind around…it’s about how do they react vs. how would YOU react. You feel dread if the character does something you don’t think they should, or if they do something stupid and fall prey to the maniacal force, you feel vindicated, like you wouldn’t have made that mistake…or if they get out of it doing things you never would have thought to do yourself, you think “I would be so dead” and you are awed at the wherewithal of the protagonist.
Prior to The Omen, but shortly after the Exorcist, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre laid down the basic groundwork for pretty much everything after Halloween…basically the slasher flick. What made the film potent though was the subtext of the backwards family committing untold monstrosities…yes we got to see some young kids pursued and eventually murdered by maniacs, but the real fear was “what the hell is going on in that house.” That element has been employed successfully since, but what horror films really took from that film was the slasher element…the idea of a psycho or multiple psychos pursuing an unwitting victim or victims, where we know what’s around the next corner, but they don’t. Of course, this film was really more of the groundwork…it worked in sort of a Deliverance sort of way, where your characters end up in foreign surroundings unaware of the depravity that surrounds them.
Then we got Halloween. Again, it started out with a child, but the child though not particularly possessed, was just an evil force driven by the forces that made him snap. After a horrific childhood incident, he is locked away and it becomes clear that away is where he needs to be…we have an unwitting potential victim who is essentially a sitting duck, and a physician who is struggling to help stave off what could be a disaster. There are a lot of movies employing a theme of one person knowing something that could prevent a bad consequence and doing everything to stop it before it’s too late, with varying degrees of success. Here, we had the first true full blown “slasher” film, where a madman is out to kill someone and it’s all about the pursuit and how the potential victim stays alive…that’s what keeps you on edge…you don’t want it to end, and particularly you don’t want it to end badly when this person has suffered through so much.
The 80s then gave us two expansions on the slasher flick, first Friday the 13th, which is horribly campy and pointless by today’s standards, was about the relentless force, just like many of the previous films, you had a vague motivation and a somewhat bordering on plausible/supernatural villain. But what this film did was it showed the gore. Which at the time was shocking, no one had really seen all the gory details in mainstream cinema before (not unless you count some of the late 60s/early 70s Grindhouse cinema by the likes of Hershel Gordon Lewis…The Wizard of Gore comes to mine, which were really more about shock value and camp than true horror, and his films were far from ‘mainstream’). The idea of an unstoppable serial murderer was brought forth in Halloween, but the body count and the full throated gore were not. A couple years later we get Nightmare on Elm Street, which uses the formula of this unstoppable evil, again preying on unsuspecting young people (which adds the element of “they’re having the time of their lives” making you empathize with them all the more), but goes a step further and pulls sort of an Exorcist twist, making the killer live in one’s dreams…it’s almost philosophical…one can’t escape one’s own mind (or sleep for that matter). Problem was, these movies were SO successful, they became parodies of themselves with multiple sequels (and eventually the two met on screen in perhaps the most pointless sequel ever). Essentially, all subsequent films drew from the first one, and as such they ended up following a predictable formula where certain things the characters do (like have sex for example) is an automatic death sentence when a psycho killer is on the loose.
Eventually all films followed this same formula and for most of the 80s and early 90s, horror sucked ass. Then came Scream, which was smart and funny, and acknowledged these “horror movie rules”, where one of the characters is aware that this psycho killer is following proper horror movie orthodoxy within the movie itself. It was at once both self deprecating and truly frightening, because even though you knew what the killer intended to do, it still came as a surprise when the killer did it. No one had really tried to inject self referencing humor into the horror genre before, and that made it easier for audiences to relate to the protagonists, as it seemed more like real people and what real people would say and do…it’s like before this, people in horror movies acted like they’d never actually SEEN a horror movie, and here you have characters who know the score, which makes the cat and mouse game more engaging.
That too became a parody of itself and most horror movies had to try to be hip, but most of the basic elements were preserved. Meanwhile really good horror was being made in Asia, and I’m not talking about Ringu/The Ring, I’m more talking about 1999’s The Audition, wherein an irrational force meets a perhaps somewhat deserving victim, and justice is dolled out cruelly. But rather than embrace the quality elements of Asian horror, Hollywood decided to remake the Ring and the Grudge…and these movies did well, but they were predictable, shallow and formulaic. The films since about the late 90s to actually break the mold and thus achieve a really good fear factor from both a visceral and intellectual standpoint are the ones that thought outside the box.
Blair Witch is a great example….there was something, but it wasn’t a “familiar” something, pursuing people who were lost irreparably (or was there, we can never know for sure, it was left ambiguous). People who were not exactly asking for trouble, found themselves in a situation where they became sitting ducks, trying to fight something they couldn’t fathom. For me, that’s where genuine fear comes from, not only do you relate to the characters, and not only are they being pursued by an unstoppable force which has the element of surprise on its side, but it works best when the motivations are not understood either at all, or until the end, because how do you know how to stop a threat when you don’t even know what that threat entails?
So as I said, I think many of the best Asian horror films were based on that suspense, even Ringu, from which the Ring was taken, was really about a force that was unstoppable but which emanated from events that we didn’t fully understand until the end, and though the remake was fairly faithful, filmmakers missed the point when remaking it for US audiences by a) overemphasizing the “gotcha” factor…it’s a form of fear no better than jumping out from behind a closet and shouting “BOO”, and the novelty of the death delivery mechanism (in this case a tape which if you watch it you die in 7 days). It was the novelty of how the killer chose its victims which was played to, more than the suspense of how is it going to happen and what are they going to do to stop it.
Since the late 90s, the best horror films have usually been more about the suspense than anything else. The Sixth Sense was a great example…you knew things were going down, you sensed a threat, nothing exactly jumped out at you, but the fear was visceral, the characters were believable, and the ending provided a great and unexpected payoff. A couple of subsequent films captured that surprise ending well, while being all about the suspense and not the continued horror….they basically managed to keep you on edge without he help of a knife wielding maniac…The Others and What Lies Beneath come to mind.
But the one modern fillmmaker who really gets horror, what is scary and why, in my opinion is Rob Zombie. In House of 1,000 Corpses, he used the unusual, mentally unbalanced characters to create an homage to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, probably what the film WOULD have been had it been made 30 years later when audiences had been desensitized to gore for gore’s sake. In the Devil’s Rejects, it’s a continuation of the theme, but it takes it on the road…having these unbalanced characters who seem to kill for thrills, who have no methodology to picking their victims, and no conscience or remorse, but who still have the charm to lure people into their clutches. There is no reasoning with these people and there are no easy outs. It paint a picture of characters whose only Achilles heel is that they are mortal, but as they live without fear and have honed their killing skills over many years, they make some of the most realistic, and brutally savage killers ever brought to the screen…you really feel like you would be dead if you met these people, and the people they encounter are as salt o the earth as they come. Devil’s Rejects also employs a vengeance theme…allowing the pursuers to themselves to be pursued…not just because it’s the police’s function, but because it’s personal, which makes the final confrontation one of the most gripping and compelling scenes in all of horror. And finally, his remake of Halloween was brilliant in that it did what the original picture did…stayed fairly close to the source material in fact, but really delved into the mindset of the character, and showed us the irrationality of the motivation, painted a character with almost superhuman strength and zero conscience or remorse (or so we think) and really made the pursuer all that much more frightening.
So for me, the reason I love a GOOD horror moving, knowing full well that 99% of them are about the BOO factor and the novelty of the killing device and are as such garbage, it’s when I find that combination of a believable character to whom I can relate and a relentless force of some kind which I can not understand, and I sort of become the person wondering how to survive, making all my neurons stand on end.
Short answer…being scared is a rush you can only get….by being scared. Hard part is, finding the combination of things that are still scary. Tapping into that part that makes you feel fear and dread….they make you feel alive.
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