Scare tactics
Horror movies run rampant this summer
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That, and the occasional walking corpse, alien death ray, or sinister, long-haired apparition.
Throughout cinema history, films have preyed on our nerves, from plumbing society’s paranoia to giving us excuses to hold hands with our dates. Today, ghost stories and gore-fests have become almost enshrined at the cineplex: You can’t look into a theater without seeing some sinister, emotionless child or heavily made-up monster staring back. Converging forces have transformed our movie houses into haunted houses because:
1) Movies reflect a time of terror. There’s always something to be scared of, whether it’s our collective panic over thermonuclear war or smaller-scale terrorist attacks. At the moment, we’re enduring a literal war in Iraq, a less definable war on terror, and pervasive economic worries. Horror films give us a place to put our fears for a few hours - a gibbering lunatic with power tools can be easier to face than escalating gas prices, health insurance or credit card rates.
Two of the summer’s biggest movies in theaters now use pop genres to take society’s racing pulse and examine the nature of fear. Batman Begins explores how a wealthy vigilante comes up with theatrical methods to terrorize the criminal class. War of the Worlds puts humanity on the receiving end of alien invaders’ shock-and-awe tactics. Popcorn movies can have unexpected power at making us question what really scares us.
2) Fright knows no borders. Scary movies travel better than more serious genres. Last month’s High Tension, despite its French pedigree, followed the old backwoods-psycho formula of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and countless others.
Japanese ghost stories provide the biggest cinematic import, first hitting big with the U.S. remake of The Ring in 2002. Proliferating in the late 1990s, contemporary Asian horror flicks range from the unnervingly quiet to the graphically sadistic, with Hollywood snapping up the former. Japanese ghost stories can masterfully build a mood of menace, striking chords by finding the dread within the banal artifacts of modern society, like The Ring’s cursed videotape, or the bland yet haunted dwellings of The Grudge and Dark Water.
Opening July 8, the American Dark Water explores the repercussions of a nasty divorce as much as a spooky apartment’s water-based poltergeist. The thematic complexity of Japanese ghost stories attracts A-list movie actresses like Dark Water’s Jennifer Connelly, but the plot similarities could make the new versions too predictable to scare people.
3) Exploding heads make great calling cards. You might not guess that artificial viscera can pave the way to global blockbusters and Oscar statuettes. But zombie movies can lead to surprising respectability. Sam Raimi went from the shlocky Evil Dead trilogy to the Spider-Man money-machine, while Peter Jackson cut his teeth on gloriously dumb undead flicks like Bad Taste before The Lord of the Rings.
The Australian brothers Peter and Michael Spierig’s Undead, which opens July 8, proves only a smidgen less sophisticated than Jackson’s early work. A meteor shower turns a sleepy Australian town into a haven for standard-issue brain-eaters and gives the Spierig brothers a shot at strutting their stuff. Zombie comedies become exercises in no-budget cinematic creativity, from building suspense to concocting sight gags. Life-or-death struggles become a kind of prop comedy of severed body parts.
In films like Land of the Dead, in theaters now, George Romero uses the walking dead to raise social questions, but the likes of Undead have lighter intentions, seeking to tickle our funnybones before sucking out the marrow. Undead has a little fun with action-movie clichés, but its shrill, repetitious humor make it feel far more amateurish than last year’s ingenious Shaun of the Dead.
4) Fear can soothe the money guys. For filmmakers, there’s nothing more frightening than empty seats, and this year box office returns have been down for 18 weekends in a row. The horror genre offers a relatively safe return on investment, which is why even Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses can get a sequel, The Devil’s Rejects, which opens July 22.
In 1999, The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense provided fresh, critically acclaimed reminders of the horror genre’s bankability. You’d think studios would invest modest sums in fresh, Blair Witch-level ideas, but instead they’re relying on name recognition, which explains why virtually any familiar franchise can get a remake, like The Amityville Horror, which opened last April.
Worse, to exploit younger ticket buyers, studios cut down on gore, titillation and mature content to earn PG-13 ratings. Horror fans hold PG-13 films in contempt - not only do they lack in intensity, they remove the guilty pleasures like gore and nudity.
Movie studios prove too chickenhearted to take chances with the horror genre, with innovative efforts like 2002’s 28 Days Later proving the exception, not the rule. We should be seeing film as daring as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (playing July 7 at the Fox Theatre). Sure, it’s duller than it should be, but its treatment of mental deterioration leads to some unforgettable moments. Current filmmakers would rather give us the devil we know, when we’re much more likely to be frightened by the devil we don’t.