The New Horror, Part I

I used to love horror films. As a child, I relished A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Friday the 13th (1980), and even the B-films such as The Evil Dead (1981) and Sorority House Massacre (1987). My wife says it explains a lot about me, and I agree, although I think I have different reasons for saying so. As an undergraduate, I even took an entire class on “the horror film,” taught by a great professor of film—Mark Charney at Clemson. We watched a lot of amazing horror films in that class, everything from the original Frankenstein (1931) to Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to The Shining (1980), yet I don’t ever remember being scared by any of the films.

Now I find myself getting way too scared by horror movies. Some of them don’t scare me, like Jeeper’s Creepers (2001), or any other movie about a simple killer/creature. These movies are all the same. I just watched The Grudge (2004) last night, though, and I was pretty creeped out by it, at least until the end. Overall, it was a pretty terrible movie, I think, not explaining much about the killers, etc. In fact, it was pretty similar to the plot of any 80s horror film—creature comes back from the dead to kill everyone, and now we get to watch as the people die in their various ways. Not too exciting, to say the least. All we’re really doing is waiting to watch the people die because we know that’s what’s going to happen anyway. Even the death scenes weren’t that compelling, either. One of my friends would always comment that you could tell a good horror film by the death scenes (The Omen (1976) being a wonderful example), and this one couldn’t even pull those off.

But the movie made me think about other horror films that still scare me when I think about them, and I can point to three of them in particular—The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Sixth Sense (1999), and The Ring (2002). Yes, two of them are big budget Hollywood films, but I have never held that against them as some horror critics do. And The Blair Witch Project is an amazing movie for many reasons that don’t need to be rehearsed here. It redefined the genre and scared me in the process. Many people say it isn’t scary, and I don’t understand them. That movie freaked me out.

Then there is The Sixth Sense, which most people call a thriller. But let’s face facts here: as the director of Cabin Fever (2002) (another great horror film, although not scary) says, The Sixth Sense is a horror film that calls itself a thriller in order to win Academy Awards. There are images from that movie that still frighten me when I’m alone at night.

The Ring, however, is the scariest film I have seen in a long time, and watching The Grudge made me think about why these new horror films are scary. As a side note, let me say that I saw Ringu (1998) after seeing the American version, and I didn’t like the Japanese version nearly as well. It wasn’t as visually scary, and it didn’t develop the plot like The Ring did. I understand that the American version used elements from the sequels, and I think it made for a better movie.

I will have to give you my take on new horror films another day, though. This has already run a bit too long. Stay tuned next time for Part II.

As a side note, I’m halfway through Drew Barrymore’s Ever After (1998), and I’m contemplating putting it in the horror category.