The New Horror, Part II

I am trying to post at least two things a week on this 'blog, but it’s difficult. Creating such fabulous critiques takes time! Not that anyone’s reading, anyway. I just like to think of myself as having a web presence.

As I mentioned last time, I love horror films, but most of them never actually scared me. And then I saw The Blair Witch Project, long after it had become a phenomenon. I actually saw it in a dollar movie theater, and my wife and I were the only people in the entire theater. Yet the door kept opening throughout the movie, and I would look back, but no one was actually coming or going. Shivers here...

And then there was The Sixth Sense, which scared me, as well. And I’m actually frightened to even talk about The Ring, that movie scared me so much. I went to return a movie at 11:00 PM on a Friday, and I decided that I might as well watch a movie that night, seeing as my wife can’t watch horror movies, and she was already in bed. So I got The Ring, went home, and watched it until 1:30 AM. Sitting alone in my house in the dark watching that movie was absolutely terrifying. Especially because the DVD had a hidden special feature, where “the movie that kills” would come on. And it couldn’t be stopped! Nothing would turn it off! And then it went blank, and the phone rang. Gimmicky, yes, but actually very creepy.

And that adjective brings me to why I think these movies are scary, especially when juxtaposed with older horror films. The scare in those older movies is pretty generic. We know Jason or Freddy, or Michael is watching (sometimes we even get interesting camera shots from Michael’s perspective), and we know he is going to kill them, but we don’t know when. The how seems beside the point, too. With A Nightmare on Elm Street, we would see Freddy, and he just looked so silly that I couldn’t take him seriously. Yes, it was different because he wasn’t bound to using knives to kill people (being in nightmares, after all), but we knew it was coming, and it wasn’t scary. The only scary thing in those films is the “jump,” as I call it—when the killer jumps out from nowhere, or even when the cat jumps out from the closet. Yes, they would fake us out, and yes, we would expect it, but it was still scary. But then it was gone. It didn’t matter. It was just, whoo, breathe again.

New horror movies have improved on this jump tremendously, and that is why they’re scary. Whenever I watch a horror film, and I see a closeup of someone’s face, I get nervous. Why? Because the closeup means that I can’t see what’s going on around them. It means a “jump” is coming.

But the jumps have changed now. They’re no longer just, whoo, breathe again. Now they’re “oh my, that was creepy.” The Sixth Sense has perfect examples. At the beginning, when the kid tells Bruce Willis that the school was where they used to hang people, Willis doesn’t believe him, but then they walk past a stairwell, and BAM! there it is at the top of the steps—people hanging. It’s a jump, to be sure, but it still gives me the willies. When the kid meets the little girl vomiting all over the place, she just appears inside his tent when he turns around, and she’s really scary! These jumps are now so creepy that they get stuck in our minds as images.

The best one is actually from The Ring. At the beginning, when the reporter goes to the dead girl’s room, the mom opens the closet door, and it flashes the scene of how she found her daughter’s body. It isn’t traditionally scary because there is no danger—no one is going to die at this point, after all. But the image of the dead girl that flashed ever so briefly on screen is completely terrifying.

Someone told me that horror films are scary now because they’re more psychological, but I think that’s kind of a cop-out. Yes, they’re more psychological (if it can get more psychological than The Shining), but one of the reasons is that they’re projecting not just killers, but images of things that are simply, well, creepy. And that creepiness gets stuck in our heads and makes us say that, yes, this movie is scary.

Older horror films never made me say that.