I feel like a wimp writing this, but since when did scary movies get so heart attack inducing? I used to love the days of The Omen, The Exorcist, Halloween - hell, even Driller Killer and Cannibal Holocaust - but lately, it's got so I have to hide my eyes when one of these damn trailers comes on in the movies. Last night at The Hangover (great movie) I saw back-to-back trailers for The Orphan and Final Destination (above), both of which left me feeling like I needed to run screaming from the theater.
Is it just me getting more of a pussy in my old age, or are these things getting past the point of being civilized?
And don't even get me started on Thirst (from the director of Oldboy, which I have to admit, looks awesome)
Stumble This
Reddit!
I gave up watching new horror films a while back when the special effects became paramount over the story. The dramatic tension and dread that built up in well-written classic stories has lost out to shock value. You no longer need an imagination or suspension of disbelief to get through a horror film, and I miss that. The last few I saw don't even have coherent plots.
Death does not need a high budget cgi team to kill anybody - you can just have swine flu or arrythmia or aneurysm or ...
Good grief, you grannies. Time to change the name around her to YesButNoButDepends!
Okay, I only protest because it is true, but I actually think the stuff took a turn for the stupid and grotesque at Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie I happen to like. In fact, I'll take the occassional basic, visceral "gutwrench" movie now and again, but I can't say that movies like Chainsaw, The Devil's Rejects, Last House on the Left or Funny Games are really what I think of as "horror" movies. More like "jolt" movies. When they fault, they just go gross.
The problem is that gross is cheap and profitable. There's not much room at the studios anymore for "decent" horror movies, because, typically, a solid, suspenseful, non-gore dependent, movie that doesn't rely on a lot of superfluous action, is going to cost more and make less, even if it is profitable.
So we get stuck with From Dusk til Dawn 3: The Re-Duskening, Saw 9: A Trip to Home Depot, and a sequel to Final Destination 3 whose only distinguishing characteristic is that they added the article "The" to the title.
Yuck.
Scaramouche is right: Scary.
***
Fortunately, I live in a horror film world where Psycho isn't a big-budget art-house reproduction, The Haunting doesn't include Liam Neeson channelling Dr. Peter Venkman, and the sequel to Frankenstein betters its great predecessor by a mile.
The last gross-out horror movie that had an engaging story was "Night of the Living Dead" [whose message is something along the lines of "Hippies are zombies who are going to make us lose Vietnam," I think.]
Doesn't look scary to me.
Just looks like a new genre - action-horror films. Or "jolt" is a better way to put it (thanks DSB). Lots of high level SFX wrapped up in high body count and blood splatter. The new Terminator could have billed itself this way.
So, in short, yes Scara, it appears you're getting much more sensitive and squeamish to these movies as you age. But don't switch genre's, cause I would argue "The Proposal" is a horror movie. Scary.
You're a wussy if you thought this was scary.
Fuck man. Final Destination really spoke to me. I would say modern horror/thriller/popcorn movies could use more teenage girls in t-shirts and underwear. That's kind of quibbling though.