Goodmorning: Lack of good Halloween scare films show shift in societal views
What in the Halloween has happened to horror movies? What happened to the scenes that would upset you, make you scream and leave you so shaken and upset for days afterwards that you only felt comfortable with your doors locked, the lights on and your back safely to a corner? Whatever happened to names like Hitchcock, Kubrick, Carpenter and Romero whose place in the opening credits would send shivers down the spine? What ever happened to Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Jason or that screaming, chest-born creature from "Alien" that made kids believe in the Boogieman again? Out of a stubborn insistence to watch as many scary movies as possible this week before Halloween, I sat down through "Drag Me to Hell." Alas, I will never get those hours back. The movie had all of the classic elements of horror films: demonic forces, naive denial, blood and the undead all pasted atop a high, screeching soundtrack to pull at the nerves. The conventions were all there: the pretty (but not too pretty) blonde heroine runs upstairs when faced with trouble, and at the end, just when she feels safe, a last cruel twist of the dagger brings her world down around her. The conventions don’t work anymore. The agents of horror that used to keep our heads under the covers at night are shrugged off as campy or cheesy. The answer behind all of this is that our skins are thicker. Why should we be afraid of some imaginary, fantastical killer when a look at the nightly news brings paranoia? In 1963 a visionary Alfred Hitchcock made a film called "The Birds." The tale was one of man versus nature as the birds of an area mass a murderous assault on its human residents. But why would someone nervously look to the sky for birds when instead there are nuclear weapons flying around much more dangerous than any bird? We simply live in a scarier world now. With the world darkening, so did the media. The hair metal music of the 1980s gave birth to thrash and death metal, which employed dark, even occultist, imagery and occupied the radio and television for several years. Our video games, once child-oriented, became dark and splattered with violence. Art mimics reality. In the ‘90s, movies outside the genre began to use just as much violence and gore as the horror films. Filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino threw so much fake blood at audiences that when an actual slasher movie debuted, the audience yawned. The same old thing isn’t working anymore. The genre has to change. Until then we’ll just have to wait and watch. Even if we don’t like what we see.
