swansong's Blog

What has happened to Horror movies?

I remember the first horror movie I saw. It was called Attack Of the Killer Shrews...It scared me, it really did. I do not remember how old I was but it turned me onto the black and white horror movies like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man, House of Wax, House on Haunted Hill, The Creature From The Black Lagoon, etc.

My point being is this...What the hell happened to horror movies and where are they going from here?

In the 70's we had Halloween, which for me, started it all and ended it all. Before Halloween there were monster flicks and sci-fi flicks of the 50's and 60's. The whole nuclear war era and fear of the unkown. We had Roswell which spawned a slew of alien films like It Came From Outer Space, War of the Worlds and The Blob. But audiences started to get tired of monsters and aliens and avioulsy wanted something new.

So Halloween started the slasher flicks, IMHO. Which in case started the 80's slasher flicks. God, I could name a shit ton of 80's slashers that the studious just poured out with no story line or acting. For me, 80's horror pretty much killed the franchise for awhile.

Little hits from the franchise here and there and then a film came along which redefined the horror genre and brought it into a new realm, Silence of the Lambs. Now, some of you may say that was not a horror film, well, how? It had cannibalism, blood, gore, a cross-dressing maniac, etc. I think one of the reasons why it was not considered a horror films was that it had one Academy Awards and the Academy likes to lift its middle finger to the horror genre...I like to refer to the genre as the bastard child of cinema.

Anyways, so the film came out and brought forth a new kind of horror. Not a slasher film, not a monster film, but a smart film. A film which could scare you not because of how terrifying looking the villian was, or if he had come from outer space but because this seemed like it could ACTUALLY happen and concentrated on the psychological aspect of the character.

So from Silence of the Lambs, spawned more horror films about the psychological aspect of the characters which we can still see in horror films to this day. Now, once again hits and misses pursued and then Scream came along, which brought a whole new term to the slasher genre. It was smart, witty and funny. Plauseable at some points and was a fresh look at the horror genre. And of course after Scream came its slew of rip-offs.

2000, it seems we have this thing called torture flicks. Hostel, Wolf Creek, Touristas, Saw etc. Now, it seems to me that horror has got so needy that they need to try somthing new, which I agree they should try, and came out with these flicks. Granted, I liked Hostel and Hostel 2 but not the Saw flicks. I can not watch Hostel on a daily basis but find it was good enough to add to my horror section of my DVD's. N

Now that this fad seems to be dying down I can only wonder what the horror genre has in store for us next....

It seems that horror comes out with a good movie which brings something new to the genre and then foloows it up with hard to watch follow-ups. I wish that with each new horror film that came out, instead of following it up with something very similar to the original, that the studious would continue with expanding their minds and try something completly different each and every time. I understand why they do that, it is a fad, jump on the bandwagon why dontcha!?

As a fan of horror and will ALWAYS be a fan of horror, I can only sit and wait for the next installment to this much underrated genre. I grew up on it, and intend to stick by it regardless of what kind of crap it spews out of its gutted stomach.