The Good Ol’ Days of Horror

Tweet

I have been a fan of horror and horror movies for almost as long as I can remember. I have been through the various phases of horror. When I was a kid it was common to find those black and white movies that probably instilled terror into the hearts of movie audiences in the 1930s. Back in those days, during the depression, the idea of mummies and vampires was probably pretty scary. Bela Lugosi in a cape and speaking in a strange accent was probably enough to scare the heck out of people. Even as a kid I never found those monster movies very scary. I mean, for crying out loud, you could get Dracula, Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein’s Monster action figures when I was a kid. How scary is it when you can get a plastic toy to play with? Especially when the plastic toy is only slightly bigger than the Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader action figures I had sitting somewhere across the room, how scary can they really be? When I first started watching movies on video it was the time when the slasher films had just started to take over. I watched Halloween and had nightmares. It was wonderful. Like all trends, however, before too long the entire pool was saturated and by that saturation the entire genre got diluted. With the creation of other movie monster like Jason and Freddy it kid of diluted the fact that the original Halloween is a brilliant and simple terror story about the boogeyman. It’s scary because of the use of shadow and implication rather than splattering gore. There is just enough blood to put the idea of blood in your head and then your brain fills in the blood the rest of the way. Since the pool became diluted the glory days of the slasher film came and went. In fact, it seems like horror films went through a period where nothing was particularly good. There was the gorefest films, of course. I saw most of those during college. These were movies that just amped up the gore and made it so that nothing was left to your imagination. These movies dazzled with amazing special effects and sly tricks. The great movies in this genre are “An American Werewolf in London,” “John Carpenter’s The Thing,” and “The Fly.” The fact that those three all took old-time monsters and updated is not lost upon me. Those movies were good. They entertained. They scared. I remember watching them and turning away from the screen. It was fun. I have written about these movies and given my opinion about which ones you should watch. Yes people died in these movies but there was always this sense of fun about them. It is hard to explain this to someone who does not like horror movies. The fun of horror movies is that they often are things that could not happen. It is not possible for Michael Meyers to really exist. You cannot have a man in a spray-painted Shatner mask who is invulnerable and comes back to life after being shot six times. There really are no werewolves. Vampires really do not exist. Watching a horror film was my equivalent to going on a thrill ride. I hate thrill rides. My stomach cannot take all of that dipping and spinning and turning upside down. However, I can experience a visceral thrill watching a guy with knives for fingers swallow Johnny Depp into a bed and then fountain gallons of fake blood onto the fake ceiling. That’s fun. It was all done with a wink and a nod. I think that maybe horror films are, in some way, a reflection of the times in which they are made. I, personally, enjoyed the brief dip into Japanese horror films. While the American remakes may be a little less intense than the original Japanese movies I enjoyed them for the most part. I like the way the Japanese are willing to accept ghosts and mediums and vast mental powers even from little girls trapped down wells. To cynical American society such things have to be explained and, in that explanation, some of the magic and scariness of the originals is lost. There has been a more disturbing trend lately and it is one I am just not willing to take with the horror movie industry. I am not sure I understand it. I guess we live in a world when our own military is accused of torturing prisoners and you can find beheadings of hostages online if you look hard enough. We live in a world when faceless people seem to be plotting to do us harm and the harm done in our minds is so terrible that seeing someone tortured must not seem so bad. Of course I am talking about the recent spate of torture films. I don’t understand them. I have not watched them. It may have started before the movie “Saw” came out but I really don’t remember them before that. I think maybe “Saw” just become enough of a hit that others figured they could make copycats of them. Just like when the pool became saturated with the slasher films the market is now inundated with these movies. Far too often they do well at the box office. “Hostel” begat “Wolf Creek” which begat “Chaos” which begat “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Beginning” which begat “Touristas.” Now I see a movie that is supposed to come out this December about a torturer at Christmas time (although I think it’s actually a remake of a 1974 film, but I digress). Perhaps I will need to reevaluate my holiday movie list, eh? In each of these movies it seems the same plot is followed. A bunch of young people end up in a group going some place. Most of the time they go somewhere in a car. Then they veer off of their original course and end up somewhere where a guy is waiting for them. Is it a slasher? No, that would be bearable. This is a guy who doesn’t just want to kill people. This is a guy who wants to stalk, capture and then torture them. As I understand it there are times when the bad guy doesn’t even want to kill his victims. From what I read about the movie “Wolf Creek” there’s a point where the guy severs one of his victim’s spine and leaves her a “head on a stick.” I don’t understand the desire to watch this. Maybe it is like when I was younger and people get some kind of thrill out of it. I don’t see it. These don’t seem to have a sense of humor. They are dark and depressing and relentlessly mean and cruel. It’s like being one step away from watching a snuff film. Even “The Passion of the Christ” was, for all intents and purposes, a two hour movie of a man being horribly tortured to death. It’s strange to wish for the time when the scariest thing was Robert Englund with make up that made it look like he had a skin condition. Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.