Horror Show

[Scorpio]

Is there any intrinsic value to the horror movie ?. They say anything gets respectable if its survives long enough, but the nasties never did. To many Terrible scripts and cruddy production values have scarred the surface of the genre; but it may be qualitative values, or lack of, that has done the damage. Critics on the whole loathe horror movies:some might consider them akin to pornography, or to catering to instincts even less worthy than pornography aspires to;and they carry no intellectual water at all. There is a lot of ground to cover within the horror movie; some people feel that tecnical and intellectual failings within the genre has earned it huge affection, and others feel that its taste for disaffection has made it truly special. I feel that the horror genre is a complex thing, like fragile economy that is subject to wild fluctuations in its currency value; but if it maintains a gold standard it will endure.
Here are some of my choices for golden oldie status, and why.

PSYCHO: Seedy bad joke of a movie, or an insightful exploiter of anxiety in an increasingly violent and permissive society.
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: Fantastically offensive rubbish, or a bracing study of an America that tourists will never go to, and the effects of social unrest : the foundation stone of a stable society THE FAMILY UNIT, or a mutated version of one, is the agent of mayhem, and years of Vietnam reportage in glorious technicolor.
ALIEN: Tarted up monster movie, or an intriguing look at the possible reality of close encounters: Infection, infestation, anhilation.


If you have your own golden nominations and your own thoughts on what a good horror movie is, then contribute to the list. Altenatively, if you hate horror flicks and feel like putting the critical knife in, get typing. I know you want to!.

[martin wilson]

I would agree that the horror movie genre has been thoroughly debased over the years, too many tedious slash 'ems where unlikeable American teenagers go to try to fix the generator on their own,in the dark, in the full knowledge there is some lunatic with a machete lurking around, I suspect that we are not supposed to root for the good guys any more but for the monsters who represent almost nostalgic figures for the older generation.
In some ways they represent a return to the AIP formulaic Roger Corman school 'I dont want it good, I want it Tuesday' pumped out for the drive in movie audiences, but intelligence and subtlety have long given way to upping the gore content,particularly torture porn flicks like Hostel and Saw.
Anyway here are my choices of horror films that I have been most frightened/unsettled/plain weirded out by.

Wickerman, the original of course not that ludicrous Nic Cage remake.
Felicias Journey.
Audition.
R Point
The Host
Dumplings (this film WILL make you feel nauseous)
James Ellroys Feast of Death (documentary, discusses the Black Dahlia case,and the first time I saw the crime photographs)

Cant think of any more.
All the best.

[Scorpio]

Hi, i have seen Ellroys ' My dark places '; it is mostly about his mother, who was raped and murdered when he was a child. Mr Ellroy is as engaging as we have any right to expect considering the subject matter. Oh, and Nick Nolte is in it.
Love Wickerman; but if it were not for Mr Woodward being burned alive at the end, i'd keep forgetting it is a great horror movie and not just a great movie.

[sdreid]

Well I think Silence of the Lambs would qualify a horror movie and it won best picture. Horror films are designed to evoke emotion just like comedies and can be thus either good or bad. To me, Alien is a fantastic movie and Psycho is pretty good as well. As a rule, I think most people sympathize with the victim in a horror film which is actually the opposite of a comedy movie which is really sadistic to be honest. We all laugh when the guy sprains his ankle slipping on a banana peel.

[Beowulf]

I still prefer the three Frankenstein movies directed by James Whale to any modern horror movie.

Quite a lot of the old movies were so much better than the new. They were more subtle and could frighten you easily. The Haunting is a good example, '65.

[martin wilson]

I think Silence of the Lambs is a horror film as well, my criteria are those films that stay with you for whatever reason, scary,creepy,repulsive,sickening etc as opposed to the classic horror film genre which often dont promote any response whatsoever,other than regretting the waste of money spent on them.
The Hammer films were beautifully shot, had great casts and Ingrid Pitt in a low cut dress,but they were dated even by the mid 70's, although Blood on Satans Claw was mentioned by Mark Gatiss in his horror appreciation on BBC4. which is about the only film they made that I remember as being genuinely scary.
Seance On A Wet Afternoon is regularly shown on film4 and again has that eerie, unsettling quality I class as horror, similair to The Haunting, great film that I forgot about,but each to his own!
All the best.

[Scorpio]

Well I think Silence of the Lambs would qualify a horror movie and it won best picture. Horror films are designed to evoke emotion just like comedies and can be thus either good or bad. To me, Alien is a fantastic movie and Psycho is pretty good as well. As a rule, I think most people sympathize with the victim in a horror film which is actually the opposite of a comedy movie which is really sadistic to be honest. We all laugh when the guy sprains his ankle slipping on a banana peel.

I think silence of the lambs occupies horror territory in exactly the same fashion as David Fincher's SEVEN. Both movies slyly use classic horror movie devices to illicit disgust and fear.

[Bailey]

Aside from arguing that any art has some value, of course horror films have validity. They get trashed for being, well, trashy, and oversimplified, but that's satisfying a basic need that goes back to the earliest intelligence - I think every culture has monster myths that are serving the same inherent purpose, from Medusa, the minotaur, etc, through to Jonah and the whale, and Grimm's fairy tales. Bottom line is that we love a good scare - it's a thrill, a taste of potential mortality that makes us feel alive (same concept as the thrill and safe "risk" we get when we go on rollercoasters) and helps us deal with the concept of mortality. Indeed, tho many would scoff and argue, it's this innate appeal that even draws us to the likes of the Ripper case - after all, it's just another scary story, even scarier because not only is it true, but there's not even the happy ending of knowing the baddie got his just desserts.

So, yes, while the majority of horror flicks are mindless trash - which could also easily be argued is the case for the majority of action and comedy films, and if you don't agree with me, go watch anything starring Adam Sandler or the high quality 1980s work of Stallone and Arnie - there are film in the genre that seek to be something more to varying degrees of success.

Psycho, Silence Of The Lambs and Seven all deserve mention and are great films (possibly not Psycho, which has a wonderful first half but is less impressive post-shower) but despite horror elements, are really more thrillers than horror flicks. Genuine horror flicks that I think qualify as actual art, with something valid to say as opposed to merely being a rollercoaster ride are fewer and far between, but they're out there - Night Of The Living Dead (and to a lesser degree its sequels) has some very clever observations to make about us for example, no doubt if I was a little wider awake (it's very early in the morning here in NZ right now) I would come up with a few more.

However, when it comes to the horror film as powerful art making taking a serious look at the human condition while still scaring six kinds of poo out of you, I have but two words for y'all - The Exorcist.

B.

[Magpie]

Sure they have validity.

Nobody questions the validity of comedy because of, say, the Porky's movies, or that westerns have no validity because of some of the cheesier spaghetti westerns out there. It's easy for people who don't like horror movies to find examples of trash to support their opinion, but that doesn't mean they're right.

Directors like Argento, Cronenberg, Romero, or Hooper have had scholarly articles and books written about them just like "important" directors like Kurosawa, Truffaut, or Welles. Theories of horror films abound in academic circles, including catharsis, social commentary, sexual politics, economic uncertainty and pure escapism etc. etc. A lot of it's pure bollocks, of course, but then a lot of the stuff they write about "real" filmmakers is pure bollocks too.

[martin wilson]

Stephen Kings' Danse Macabre is a fun,non bollocks spouting read on subtextual themes in horror movies, I tend to the view that thesauras bothering dissertations are more about the writer than the subject but thats a personal view.
If Psycho is a horror film,why not Silence of the Lambs?, did Psycho have the benefit of the shock of the new? whereas by the time SOTL came along,the serial killer genre was well established?, I dunno, I know that Anthony Hopkins Oscar winning turn cant hold a candle to Anthony Perkins (funny about the names isn't it?) terrifying stare into the camera in the final 'wouldn't hurt a fly' scene, the cold grip of fear stayed with you for some time afterwards because you were now aware there were some very strange people in the world and if you were unlucky enough you might meet one of them down a dark alley somewhere............
Thats horror for me, Jaws could be classed a horror film as afterwards you were a little bit nervous about going for a paddle at thev seaside.
Which is not to say I dont enjoy a dumb monster movie, but I find them almost comforting in a way, the only surprise in them is waiting to see what inventive method the writers have come up with for killing the bikini clad females this time.
All the best.

[Robert]

I love horror films, ghost films, etc. I don't like the slash and gore stuff, though I did watch the Freddie Kruger ones.

I don't believe in over-analysing such things, so I'll just say to anyone who scoffs at horror films, take a look at the first Frankenstein.

[Scorpio]

I love horror films, ghost films, etc. I don't like the slash and gore stuff, though I did watch the Freddie Kruger ones.

I don't believe in over-analysing such things, so I'll just say to anyone who scoffs at horror films, take a look at the first Frankenstein.

I enjoyed the first half of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM ST. Freddies homicidal Incubus ,as i think of him, was genuinely bracing and original.

[sleekviper]

I also love the horror vein, but no matter how well any are made, it suffers two problems; we are taught as small kids that there are no such things as monsters to give us piece of mind, and humans absolutely hate the thought of not being top dog. A bad marriage, spouse cheats, the underdog wins, we relate and feel for those, while feeling scared or frightened drifts back to childhood when it is stupid to feel that way for something that is not real. "Alien" was brilliant, That chest bursting scene of Hurt was real reaction of those involved. Scott told them with that scene it would be coming from Hurt like in the script, but when things started flying out, that is real actors reactions. Miles ahead of it's time, miles behind on proper credit.
In any horror film something is going to be better than the average person, and we hate that. Could have understood that in "Jaws" people were invading his turf, would not matter, it still was beating humans, so scared or not, it is not on equal level of what it could be as a film. Secretly we like what they do as a guilty pleasure; if they didn't sell tickets, there would be more Woody Allen knock-offs, but outwardly they get trashed for going against the grain. Ju-on, American version The Grudge, Dog Soldiers, Pan's Labyrinth, The Feast, 30 Days of Night,Full Eclipse, Curse of The Demon, and either version of The Thing are enjoyable.

[kensei]

I LOVE HORROR MOVIES! It is one of my favorite genres. My mother remembers me as a very small child seeing Hitchcock's "The Birds" on tv and then being afraid to go outside afterwards. I don't remember that, but it was probably a couple of years later that I saw a campy old afternoon movie on tv called "The Vulture" that I remember very clearly, about a half man-half bird creature with some kind of vendetta against some family. Lots of scenes of people being lured out on to balconies at night, then ominous wing-flapping and dark talons coming down on their shoulders and carrying them away. I was probably eight years old or so and I was terrified! I'm sure I'd laugh if I saw it again today.

I've watched several of the old black and white classics, and compared them to their more modern counterparts. I understand that the old ones were considered scary as hell in their day and I do enjoy them in that way, but if you compare them to now they almost seem silly. Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man had sharp teeth and claws, yet he tended to strangle his victims and shed not a single drop of blood. The blood-soaked remake a few years ago with Benicio Del Toro had no such problem with squeamishness. And how many of you have seen the original "Dracula" with Bela Lugosi? It has its high points, but the ending is absolutely anti-climactic and not scary at all. My favorite Dracula movie is "Bram Stoker's Dracula" with Gary Oldman, which actually stuck closer to the book than any other Dracula movie before or since (even though it also took many liberties).

Ghost and demon movies- hard to do with things that are usually invisible. "The Exorcist" is absolutely number one. With ghosts, would you call "The Sixth Sense" a horror movie? Maybe, maybe not, but it was SO GOOD. "The Blair Witch Project" and the "Paranormal Activity" series are examples that people tend to either love or hate, with no middle ground. I personally loved them. Their home video-reality approach was a truly new innovation.

Slasher movies, it can't be denied, did cheapen the genre for a while. "Psycho" was the first. But who can deny that the original "Halloween" is a great, great horror film? After repeated viewings, it still gives me chills.

There have been monster movies aplenty- monsters from nature, monsters from outer space, monsters spawned by magic or radiation or pollution, etc. etc. etc. But I will tell you my very favorite line in any monster movie or indeed in any horror movie I've ever seen. It was spoken by a child, Carrie Henn, playing a little girl named Newt in "Aliens," the second and best of the "Alien" series, to Sigourney Weaver.

"My mommy always told me there were no monsters, no real ones, but there are. Why do they tell little kids that?"

[Robert]

"Ghost and demon movies- hard to do with things that are usually invisible"

Kensei, I think that perhaps film isn't the ideal medium for such stories. It depends on what's wanted. What is "horror"? One can get plenty of horror simply from reading history books, or even the daily newspapers. Anyone can make a film showing, say, people having their limbs hacked off. This is horror, and even disgust. Then there is another meaning of "horror" which has more to do with the uncanny. I think the uncanny is a very important element in ghost/horror stories, and often it's better imagined than described or filmed. One of the reasons "The Haunting" was such an effective film was that it avoided images and concentrated instead on sounds, which left more space for the imagination. Or take this chilling line from that film : "Then who was that holding my hand?" I think Christopher Lee once said that there is nothing so frightening as a half-open door.

Of course, inbetween the slasher stuff and the uncanny there is a whole spectrum. And people don't always read/watch horror material to be frightened. Like most good literature it will succeed on more than one level.