The Horrors of Horror

I grew up, as many members of my generation did, in the 1980s. A period in history which, I feel pretty confident saying, was more or less the golden age of horror movies. Into legitimately unsettling stuff? We've got The Thing, we've got Alien (1979, but close enough), we've got The Fly, one of those should suit you. Silly schlocky goodness? We've got Waxwork, Critters, and House just to name a few (and if I'm bending the rules to count Alien, I might as well grab 1990 to for Tremors). Heck, even if you're a slasher fan, this was the heyday, but let's not get into the issues I have with that subgenre because I'm fairly sure I've covered it before.

Why this golden age existed comes down to a combination of a few factors. First off, the makeup/special effects wizards of the time just really started doing some amazingly good looking and surreally creative work. Seriously, the things these people started doing with just latex, rubber tubing, and corn syrup are mindblowing. Before that, things tended to look hokey, and after we were stuck with lousy CGI for a good decade before people (rather recently) began realize the latex stuff looked so much better and started a move back.

Also a factor, you could just plain get away with this stuff. Even non-horror movies of the era had massive explosions of blood, skin being ripped off in large sheets, faces melting off, people and so forth. Even in PG-13 movies (and lower if I'm not mistaken). Even Oscar winning movies. If you're doing a legitimate, R rated horror movie, the sky's pretty much the limit.

Then there's the biggie, and the one which has no outside excuses to draw on. These movies were, for the most part, all about fun. We're not splattering gore all over to make some deep statement about human nature, or make thinly veiled political statements, or maximize shock value, or make people jump out of their seats, we're just having schlock for schlock's own sake. You get your special effects team to whip up the most bizarre and messy effects they can manage, you write a simple plot around them (or if you're feeling ambitious, you work in some nice psychological horror, playing with paranoia and claustrophobia and whatnot), you shoot it, people watch it, and either they laugh or they lose a night's sleep, depending what you were going for (and if you properly pulled it off).

Recently though, we don't tend to see horror movies like this. Mainly, we get three things (and yeah, I'm saying that a lot lately). First, there's spoofs of this sort of thing, which just plain don't work because you can't spoof something that isn't taking itself seriously in the first place. Then, we've got scream based horror (that is, literally based on screaming, not movies derivitive of Scream, which would be the aforementioned spoofs). These are the movies were the directors brag about how they'll make the audience jump out of their seats, which they accomplish by breaking total silence with an excessively loud scream or gunshot about once every 10 minutes. Startling someone is not the same thing as scaring someone. It's also childish hackery, and I just plain have no respect for anyone who relies on it. Finally, we have this new horror subgenre which seems to have acquired the name Torture Porn. The definitive example of these is the Saw series. We have even less of a plot than "a [blank] is roaming about an old decrepit [blank] killing stupid teenagers," which is really saying something, there's really nothing to surprise us, and ultimately, you spend most of your time just watching some person in a room freaking out about how something nasty is about to happen to them, then a really unpleasant view of said nasty thing happening. So, basically, the only reason to see this sort of movie is just see people suffering and dying, and seriously, who really wants to see that? Well, OK, sociopaths and serial killers I'd imagine, but that's not a demographic you want to go and target.

Fortunately, while these sorts of movies are the predominant trend, a few people out there still have some idea what they're doing (notably not the people who made the totally-not-a-remake of Dawn of the Dead and Slither unfortunately, but they try, they try). The Tremors series (at least up through the 3rd movie) have it down pat. Shaun of the Dead is a wonderful zombie movie (which I consider it's own non-horror genre, but still). So's Land of the Dead for that matter. Anything involving Bruce Campbell is generally a safe bet too.

Then of course there's the impertus for this here rant. Black Sheep. It's from New Zealand. Sheep eat people. Sheep also bite people turning them into weresheep. "Baaaa" is heard rather often in a threatening context. It's great.