October is around the corner and I couldn't be more excited. It means fall flavors, chilly evenings, and changing leaves (if only in my imagination). It's my favorite month of the year and one I look forward to all summer - the end of the heat and the beginning of better, colder, darkened days.
By far my favorite thing about October, though, is that it means a month of horror film watching. I'm counting down the days until October 1st, when I get to relive a bunch of my old favorite horror films and hopefully experience some new ones.
Considering that horror is one of my favorite genres, I have to say I'm saddened and dismayed by the state of modern horror film-making and the collective experience audiences now come to expect when watching a horror film.
I love horror films because they are beautifully unique in their ability to move you, emotionally and even physically, when you watch them. They are (or should be) about subtle building tension and creeping terror and atmospheric shifting. There's nothing else like them. Nowhere else can you shift so far emotionally when watching a film then when you are afraid, getting you so lost in the picture that you forget where the film ends and the real world begins. We've all been there - afraid to fall asleep after watching The Nightmare on Elm Street or scared of the TV after we experienced The Ring. It's this beautiful delving into the imagination that is so unique to horror films, and the reason that I love them so. Horror films stay with you in a way that other types of films do not - and that is something I truly admire.
Last night we went to the Arclight to see Insidious 2, and it made me realize that what I'm seeking cannot be found, that our culture has moved on and replaced this wondrous sense of dread with something else.
There aren't movies anymore like The Shining or Rosemary's Baby, which build tension so beautifully and subtly that you won't realize you've reached the peak until you notice that you're white knuckled and have stopped breathing. There may never be another movie like The Blair Witch Project, which created a brand-new sub-genre that revolutionized the horror industry forever.
Instead we're left with movies like Insidious 2, cheap money grabs that attempt to rip off the masterful works of the past but instead insult their legacy.
I won't get into too many details about what's wrong with Insidious 2 as a film in this post, because this isn't meant to be a movie review. I'm more interested in how I felt when watching the film (disappointed), and how those around me were experiencing it as well.
To me, horror films are meant to scare. They're meant to terrify. They're meant to crawl under your skin and sit there long after the credits have rolled. They're meant to make you feel things, to keep you wondering as you fall asleep why you feel so uncomfortable. It sounds a little masochistic, I guess, when spelled out like that, but that's really what it's about for me. I guess I watch horror films for the same reasons people jump out of airplanes or go on roller coasters, for that little thrill of adrenaline.
Unfortunately, that's not what horror films are about anymore. That's not what people watch them for. Today, people watch them not to be scared, but to laugh at them and mock them as a collective group. Something pops out with a streak of eerie string music, and instead of enjoying that moment of fear, even if it's a weak one, the audience laughs it off. And doesn't that defeat the purpose? Isn't the purpose to enjoy those feelings, rather than making a joke out of them? Why go watch a movie that's supposed to build in tension if you constantly try to dissipate that tension by mocking its very presence? But then it's a catch-22, isn't it? If audiences are reacting to horror films this way, it's no wonder that filmmakers are making less serious and more silly horror films instead of the ones of the past.
But where does that leave people like me? People who want to take it seriously, who want to try and fall into the world of the film as much as possible without any distractions, without making fun of the scares and laughing at things that aren't meant to be funny?
Who knows, though, maybe someone will come around and re-create the genre again, and we'll be back to that wondrous tension building of past.
Until then, you can find me here, alone in the dark, enjoying these movies as they were meant to be seen, enjoying the tension as it builds.
