Horror films - a pontification

[Don Brown]

Please forgive the irrelevance of this posting to the list, but I felt it 
necessary to discuss the horror film within a wider context. Feel free to 
give me a good telling off for steering the discussion off target, but then 
again the Sacchi-Micchi thread was interesting despite its seeming 
irrelevance.  I hope list members will think the same of this.
  As a fan of the horror genre I have a few comments and criticisms that 
might be of some vague interest to those of you out there with flexible 
foreheads, i.e whose tastes stretch from lowbrow to highbrow, and all the 
wrinkles in between.  I promise you that I do eventually bring the axis of 
my discussion back to Japan.  It is not purely academic, if indeed it is at 
all, but I hope it will bring some people out of the woodwork and enable 
this thread to continue for a little while.
  The current 'horror' boom, as far as American film goes, seems to be a 
revival of the teenage slasher genre that had its creative nadir in the 
'70's.  Gene Simmons of Kiss had a good line about these movies being merely 
vehicles for the bland, fresh faces of the day, mostly recruited from teen 
TV sitcoms and dramas, and content-wise they generally can't hold a steak 
knife to classics like Halloween etc.  The means they use to put bums on 
seats is an illustration of this - the promotional material focuses on the 
'stars' rather than the 'monster', as shown in the carbon copy posters that 
are usually a montage of pretty young faces staring vacantly into the void.  
As slasher films, at least in this kind of subgenre, it's less about who 
will survive and how the hell will they knock off the bad guy, and more to 
do with who's behind the mask.  There's usually a short, unsatisfactory 
explanation as to why they went and stabbed everybody, instead of a 
backstory or 'mythology' relating to the motivations of the boogeyman.  And 
as it's all about whodunnit, the violence is mundane and cursory, and 
therefore lacks any sense of menace or morbid inevitability.  The killer is 
always killable, and it's simply a matter of when the good guys will turn 
the tables.  That's not very scary.
  This latest wave of films is often described as 'post-modern', in the way 
they knowingly take the conventions of the genre and turn them on their 
head.  This credits their creators, including the extremely over-rated Wes 
Craven and Kevin Williamson, with more nouse than they actually possess.  
They truly put the 'hack' into 'hack and slash'.  Their characters are 
themselves often fans of the genre, and are aware of how these stories 
usually transpire, whilst name-dropping genre classics as references for 
future developments in the plot. But it all comes across as an attempt to 
associate an inferior product with a more well-known and respected mainstay. 
  They're as predictable in the way they plagiarise the previous generation, 
as in their self-conscious attempts to add an "unpredictable" twist to a 
banal plot device.  The Williamson-scripted 'Halloween H20' was a notable 
waste of time in the sense that it added nothing to the series, except for 
giving Jamie Lee Curtis another 10 rounds against Michael Myers.  Like the 
equally unnecessary sequel 'The Rage - Carrie 2' it was a pretty obvious 
attempt to ride the coat-tails, or entrails of the copycat slasher film 
wave. It even had the arrogance to have the bad guy decapitated by the 
heroine in the end, bringing the series to an unsatisfying close.  At least 
until the next straight-to-video sequel (incidentally, these installments, 
beginning after the irrelevant third film in the series, are worth looking 
at.  If only to pity poor Donald Pleasance as he wheezes his way through the 
script, who looks like he will keel over at any minute, and occasionally 
does.  The serialisation of the story and a deepening of the explanation for 
Myer's existence is quite original).
  The success of these starlet-driven features contrasts with the decline of 
the big-budget, big-name horror film.  By horror this would include films 
with a supernatural or inhuman theme, but leaning towards the darker side of 
the universe and the differing means by which it becomes corrupted, whether 
they be satanic, man-made, extraterrestrial and so on.  In recent years we 
have seen such disappointments (often laughably so) as cuddly Jack 
Nicholson, the mid-life-crisis lycanthrope in 'Wolf', the battle between 
good and evil as fought by shouting lawyers in 'The Devil's 
Advocate/Diabolos', and Tom Cruise desperately trying to convince himself 
that his character is not homosexual in 'Interview With The Vampire'.  At 
the expense of sounding like a sad old git yearning for the past, it seems 
as if films the calibre of 'The Omen', 'Hellraiser' or 'The Howling' are 
just not being made.  There's far more interesting stuff going on in the 
smaller-budget category, like the warring angels of 'The Prophecy' or, at a 
stretch, 'Pi'.  The CG revolution has put some serious clock speed behind 
the monster movie ('Godzilla', 'Starship Troopers', 'The Haunting') but 
these are more interested in having their binary beasts crush, crumble and 
chomp their way to the bank.  Those films that have aspirations of dealing 
with issues weightier than their protagonist are few and far between, but I 
suppose this is endemic of Hollywood at present.
  As I see it, the popularity of current horror films in Japan is a separate 
phenomenon, at least in terms of content.  With some exceptions, the most 
successful  seem to be of the folklore/campfire tale variety that seems to 
be so popular here (Ring, Rasen etc.).  Very much ghosts and goblins and 
things that go bump in the night, rather than the bloke with knives for 
fingers, or the bug from outer space that's growing in your dad's stomach.  
Conversely you're more likely to find that kind of thing on the shelf of 
your local video shop.  Perhaps the selection on offer here is a truer 
picture of the tastes of the Japanese public, judging by the popularity of 
'rentaru bideo' versus cinema here,
  What I find surprising, if fairly disturbing, is the popularity of the 
child-oriented horror.  Sure, in the west we have the whole Goosebumps 
juggernaut that has proven so popular worldwide, but I feel this is pretty 
tame in comparison.  I don't feel that a scene where a man in a trenchcoat 
trys to hack down a toilet door with a sickle to get to the elementary 
school girl inside is the kind of genre innovation we necessarily need right 
now, and yet this was on Japanese television a few weeks ago.  Perhaps it is 
part of that cliche about Japan that the crime rate is so low here partly 
because the violence in televisual and printed media offers an outlet to the 
bestial side of the Japanese psyche.  I'm sure there's some truth in that 
old chestnut, but it just doesn't seem healthy to me.  I don't think that 
these films are evil and should be banned, as with the moral panic over 
Child's Play 3 in the U.K. after the murder of James Bulger by two other 
children.  I've seen that movie, and it's just the same as a million other 
second-rate horror sequels.  But it wasn't made for children.  By all means 
let's scare the willies out of the kiddy-winkles now and then, but I'm sure 
there are acceptable ways of doing this.  Barney scares the bejesus out of 
me personally.
  Even Beat Takeshi's in on the act, with his TV show "Anbariibabou" 
("Unbelieveable" - although 'Unpronounceable' would be more appropriate) 
which contains 'recreations' of encounters with the supernatural (usually in 
the form of a blurry photograph, or a slightly less intangible ghostly 
apparition) with 'funny unbelieveable' for light relief.  The show generally 
lives up to its title, but perhaps not in the sense it intends to.
There seems to be more imagination being exercised within the genre here in 
Japan, regardless of the actual quality.  In recent years we've seen themes 
of technological and ecological foul play (Parasite Eve), and stories of the 
'ripped from today's headlines' variety (Cure).  The manga/anime/video game 
influence is seemingly stronger than that of American films in influencing 
Japanese efforts in the genre, and thus they have little to do with the 
present nudge,nudge,wink,wink,stab,stab Hollywood output. However, the 
current pervasion of zombie-related video games (Resident Evil/Biohazard, 
House Of The Dead) would point to the influence of Batarian (Night Of The 
Living Dead), a favourite of Japanese horror aficionados.  As the lines 
between video games and cinema/television blur with technological advances, 
the quality of script development and storytelling becomes ever more 
sophisticated, and in some areas it is already beginning to surpass its 
competitors (at least in terms of excitement and involvement).
  Being a horror film fan is usually a quite unrewarding experience.  It's 
like panning for gold - every little once and a while you find a nugget, but 
usually you have to make do with the sparkle in the sand.  So many of the 
films that fall into this genre have one good idea, whether it be a 
characterisation, the design of the monster, or an original story thread.  
As a fan I watch in the knowledge that there is a very high possibility I am 
going to want my money back, but I do so in the hope that I'll find 
something that I couldn't have easily dreamed up myself.  It's very rare to 
find a film that is a rounded whole, a shining (or perhaps oozing) example.  
It makes finding an Exorcist, or an Alien, or even a Pumpkinhead all the 
more rewarding.  And yet they rarely get the credit they deserve, because of 
the genre itself.
  Any comments, corrections, criticisms, or chastisements are more than 
welcome.


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