“… the last and worse one: Terror… It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there...” – Stephen King
I love to be scared!
You are in fact dealing with a lover of horror, a fear based adrenaline junkie, a scaredy cat and a masochistic coward! I’m terrified of spiders and love cats but an old workmate shared his room with two tarantualas but would break into a cold sweat at the sight of cat, what scares you might not scare me, terror and fear are completely subjective and personal.
Now I’m not talking about the kind of scare that you get from a pop out ghost or explosively dramatic piece of music that so many modern ‘horror’ films these days employ to ‘scare’ us! That’s not scary! It’s shocking! It would rattle even the toughest of us and are the perfect prank to play on unsuspecting children (unless of course you hate making children cry! *cough*). When I talk about terror I am talking about the kind of fear that lives with you, that buries itself into the back of your mind, letting you forget about it until you find yourself alone and in the dark. It creeps, crawls and coils in the shadows of your imagination, it empties your stomach, chills your spine and electrifies your senses, sending you into a state of paranoia. As a horror fanatic there are three films that will always stand out for me, three films I feel that helped me form my opinions on what real horror is and why I feel that most modern films have lost their fright!
“Nosferatu”, the German expressionist film made in 1922, is the story of a blood drinking creature known as Count Orlok who preys on the naive people of Wisborg and terrorises the family of Thomas Hutter. The silent film is based on Bramstokers Dracula but unable to attain permission, the production company changed names and details (not enough to avoid being sued however!), it relies heavily on the use of shadows and light, not only as a metaphor for the film but in terms of production. Nearly a hundred years old and the film is still regarded as one of the greatest pieces of cinema and is loved by horror fans of all generations. To this day the shadow of Count Orlok oozing it’s twisted frame along the wall and up the stairs sends me into a tizzy.
Jumping ahead to the 1970’s, to be precise, 1974, cinema goers were tormented in the cinema by Leatherface and his twisted cannibal family in what is regarded as one of the most influential horror movies of all time. The film was banned in several countries and many theaters refused to show it for it’s excessive violence and gore with the scene involving Pam and the meathook cited as the main reason for the ban in many cases! The beauty of the ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ was that most of the violence was left up to the audience to imagine, we never saw Pam being impaled, we saw her being lifted up, we saw the hook but there was no actual shot of the young girl being hung up like a side of beef, it was left for us to visualise and create ourselves. Our own imaginations were responsible for the nightmares…
In 1976, horror fans were exposed to the first feature length Stephen King horror film, ‘Carrie’, with the book also being his first published, Carrie was considered to be a major success. It isn’t the story of a terrifying monster or a depraved serial killer, it was the tragic story of a young girl pushed beyond the point of breaking, by her uncaring teachers, schoolyard bullies and an abusive mother.
Little did all of these people realise that Carrie was no normal teenage girl, she possessed the ability to move things with her mind and in one of the most frightening and iconic film scenes of all time, one that involved only a bucket of blood, we witness a quiet and timid creature snap and turn on her tormentors with lethal vengeance. Carrie evoked in me not only a typical scared reaction but it seemed to disturb some rather dark feelings of my own, wishing and wanting to develop my own psychic powers and use them against my own bullies.
For me, horror isn’t about the ‘boo’ factor but more about the story, the ideas and that feeling that stirs inside, that itches the fight or flight instinct in all of us.
So what has this to do with modern horror? At this stage, it should be obvious! Modern horror films have gotten lazy, they offer shock value and little else! It’s no longer about creeping out the audience but more about boos for your buck. The frights and scares become predictable as the killer pops up when the hot teen victims least expect it, the monster is always two steps ahead of it’s prey and the ghosts always pretend to be nice for a little while!
Editor-in-Chief, part-time super villain and hoarder of cats. If you can’t find me writing, I’m probably in the kitchen!
Please don’t think I’m bashing every single movie made after the 90’s, far from it and there have been some serious diamonds amongst the rough. Two films that still manage to unnerve or terrify me to the point of needing a safety blanket while watching them are ‘The Others’ and ‘Signs’, respectively. ‘The Others’ is a psychological horror that depicts a mother and her two children falling victim to the closed walls and empty halls of their mansion, strange noises, sightings of people who vanish quickly and of ghostly figures. It is a completely unnerving experience, the film gets under your skin and we’ve all been there, alone in the house when something in another room goes bump, that sense of dread and sickly fearfulness.
Signs works on a similar level, ignoring the preachy elements about faith and family, the film manages to push me over the edge every single time, leaving me a cowering mess under my blankets too terrified to go to sleep because of the nightmares.
(Being perfectly honest, I can’t watch the above clip without feeling sick!)
I’m not saying that Freddie and Jason don’t have a place in the genre nor am I saying every single film made these days hasn’t made me jump or fall asleep with the lights on what I am saying is that somewhere and somehow we’ve seemed to have lost the meaning in horror, maybe we’ve become desensitised to traditional notions of the film genre, maybe writers and film makers have gotten lazy or maybe this fan has just grown up but whatever the reason I just know that these days I’m just not scared.
For those in the business of making fear come to life, take not that real horror doesn’t need rivers of blood or millions spent on special effects, in fact it’s much better to let the audience fill in the blanks with their own imaginations and let them scare themselves into sleepless nights. The films we watch today fade away from memory as fast the credits, they don’t follow you home on the bus or the car, they don’t lurk under your bed or camouflage themselves in the shadows on your wall. Real terror, real fear is only accomplished when the audience member forgets about their terrifying experience in front of the screen only to relive it a week, month, year later when they turn off the lights, when they are afraid to be on their own, when our minds turn against us.
Editor-in-Chief, part-time super villain and hoarder of cats. If you can’t find me writing, I’m probably in the kitchen!
