Whip Lash
2006-03-18 17:39:48 UTC
Horror Films Rise
From The Grave
Who Scares, Wins
By Russell L. Blaylock, MD
3-17-6
The horror movie has risen from the grave. Christopher Goodwin
examines why today's audiences are baying for blood
Just a few years ago, Hollywood had all but declared the horror
movie dead, the last drop of blood drained from its lifeless corpse. Even
modern masters of the genre such as Wes Craven, who had terrified two
generations of audiences with films like The Last House on the Left
(1972), The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984),
had veered into parody - even self-parody - with Scream (1996) and its
sequels. Young audiences, it seemed, had become far too wise to the tricks
of the trade to be scared any more. Horror had become a laughing matter.
It's not funny any more. This week sees the release of the remake
of The Hills Have Eyes, produced and co-written by Craven, and directed by
Alexandre Aja, who made the cult French slasher movie Haute Tension. And
in two weeks, Hostel will be released, directed by the American film-maker
Eli Roth, with Quentin Tarantino as executive producer.
What most distinguishes these two films, and a crop of others such
as Saw and Wolf Creek, is their astonishing goriness and unrepentant
sadism, the degree of which has not been seen on screen since the British
Board of Film Classification banned so-called "video nasties" such as The
Driller Killer and I Spit on Your Grave in the mid-1980s. The characters
in these films use and abuse saws, drills, gouges and any other device
they happen upon, inflicting literally eye-popping, bone-cutting,
artery-squirting, toe-crunching violence on those to whom they have taken
a dislike. The difference these days, though, is that the kind of horror
films that were once sold under the counter in Soho are now mainstream
cinematic fare, often distributed by divisions of the major Hollywood
studios.
And young audiences all over the world can't get enough of them.
Saw had a $1m budget and grossed $55m in the USA and $47m internationally;
Saw II cost $4m and grossed $87m in the USA, and nearly as much overseas.
Hostel, which cost less than $5m and features scenes of astonishing and
unrelenting cruelty and brutality, has taken nearly $50m in the USA since
its release at the beginning of January. The film tells the cautionary
tale of two young American men and one Icelander who end up in Bratislava
because they're told the Slovak girls are crazy for foreign guys. They
are, but not in the way they think.
Even the makers of this new breed of celluloid gore are happy to
acknowledge the baseness of their intent. "The best part of seeing Hostel
with an audience is seeing people pass out and vomit," Roth said recently.
Why has horror made a comeback, and why is the new ultra-gore so
attractive to adolescents today? Adam Simon, who directed the documentary
The American Nightmare (2000), believes it's impossible to understand
horror films without looking at the social context in which they are made.
In The American Nightmare, the leading horror directors of the 1970s and
1980s - Craven, George A Romero, John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper and David
Cronenberg, all of whom came of age in the 1960s - make it clear how many
of the most horrific visions in their films were informed by images they
had seen on television: of lynchings, brutal police attacks on
civil-rights marchers, the slew of televised violence that Vietnam became,
the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Their films
fed on and translated into terrifying fantasy the dread and anxiety of
those times, and their sense that the American dream their parents had
believed in proved to be just so many dangerous and bloody lies.
"I think there is something about the American dream," says
Craven, who started his working life as a literature professor, "the sort
of Disneyesque dream, if you will - of the beautifully trimmed front lawn,
the white picket fence, mom and dad and their happy children, God-fearing
and doing good whenever they can - and the flip side of it, the kind of
anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that's not
the truth of the matter, that gives American horror films, in some ways,
kind of an additional rage."
That rage and intensity had dissipated by the time the likes of
Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street had spawned their
numerous sequels. They became tired, exploitative and far less terrifying.
Hence the success of the Scream parodies from the mid-1990s.
Many people credit M Night Shyamalan, with films such as The Sixth
Sense, Signs and, most recently, The Village, with bringing horror back
into the mainstream. Tarantino, though, has been far more influential. He
made ultra-violence ultra-cool again, and paved the way for the latest
bucketfest of horror gore. More important, he has also championed some of
the Asian horror directors whose films seeped into the video underground
in the 1990s. Mainly from Japan, but also from Korea, these directors have
been the most important stylistic influence on American horror directors
in the past decade. One is Hideo Nakata, whose Ringu was remade by
DreamWorks as The Ring (2002) and took $130m at the US box office, and as
much overseas. Nakata directed last year's sequel, and Dark Water (2005),
directed by Walter Salles, was also based on one of his films. Another is
Takashi Shimizu, whose Ju-On was the basis for The Grudge, which took
$110m in the US.
Many of these American remakes featured starry actresses: Naomi
Watts in the Ring films, Sarah Michelle Gellar in The Grudge, Jennifer
Connelly in Dark Water. And other A-list Hollywood actresses have parlayed
their thespian credentials into leads in horror films, including Halle
Berry in Gothika (2003), and Nicole Kidman in The Others (2001). These
actresses have helped bring about one of the most important revolutions in
horror in the past decade: they have brought young women into the cinemas
to watch films that used to be the domain of the adolescent male. They
come to see, and learn, how these female characters fight back against the
terrors that confront them. Fifty-five per cent of the American audience
for The Grudge was female, for example.
"I remember going to theatres showing the first Ring," Walter
Parkes, who produced the film for DreamWorks, told Variety last year. "You
would see groups of three and four teenage girls all peering out from
under one overcoat over all of their heads. It was a surprise to me."
Adam Simon believes much of the appeal of horror, particularly the
new, extremely bloody kind, for western adolescents is that these films
"have always been the equivalents of tribal rites of passage, of
psychological endurance. But the traditional rules of horror films, from
how to safely kill a vampire to the slasher guidelines parodied in Scream,
made the audience feel safer. This new generation of horror films doesn't
play by those old rules". The Asian originals, and sometimes their
American remakes, are disturbing principally, as the writer Mike D'Angelo
suggests in Esquire, because of their "sense of uncertainty, the unnerving
feeling that rationality is a luxury we can no longer afford".
Simon believes this latest profusion of blood and gore can in part
be attributed to the horrific and appallingly graphic images easily
accessible on the internet today. We have all seen the images of
brutality, sexual sadism and torture from Abu Ghraib, and the execution
videos, which have featured on-camera beheadings, put out by the
insurgents. "The renewed emphasis on physical torture in these films seems
to directly restage these images," he says. "The same kids lining up to
see Saw II or Hostel know exactly where to go online to see execution
videos from Iraq or uncensored footage of bodies falling on 9/11. In a
world where both sides in a potentially endless war have tossed out the
rule book, it certainly shouldn't be a surprise that the new breed of
horror film mimics this rulelessness and sadism."
But this kind of extreme violence, believes Simon, presented
within the safe confines of the four walls of a cinema, has a tangible
benefit: it allows adolescents to begin to figure out how they can
confront their own psychological fears, and the dangers and violence the
world seems to want to inflict upon them.
"It's cultural homeopathy," he says, "a little dose of poison to
protect you from the real poison. Suicide bombers don't watch horror films
for inspiration or comfort; their potential victims do." Or, as Tobe
Hooper, director of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, puts it in The American
Nightmare, these horror films allow us - and, in particular, adolescents
searching for their own identities - to begin to face "the stuff in the
darkness, the stuff in the shadows and in particular the stuff that we
don't open the door on".
And it's all bloody good fun, of course. Or is it?
Copyright 2006
From The Grave
Who Scares, Wins
By Russell L. Blaylock, MD
3-17-6
The horror movie has risen from the grave. Christopher Goodwin
examines why today's audiences are baying for blood
Just a few years ago, Hollywood had all but declared the horror
movie dead, the last drop of blood drained from its lifeless corpse. Even
modern masters of the genre such as Wes Craven, who had terrified two
generations of audiences with films like The Last House on the Left
(1972), The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984),
had veered into parody - even self-parody - with Scream (1996) and its
sequels. Young audiences, it seemed, had become far too wise to the tricks
of the trade to be scared any more. Horror had become a laughing matter.
It's not funny any more. This week sees the release of the remake
of The Hills Have Eyes, produced and co-written by Craven, and directed by
Alexandre Aja, who made the cult French slasher movie Haute Tension. And
in two weeks, Hostel will be released, directed by the American film-maker
Eli Roth, with Quentin Tarantino as executive producer.
What most distinguishes these two films, and a crop of others such
as Saw and Wolf Creek, is their astonishing goriness and unrepentant
sadism, the degree of which has not been seen on screen since the British
Board of Film Classification banned so-called "video nasties" such as The
Driller Killer and I Spit on Your Grave in the mid-1980s. The characters
in these films use and abuse saws, drills, gouges and any other device
they happen upon, inflicting literally eye-popping, bone-cutting,
artery-squirting, toe-crunching violence on those to whom they have taken
a dislike. The difference these days, though, is that the kind of horror
films that were once sold under the counter in Soho are now mainstream
cinematic fare, often distributed by divisions of the major Hollywood
studios.
And young audiences all over the world can't get enough of them.
Saw had a $1m budget and grossed $55m in the USA and $47m internationally;
Saw II cost $4m and grossed $87m in the USA, and nearly as much overseas.
Hostel, which cost less than $5m and features scenes of astonishing and
unrelenting cruelty and brutality, has taken nearly $50m in the USA since
its release at the beginning of January. The film tells the cautionary
tale of two young American men and one Icelander who end up in Bratislava
because they're told the Slovak girls are crazy for foreign guys. They
are, but not in the way they think.
Even the makers of this new breed of celluloid gore are happy to
acknowledge the baseness of their intent. "The best part of seeing Hostel
with an audience is seeing people pass out and vomit," Roth said recently.
Why has horror made a comeback, and why is the new ultra-gore so
attractive to adolescents today? Adam Simon, who directed the documentary
The American Nightmare (2000), believes it's impossible to understand
horror films without looking at the social context in which they are made.
In The American Nightmare, the leading horror directors of the 1970s and
1980s - Craven, George A Romero, John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper and David
Cronenberg, all of whom came of age in the 1960s - make it clear how many
of the most horrific visions in their films were informed by images they
had seen on television: of lynchings, brutal police attacks on
civil-rights marchers, the slew of televised violence that Vietnam became,
the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Their films
fed on and translated into terrifying fantasy the dread and anxiety of
those times, and their sense that the American dream their parents had
believed in proved to be just so many dangerous and bloody lies.
"I think there is something about the American dream," says
Craven, who started his working life as a literature professor, "the sort
of Disneyesque dream, if you will - of the beautifully trimmed front lawn,
the white picket fence, mom and dad and their happy children, God-fearing
and doing good whenever they can - and the flip side of it, the kind of
anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that's not
the truth of the matter, that gives American horror films, in some ways,
kind of an additional rage."
That rage and intensity had dissipated by the time the likes of
Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street had spawned their
numerous sequels. They became tired, exploitative and far less terrifying.
Hence the success of the Scream parodies from the mid-1990s.
Many people credit M Night Shyamalan, with films such as The Sixth
Sense, Signs and, most recently, The Village, with bringing horror back
into the mainstream. Tarantino, though, has been far more influential. He
made ultra-violence ultra-cool again, and paved the way for the latest
bucketfest of horror gore. More important, he has also championed some of
the Asian horror directors whose films seeped into the video underground
in the 1990s. Mainly from Japan, but also from Korea, these directors have
been the most important stylistic influence on American horror directors
in the past decade. One is Hideo Nakata, whose Ringu was remade by
DreamWorks as The Ring (2002) and took $130m at the US box office, and as
much overseas. Nakata directed last year's sequel, and Dark Water (2005),
directed by Walter Salles, was also based on one of his films. Another is
Takashi Shimizu, whose Ju-On was the basis for The Grudge, which took
$110m in the US.
Many of these American remakes featured starry actresses: Naomi
Watts in the Ring films, Sarah Michelle Gellar in The Grudge, Jennifer
Connelly in Dark Water. And other A-list Hollywood actresses have parlayed
their thespian credentials into leads in horror films, including Halle
Berry in Gothika (2003), and Nicole Kidman in The Others (2001). These
actresses have helped bring about one of the most important revolutions in
horror in the past decade: they have brought young women into the cinemas
to watch films that used to be the domain of the adolescent male. They
come to see, and learn, how these female characters fight back against the
terrors that confront them. Fifty-five per cent of the American audience
for The Grudge was female, for example.
"I remember going to theatres showing the first Ring," Walter
Parkes, who produced the film for DreamWorks, told Variety last year. "You
would see groups of three and four teenage girls all peering out from
under one overcoat over all of their heads. It was a surprise to me."
Adam Simon believes much of the appeal of horror, particularly the
new, extremely bloody kind, for western adolescents is that these films
"have always been the equivalents of tribal rites of passage, of
psychological endurance. But the traditional rules of horror films, from
how to safely kill a vampire to the slasher guidelines parodied in Scream,
made the audience feel safer. This new generation of horror films doesn't
play by those old rules". The Asian originals, and sometimes their
American remakes, are disturbing principally, as the writer Mike D'Angelo
suggests in Esquire, because of their "sense of uncertainty, the unnerving
feeling that rationality is a luxury we can no longer afford".
Simon believes this latest profusion of blood and gore can in part
be attributed to the horrific and appallingly graphic images easily
accessible on the internet today. We have all seen the images of
brutality, sexual sadism and torture from Abu Ghraib, and the execution
videos, which have featured on-camera beheadings, put out by the
insurgents. "The renewed emphasis on physical torture in these films seems
to directly restage these images," he says. "The same kids lining up to
see Saw II or Hostel know exactly where to go online to see execution
videos from Iraq or uncensored footage of bodies falling on 9/11. In a
world where both sides in a potentially endless war have tossed out the
rule book, it certainly shouldn't be a surprise that the new breed of
horror film mimics this rulelessness and sadism."
But this kind of extreme violence, believes Simon, presented
within the safe confines of the four walls of a cinema, has a tangible
benefit: it allows adolescents to begin to figure out how they can
confront their own psychological fears, and the dangers and violence the
world seems to want to inflict upon them.
"It's cultural homeopathy," he says, "a little dose of poison to
protect you from the real poison. Suicide bombers don't watch horror films
for inspiration or comfort; their potential victims do." Or, as Tobe
Hooper, director of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, puts it in The American
Nightmare, these horror films allow us - and, in particular, adolescents
searching for their own identities - to begin to face "the stuff in the
darkness, the stuff in the shadows and in particular the stuff that we
don't open the door on".
And it's all bloody good fun, of course. Or is it?
Copyright 2006