Whatever Happened to the "Scary" Horror Movie?

The state of the Horror Motion Picture seems to have been in decline over the past couple of decades. From the constant recycling of old classic horror pictures like "Wicker Man", "The Fog', "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Psycho" (Arrgghh!!) to the nearly always inferior re-makes of all the most popular Japanese Horror films of recent years, i.e.: "Grudge","Pulse","Premonition","A Tale of Two Sisters","Ring" to tired and predictable (kinda/sorta based on a true story) films like "Wolf-Creek" and the unending sequels to those few horror movies which actually do well nowadays, i.e.: "Saw","Hostel" etc. Hardly any films have actually attempted to scare us. It seems to be more Shock than Scare. So lacking in original ideas are the film-makers of today that they have reverted to adapting video games, i.e.: "Silent Hill", "Resident Evil". There are a number of factors in today's horror films that I feel dooms them to failure.

1: Characterization. How many lead characters in recent films have you really cared about? You need to at least like the main character or victim of the story or else why are you going to care what happens to them. For example, 'Gregory Peck' beautifully cast as the President in "The Omen". Now come on, who wouldn't want 'Gregory Peck' for their president? Everything about him says honor, principles and moral fortitude. He's likeable in that he battles so hard to do the right thing fighting a conscience we should all admire. Compared to say 'Nicholas Cage's' horrendous performance in the uber-boring "Wicker-Man". A film so tedious that the only way the main character could be woken from his reverie was by burning him alive in the climax. Never before have I been so grateful for a movie to end.

2: 'Too Many people'. It's easier to identify with people when there are less of them around. There is less distraction and you can concentrate on the hero/victim's character, getting to know them. We are after all essentially alone and so we can relate all the better given limited number of characters. As soon as you introduce too many characters into a story it usually leads to a muddled mess. Take for instance "28 Days Later" which was wonderfully angst-ridden for the first 20 minutes or so. A single man waking, disorientated and alone and wandering a deserted urban landscape. All our attention is rapt on him. We have no choice but to identify with him as he is the only character present. With each subsequent character introduction we lose just a little bit of the fear you initially experienced from him just being alone and the second half of the film completely fails as the army unit is introduced. Just way too many people, too late in the film to make any connection with its audience.

3: Music. Unfortunately it has been in recent years the curse of most Hollywood movies to have ridiculously loud music, mostly to cover for unexciting images and poor storytelling. Horror movies especially suffer from this. A ghostly image should not need to be accompanied by the philharmonic orchestra. In some instances a 'scary moment' will be practically announced by a swelling of violins or dinky donk piano playing. A common cheat is to throw in a loud bang of a noise when say cat darts out in front of someone or something unexpected happens. It's a cheap trick to use and although it certainly makes you jump it's not scaring or horrifying anyone.

4: Clichés. Disembodied children's voices. Overused 'CGI'. Women (& men) who scream at the top of a hat. People continually splitting up groups for no apparent reason. Piano's playing all by themselves. The sudden appearance of someone/something out of nowhere. For instance I always hate it when the heroes' friend creeps around silently in an empty haunted mansion only to be amazed that the hero is frightened out of their wits when he/she grabs them unannounced and all of a sudden. In Japanese horror movie's, people seem to lose the use of their legs instead of getting that 'fright-flight' syndrome. They fall backwards, staring uselessly, supposedly because they are so terrified. Now although this worked in the first wave of Japanese Horror it's become clichéd since. New clichés include the fast Zombies from both "28 Days Later" & "28 Weeks Later" to the remake of "Dawn of the Dead". I don't think we'll see any more slow monotonous zombies for a while.

5: Visuals. Is it really so difficult to come up with good scary visuals. Here are some that I think really worked and resonated with me many years after I saw the movie. In "The Innocents" there is a scene where the new Nanny sees the ghostly image of a woman across a pond. The figure stands completely still and it's a very creepy moment. In 'The Omen', the close-up on the Evil Nanny as she approaches poor 'Lee Remick' before throwing her out the window. "The Exorcist" which managed to come up with so many original scary moments from a very confined space. In "28 Days Later" with the Tunnel sequence which was wonderfully composed scene where the heroe's have to fix there car as the rampaging Zombie horde are racing through the tunnel. The very scariest moment here were the shadows of the zombies zigzagging distortedly against the tunnel's walls. 'Ringu' with 'Sadako' slowly creeping through the TV in the closing moments. Films like "Alien", "Jaws","Ringu" which managed to establish a feeling of dread with visuals that merely hinted at the monster lurking beyond. "The Shining" with the creepy girls suddenly appearing at the end of a corridor as the little boy cycles his way around the big house. "An American Werewolf in London" with the empty London Underground and the ominous howls of the Werewolf as the lone commuter tries to escape up the escalators. You'll notice that a lot of these scenes concentrate on loneliness and alienation. The images are basically simple and need little if no computer animation. Good acting will always make something scary, just check 'Anthony Hopkins' in 'Silence of the Lambs'.

6: Humor, or rather misplaced humor. There is a delicate balance with humor in Horror. You can definitely have too much of it with youthful wisecracking and snappy one-liners in the face of imminent danger. Riding the horror/humor tightrope was never done better than "An American Werewolf in London" which succeeded by being one of the very few, if not the only movie that was both funny and scary at the same time.

7: Trailers that tell you almost the entire story before you've even seen the movie. I don't know why I've bothered to see some of the horror-movie's I've gone too lately. Almost everything has been given away in the Trailers. You'll be shown nearly all the scariest moments along with some plot-spoilers, like certain main characters actually meeting their demise. The same annoying voice-over with the same annoying music telling you that 'it's beyond your imagination'. A lot of today's movies seem to go by the numbers. I remember thinking back to one of the cinema trailers for "Alien" back in 79/80' which only showed the 'Alien Egg' but managed to enlist such a sense of dread that you just knew you had to see the movie. Trailers also sometimes completely misrepresent the movie as something their not.

More and more the emphasis seems to be on shock rather than scare. Instead of taking a script and working a movie around the words it seems to be that scripts are being written around images and vague notions of a scary idea. Perhaps it's going to be left to the smaller independent studios to bring back the real horror to us. Hopefully the big studios will eventually buck the current trend for by the numbers horror in favor of good acting and intelligent screenplays.