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Whither Now For Horror Films?

Zeke Newbold

Zeke Newbold

Carbon based biped.
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Apr 18, 2015
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So the last horror flick I saw at the kinomatograph was Last Rites, out this year. It has not received much attention and I watched it in an empty theatre, albeit at a late night showing.

I quite enjoyed it but it did get me thinking as to where horror films need to go next. The particular subgenre that Last Rites very much belongs to - I am tempted to call them `Jumpers` - seems to have runs its course.

You know the sort of thing: a group of pretty American kids/ thirty something hipsters go to a forest/creepy old house armed with a lot of technical gizmos and come across demonic spirits - yadayada. The main dramatic effect that is used is to have something suddenly appear in the darkness coupled with a loud echoing slamming noise (hence `jumpers`). To be sure this works everytime, but is starting to get very predictable. I suppose it all started with the Sinister series, and The Conjuring and Paranormal Activity.

And let's be fair: this subgenre does have two notable virtues: (1) It is not special effects based (or rather the special effects used tend just to be lighting and loud noises), and (2) they do not demand big star names - indeed this subgenre works much better with actors who are ordinary unknowns.

It was fun while it lasted, but where do horror films go now? Well, I'm nostalgic for the early nineties where you had creature-features like Mimic and Species which had a science-gone-wrong premise and were not just trying to make you leap out of your seat. I hear that the forthcoming Hallows is a bit like that, albeit this too seems to be centred on demonaical hokum.

Another good omen was Viktor Frankenstein, from last year. This was a bit like an old Hammer horror film from the sixties on speed. As much as I dislike camp, this sort of thing is good fun too.
 
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I think the possession and the cabin in the woods type film is on the wain, zombie films will follow soon.

I'm hoping space-horror in the mold of Alien of The Thing make it big.

I'd like to see someone make a decent Lovercraftian Film Like The Shadow out of Innsmouth. Would be great for the paranoia of our times.
 
I've thought about this quite a lot. With the general decline in superstition and the desensitization of kids through the internet, I would imagine that people are a lot easier to scare they used to be. The kinds of people who would actually be frightened by horror films are the least likely to watch them.

I think that real horror films of the future might be very experimental in nature; having a monster hiding in the attic just isn't scary anymore. Imagine a team of psychologists and neurologists getting together and using their knowledge of the human mind to create a film that uses lights, sound and imagery in a way that can evoke true fear within the viewer. It would literally be torture to watch. I would buy a ticket for such a film.
 
Dr. Porhoët said:
I've thought about this quite a lot. With the general decline in superstition and the desensitization of kids through the internet, I would imagine that people are a lot easier to scare they used to be. The kinds of people who would actually be frightened by horror films are the least likely to watch them.

I think that real horror films of the future might be very experimental in nature; having a monster hiding in the attic just isn't scary anymore. Imagine a team of psychologists and neurologists getting together and using their knowledge of the human mind to create a film that uses lights, sound and imagery in a way that can evoke true fear within the viewer. It would literally be torture to watch. I would buy a ticket for such a film.
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I think you'll find it's already been done.

http://www.americanidol.com/
 
Dr. Porhoët said:
I've thought about this quite a lot. With the general decline in superstition and the desensitization of kids through the internet, I would imagine that people are a lot easier to scare they used to be. The kinds of people who would actually be frightened by horror films are the least likely to watch them.
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Easier to scare than they used to be?

I think it's the other way round. Kids laugh at some of things that terrified earlier generations. I recall my Grandmother hated the old.Hammer.Horrors that were always on TV when I was a kid, hiding every time Dracula came on screen
 
A.I. gore and jump scares are cheaper than real effects.

I think the internet has given more exposure to real and fictional horror, so the bar as to what is scary is high.
Psychological horror would be nice ... but film makers have to decide what the viewing public want. This means increased, utterly ridiculous gore, jump scares and horror characters that are already scarypasta or well-known.
Does the majority still have a short attention span? Less appreciation of emotional terror?
 
Jumpscares and revulsion are comparatively easy to create and reliable in effect compared to dread or terror. Maybe something that manages to evoke all those emotions.
 
Jump-scares are for teenagers. It's the sound that marks the emphasis, not the scary image. It can be done much more effectively.
There are much better, grown-up methods available such as the dolly zoom -


While I enjoyed The Sixth Sense and didn't guess the twist, the jump-scares let it down. We don't need a raucous sound-effect when the ghosts appear. They're obviously supernatural.

Did the director want them in? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he didn't.

We're hoping to watch his new fillum tonight. :)
 
In The Entity, the score was well-used in conjunction with a scary incident.
They used a light, low-volume violin just before the event, then when the scare starts, the volume ups while the music is base-heavy pounding until the event finishes with a diminuendo along with the action. It associates the sound with the scare but doesn't use it as a warning.
 
The new wave of French horror films, typified by Martyrs, Raw, Irreversible, Frontier(s) etc. really isn't to my taste.
I much prefer a subtle, building creepiness that gets under your skin (pun intended) more than a series of flayings and disembowellings.
 
Gore-fests don't horrify me or scare me - they're just disgusting. It's like film makers only use the story to get from one splatter to another. "Oh, let's see what else we can imagine to do to a body, eh?"

Horror I 'like' is the psychological, the possible yet uncanny. Some are quite blatant, like The Hitcher. Others might involve serial killers but are more concentrated on the threat rather than the 'act', such as M. To me, terror is felt because it is plausible.
Again, some might imply horror but not actually show it, such as The Maze (1953). This allows supernatural horror, in that the unseen is imagined by the audience - the image is in their interpretation. A reveal would only disappoint; examples of this are The Island of Terror (1966) or The Night of The Big Heat (1967), which also involves building tension. Great films both ... up until you see what the 'monster' is.
Terror, or fear, is an emotion and a film that is creating this needs to 'hit' the most number of people. Spiders, blood, torture - sure we fear them - but the most effective fear is one that is likely to actually happen. Opening curtains at night to see someone staring in; washing in a bathroom, rinsing your face only to look up and spot something over your shoulder in a mirror; walking past a doorway and noticing something in the corner of your eye - these are scary things. Linking them together in a plausible plot ... THAT is the art.
 
Blimey! This is a blast from the past!

Since writing the O.P seven years ago, things have moved on a bit (indeed, I like to think that I was anticipating the changes). For one thing The Creature Feature, the loss of which I lamented, is back with a vengeance in the form of the hugely successful Meg and Meg 2 - and, I suppose, the forthcoming remake of Godzilla. Then there has been a new wave of more thoughtful `Elevated Horror` movies such as Midsommer and Hereditary which don't rely on jump scares. There has even been some attempt to drag the old Universal Monsters into the 21st century - in such films as The Invisible Man . from a year or two ago (I've not seen it, but it sounds like it's on the right lines, from my point of view).

There seems to be some unanimity above with people saying that they prefer the more subtle and psychological end of horror to the blood and guts end, and I agree too. I have often felt that the very term `Horror` as a label for the genre that we like is something of a misnomer.

It would be interesting to know when (and where) the application of the word `Horror` to denote a genre of fictiion began. My guess is that it is relatively recent and probably emerged with the rise of cinema - where simple classifications became required.

Before the term `Horror` became mainstreamed we had a plethore of labels to cover the whole gamut of possibilities: there was the Ghost story, of course then the Tale of Terror, the Shilling Shocker, Weird Fiction, Crawlers, Bogery Tales, chiilers, Stories of Peril, and Gothic Romances. (In the Russian language there is a charming term - `Mystical Thriller` which is applied to many things we would simply label ``Horror`).

I'd say that most Horror films are really Supernatural Thrillers - that is to say thrillers where the plot hinges on Supernatural events in some way. We watch them to be thrilled and maybe chilled, and for the suspense involved - but not horrified and certainly not revulsed.

For example, I am very much drawn to horror involving medical skullduggery and Mad Doctors - but I have never bothered with The Human Centipede cycle. This is because I know these films are an exercise in pushing the revulsion envelope and that is not what interests me in the `horror` genre at all.

I should add that the purest kinds of literal horror are often found in films which are not designated as such. There is a scene from ther film The Aviator - a sort of biopic - which has alwyas left me a bit traumatised. In it, a captured soldier (William Dafoe) has his thumbs cut off by his captors. I have never really liked that film because of that unpleasant scene.
 
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This is the difference in dramatic presentation.

Horror effects few people but in a personal way. Grand presentations rarely consider or present "What about the crew of that train that Godzilla stomped into paste? Isn't that horrible?"
The bigger the disaster, the wider the disconnect. Which is why, in the 80's, the disaster movies such as The Towering Inferno and Airport were so striking. They introduced the idea of small stories of small people being caught up in big events.
 
Zeke Newbold said:
There is a scene from ther film The Aviator - a sort of biopic - which has alwyas left me a bit traumatised. In it, a captured soldier (William Dafoe) has his thumbs cut off by his captors. I have never really liked that film because of that unpleasant scene.
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That was The English Patient.
 
I like this quote by Stephen King about the different levels:

"I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud."
 
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