Are We Deluding Ourselves? - Page 2

Surely the crazed maniac and monster on the loose are the same plot?
I'd add protagonist (maybe) going insane as a third option instead.

Exactly! Just as many shitty horror films (or in any genre, for that matter) were made in the 60s, 70s, and 80s as there are right now..............it's just that nobody remembers most of them! Just as many remakes and ripoffs were done back then as well, but most of the bad ones have fallen into obscurity. Usually after a decade since the end of an era has passed, only the cream (and a bit of the bittersweet underlining) rises to the top..........with the rest of the shit left to disappear into the garbage can. It's no different now than it was then. One film comes out and becomes a hit (whether it is good or not) and is copied countless times until the trend runs out. Then another hits and the cycle starts anew again.

Also, we as horror fans need to be a little more open-minded about new trends. I'm not saying we need to make excuses for films, but we still need to keep an open-mind. For instance, I've mostly been raised on pre-90s horror. Overall, that's what I prefer. Now I've enjoyed a lot of genre flicks that have hit since the 90s began, but my favorites usually date before then. Each decade is different unto itself. They have different styles, trends, and techniques. Older horror fans might scoff at the Saw franchise, but I'll bet you years from now it will still be touted as one of horror's best. Does it deserve it? I don't know. I personally enjoyed the first two, but found the third boring and the fourth downright awful. But you know what? I bet the generation that was our age now when the Friday The 13th movies hit in the 80s said the EXACT same thing about them. And now they're considered classics.

You see, that's the other thing we need to demand from ourselves. Not only should we not set our standards low and make excuses as horror fans, but we need to keep ourselves from becoming too jaded and allowing our tastes to become dated. I see it happen with film critics all the time (Ebert, I'm looking at you!). I'll be damned if I let it happen to myself though!

In the end we need to just flat-out realize that only a handful of worthwhile (be it classics or solid entries) films come out each year in any genre. All the hundreds of others are just a boring waste of time or absolutely awful. This pretty much applies to every year of film in general, from the 1920s up until today. Same goes for the music and literary industries. Hell, it applies to an of the "arts".

So here's the ever-evolving list of "horror fiend" duties:

1. Never apologize for what you love.
2. Never lower your standards.
3. Never makes excuses for projects you feel are lesser.
4. Never allow yourself to become so jaded that you can't enjoy modern works.

Are there any more that we should add?

This is where your view falls down, though. It doesn't matter what fans of the time think of them. Saw is shit now, and it will be shit twenty years from now. And the Friday the 13th movies? Shit, then and now. Both franchises display what's wrong with most of the horror audience: gore=good. Nobody in their right mind would try to make the case that either are well-written, well-directed, or contain good performances. The "acknowledged classic" status of such films can only therefore be chalked up to nostalgic fondness or a belief that horror is all about the blood. And I don't care to buy into either of those.

Saw and Friday the 13th both very solidly fall under the umbrella of exactly what this discussion was about; that horror fans make too many allowances for what's generally considered good filmmaking if there's enough grue on display, or simply employ the qualifier "for a horror movie". The fact that a large number of people call something a classic doesn't make them right, or even make it a good movie. If that's the case, we all better just sit back and acknowledge that The Goonies is a masterpiece. And I ain't doing that.

Keeping an open mind doesn't have to mean sacrificing your own ideas of what constitutes a good movie.

If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.
- William Ornton

I wasn't referring to neither the F13 franchise nor the Saw ones as paragons of quality. They certainly aren't. Though some of the films in each franchise might be entertaining, at the end of the day they are the epitome of assembly-line filmmaking. Sequel after sequel churned out year after year until the grosses die down enough that the studio finally gives up (which, despite saying they'll stop at six, probably won't happen until Saw 8 or so).

What I am referring to is the fact that nothing has really changed in horror since the end of the '60s, or ever for that matter....

1. We take issue with countless sequels to things being made, yet this has been going on since the '70s. Friday The 13th, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Halloween, Rambo, Rocky, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, etc. The '80s thrived on sequels and it is a trend that has continued to this day.

2. We take issue with all the remakes and re-adaptations of things, but it's been going on since at least the '50s and has never really slowed down. Hammer Studios became famous for their remakes of the classic Universal monster movies and there have been countless other remakes since then as well (some classics themselves, with many others since forgotten). And what did Hammer do? They took the premises and made them "grittier" and more sexually charged than the previous efforts, adding to them a distinct style of the times. That's the exact same thing we criticize Platinum Dunes and their ilk of doing. Now many of us love the Hammer remakes to death (myself definitely included), but I doubt we love them any more than a lot of the younger generation of today loves the current spell of remakes. I'm certainly not saying that I feel the new rounds of redos is on par with the output of Hammer Studios (I definitely don't feel that way), but it makes for an interesting viewpoint. How can we criticize them for doing exactly the same thing that the current studio system of doing without being hypocrites? Hell, Hammer cranked out sequels like made throughout the '70s as well!

3. We take issue with new filmmakers who seem more interested in riffing on the previous work of others, but that's been going on for decades as well with many genre "masters" guilty of doing the exact same thing. Look at John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, Dario Argento, George Romero, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, etc. They all borrowed from previous sources and used what they took to create their own distinctive takes on things. They might have been better at it in our eyes than many of the directors who do the same today, but that's all only a matter of opinion really. Hell, many of them are most certainly guilty of the "nudge nudge, wink wink" cinephile references that many complain about today's films doing. Once again, while we might find their work superior to the current slate of things, such is not the case with most of today's younger generation. To them, the new generation of filmmakers are the geniuses of cinema. Wrong or right, who's the say, but again I don't feel I have the right to criticize their new heroes for doing the exact same things that my own cinematic heroes have done (and still are, to a certain degree).

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."

That line always and will always ring true as far as I am concerned. Styles change, as do the faces making them, but in the end not much at all really changes within the horror genre overall (hell, in any genre). Fifteen to twenty years or so from now there will be a generation complaining about Saw being remade; how it is blasphemy and how it could never live up to the original. Mark my words, it'll happen!

But really (as far as I could tell), we weren't talking about horror movies being accepted. We were talking about whether they're actually any good. All of your points are very true; this shit has always gone on, and the fact that most film fans have terrible taste should come as a surprise to no one who takes movies seriously. But for me, the fact that this is nothing new does little to cut the nasty aftertaste of it all. And really, I'm not sure how any of your points relate to the central idea that horror fans regularly heap praise on mediocre to terrible product simply because it delivers on the most basic level, and sometimes only in a single category.

I think we can all agree a lot of the horror base has shitty taste, try reading a Fangoria as an adult(I love you Rue Morgue). If this is now coming as a surprise to you then I'd have to say you're all slow. My only advice to you all is try being more selective in what you consume, therefore should you run across crap it'll be easier to put it in the back of your mind. I went to see the first Saw film in theatres realized it was crap and didn't see the sequels, where's the difficulty in that? I'm certainly not going to write off the genre based on that.

Uh...I don't think anybody said any of those things. No, this isn't new, and I'm not surprised. But I think it tends to get overlooked, and it's worth discussing. And really, I don't think it's just the bottom-dwellers who are guilty of it. A lot of very intelligent film geeks who happen to like horror make way too many allowances.

"You get it, you just can't handle it." (bonus points if you can ID the quote)

Seriously, your post describes about a dozen indie horror sets I've been on. Right down to the high-fives. "We did what they did!"

I do see where you're coming from here. As I mentioned earlier, I'm guilty of much the same thing when it comes to kung fu movies; give me blistering fight choreography, and I'll overlook paper-thin characters. The difference, I think, is that the kung fu movie with blistering fight choreography is delivering on its most important element, and that's why I get to make excuses for it in other departments.

In the case of the Friday the 13th movies and Saw (and obviously, this is just my opinion), they don't deliver on their most basic and important element, to wit, being scary. Friday the 13th, in fact, has a lot to answer for in my view, as it severely damaged the reputation of the horror film for decades after by altering its base mission statement. From that moment on, the expectation for horror movies was not that they'd be frightening, but gory. Atmosphere, a sense of unease, a feeling of dread, all went out the window in favor of creative and bloody kills, preferably delivered very suddenly with a jump scare and a musical sting. The goal was not to scare the audience, but merely to gross them out.

In Stephen King's Danse Macabre (which I recommend every horror fan read, even though I disagree with a fair bit of it), he lays out a hierarchy of the horror author's goals, with terror being the best goal, horror being the lesser, and the gross-out at the bottom. To my mind, Friday the 13th set a precedent that had horror movies going straight to the gross-out almost exclusively. The slasher film boom that followed not only failed to be scary, but most of the time, failed to even try to be. It was felt that finding new ways to make the audience go "Eww" was enough.

So I guess the question I'm asking in my long-winded fashion is "What do we mean by delivering the goods?" To me, these movies fail their central mission statement of scaring me, disturbing me, or even making me uncomfortable. "That's gross", to me, isn't an acceptable reaction while watching one of these movies. A comedy with great performances, beautiful cinematography and fascinating characters fails as a film if it isn't funny. By the same token, ideally, a horror movie should be considered a complete failure if it isn't scary. I think that a horror movie that isn't scaring me is nearly as painful to watch as a comedy that isn't making me laugh. It doesn't matter how many buckets of blood are employed.

Speaking just for me, there was a time when I equated horror with gore, but I think that's because I came of age in the 80s, the golden era of the slasher film. So long as it had plentiful gore (and tits, too...can't forget the tits), I was pretty much satisfied, even if all the other elements pointed toward it being a terrible film. Then, as I started to go back and watch the classics that had come out slightly before my time, I realized that movies like The Haunting, The Shining, The Exorcist, Carnival of Souls, Halloween, and even Night of the Living Dead (to a much lesser extent than the others) all relied more on atmosphere to create a sense of dread, and I actually found many of these movies to be much more frightening than the vast majority of slasher flicks I had been watching up to that point.

Of course, I didn't start watching those movies until I was in my late teens, and some of them I didn't full appreciate until I was into my 20s. So it seems to me that it's a bit of a maturity thing. When you're younger, you watch all the shitty slasher films because it's the dangerous thing to do, seeing as how it upsets the establishment (in this case, parents, although mine were pretty okay with my horror viewing habits). As we get older, we tend to move away from that element of rebellious danger, and focus more on the more important aspects of horror films; the atmosphere, the craft, and all that. Unless of course, we're emotionally stunted, like the vast majority of fans who populate the Fango conventions. They just seem to focus only on the tits and gore, and as long as it's there, they're satisfied.

So I know I'm not really saying anything new here, but I do tend to believe it's a maturity thing. We can appreciate the slasher flicks or the dumb, gory romps for what they are, and can still have fun with them. Like Iggy said, if they're a solidly made film to boot, all the better. It's just that, at the end of the day, we realize that horror can be so much more, and are not really willing to settle for something that relies on gore in place of scares, and we are disappointed that the genre doesn't always live up to the potential that does exist.

Maturity is a factor, but there's a lot of 30-somethings walking around still seriously debating the merits of one slasher over another.

When I was a kid, I had this book:



It covered the silents to around Videodrome. It was fairly light analysis, but critically the book was spot-on (praising Texas Chain Saw Massacre as well as Peeping Tom and M). Just when home video was starting to take off, it told me what films to track down and why, what films were crap, and it gave me my first real appreciation of film history. With its context of 80 years worth of movies, it trained me to not just gobble up anything with gore the way a steady diet of Fangoria might have.

Great thread, and excellent post TS. Echoed my thoughts exactly.

I think this sort of highlights why the horror genre needs to be singled out as particularly lacking.

The philosophy of horror, to shock and frighten, happens to be more susceptible to appealing to the lowest common denominator, just on principle alone; usually coming across as porn for a mainstream audience. The horror genre seems unusually attracted to gimmicks, which is why it seems there are more sequels within the horror genre than in any other.

In addition, the expectations the audience has for a horror film contributes; we take it to be self evidence that in order to be shocked, and frightened, certain sacrifices have to be made, like the sacrifice of a moderately decent story, or a good plot. And for filmmakers, it's all too easy to take the short cut in affirming the philosophy of the horror film: the use of monsters, serial killers, ghosts, Richard Beltzer's face, etc.

This thread kind of highlights my disappointment in The Mist. I still enjoyed it, but a masterpiece it wasn't. It was still plagued by plot contrivances of the highest order (Andre Baugher choosing not to look at the tentacle, for example).

I realize there's a stigma to horror which contributes- for example when a horror movie straddles the line and gets tagged a horror film by another (socially acceptable) name (ie 'psychological thriller')- but I think most of the problem lies within the genre itself. Which is why I always found it ironic when people would complain about the lack of good Stephen King adaptations (besides his non horror stuff)- the stories ain't all that to begin with folks.

One of the frustrating things about Greg David's posts is that he doesn't have a solid knowledge of the history of the genre. Simply put, F13 didn't up the gore ante in any way - in fact, the original is less gory than many many many films that came before. What F13 did was upped the ante on the gimmick kill, which was very much a Tom Savini thing. F13 made it so that every kill had to be unique and interesting - you couldn't just stab somebody to death anymore, you had to pierce them from under the bed. To be fair, F13 didn't invent the gimmicky kill (and stole a number of them), but this is what it really added to the HALLOWEEN and giallo templates it was ripping off.

Second, the idea that horror movies have to be 'scary' is boring. I'm bored of this argument. As a grown man it's highly unlikely that things in a movie will really scare me, unless they're hitting on my own personal neuroses. If you are scared by vampires it's probable that you're retarded or 9. Unsettling, creepy, spooky - these are more realistic than 'scary.' I'd rather be weirded out after a movie than be somehow scared by it.

Third, there's nothing wrong with gore. I love gore. I'm living in Los Angeles meeting awesome filmmakers and writing about movies for a living because I fell in love with gore when I was a kid. Gore doesn't belong in every movie but there's nothing wrong with a good splatter film.

I didn't claim that Friday the 13th invented gore, or was the most gory film of all time in its day. But it certainly popularized it. The runaway success of that film meant that, in order to be competitive, horror movies had to put heavy emphasis on that. You're right to point out the "gimmick kill", which was a staple of the genre for years afterward.

And I'll admit that a film actually scaring me is a pretty rare occurrence at this point. I'll certainly settle for being disturbed or uneasy, and the films that manage to do that aren't always horror films. But I can at least recognize when a moment was an effectively scary one, even if it doesn't work on me personally. Mostly, I just appreciate the effort. So few horror films in the eighties actually tried to be scary that, despite the flood of horror movies at the time, it was actually a pretty frustrating time to be a fan of the genre.

I have nothing against gore either, unless it's an end unto itself. Sorry, but I just can't get behind that. I love Cronenberg's The Fly, and that's plenty nasty. But it has other things to offer. It's a complete package. And while a complete package is an uncommon thing (in any genre, really), having at least one or two other things to offer is nice. I just find the slasher film, which practically took over horror in the eighties, to be a creatively bankrupt sub-genre, popular only for the freak value.

No, I don't think I'm splitting hairs at all. When I am in the woods at night it isn't bears or wolves I'm creeped out by, it's slashers. People go on and on about how F13 isn't scary, but it's almost certainly imprinted itself on the brains of those who have watched it.

Seriously? You honestly are more afraid that there's a mask-wearing maniac in the woods gutting random passers-by with farming implements than native predators? I don't see it. You like to accuse me of using personal anecdotal evidence to support my case, but that sounds a lot like the same thing, doesn't it? Sorry, but I have no inherent fear of hideous mutant freaks murdering strangers in the woods for no readily apparent reason. And I doubt that these movies had any intention of either praying on that fear or inspiring one. They were competing to see who could work out the most combinations of unexpected weapon meeting prosthetic body part.

Isn't scary subjective anyway? If "People go on and on about how F13 isn't scary", then don't you have to accept that? Are you saying that they're lying? I'm not sure what your premise is here.

I'd like to boil the whole thing down to this: sometimes I want "steak" and other times I just want a "cheeseburger". I am well aware of the films within the horror genre (or any genre for that matter) that are actually good (at least in my opinion). The quality films that deliver on multiple levels and in multiple ways. The "steak" of the genre, if you will. It's always great and tastes delicious when you devour it, but things can get boring if that is all that you eat. So that is where the "cheeseburger" comes in. It might be a simpler, one-note food that isn't good for you at all........but I'll be damned if it doesn't taste good! While I prefer the steak, sometimes all I need is a little diversity in the form of a quick-fix "cheeseburger" of a horror movie. It might be unhealthy, but I love it just the same. Slasher movies (well, most of them anyway) are certainly one of the big "fast food" chains of the horror genre and I eat there often. I might be disappointed more often than not, but for some reason I just cannot help myself.

The point is, you praise what you love and we all love different things. Personally, I think Citizen Kane is very overrated. While I can see and definitely understand the sheer technical achievement of it, I find the film stale and boring. To me, it only delivers on a few levels and by that account it isn't worthy of the praise it receives in my eyes. Sorry, that's how I feel. On the flipside, I love Last Action Hero to death and I'll be damned if I ever apologize for it. It fully delivers on almost every level for me, making it a success and a good film in my eyes. I completely realize that my views on these two seem to be the complete opposite of most other people's, but does that make my opinions wrong? No, it doesn't.

The point is, in the end, it is really impossible to label what films are "good" and what ones are "bad" within the horror genre.............or any type of art in general. We all have different interests and tastes, so there is really no true right answer.

That said, I understand what some of you are getting at and I think it boils down to one other thing: we all love cinema (I'm assuming) and are constantly wanting to share our loving discoverings with one another. And we do that by praising the hell out of the films that we enjoy, be it as an entire package or only certain scenes. When that happens, people are bound to be disappointed if their own tastes don't match with those who are praising the project. It happens and there's really nothing that can be done about it. The best thing you can do is align yourself with fellow board members and journalists who share cinematic opinions that are close to your own.........and just go from there.

Oh god, not the steak and burgers metaphor again. Can we please agree to retire this for all time? This is the most tired argument in the film geek arsenal.

To plow through this once again: this has nothing to do with whether a movie is "good for you" or not. It's about whether it's well-made. Presumably, you don't like shitty cheeseburgers, and would prefer to have one that's made by somebody who actually knows how to make a cheeseburger.

The reason your argument doesn't work is that nobody here is saying that we don't like "fun" or "light" horror films. I just don't like incompetent ones, and I feel that horror fans have a tendency to forgive incompetence if there's enough gore or rubber monsters on screen.

So unless you tend to go to bad burger places and make excuses for the poor quality of the burger simply because it has plenty of meat and cheese, your comparison doesn't work.

It's often hard to tell the difference with some of these people. It's become so common for a horror fan to describe a poorly-made movie as "awesome" or "classic" that it's difficult to tell whether they're enjoying it on an ironic level (something I personally don't enjoy), or legitimately believe that it's good filmmaking. I feel that if you're appreciating the film in a way that involves having fun at its expense, then the film has failed at its purpose, and is therefore not "awesome" or "classic" in any way. But that's just me, apparently, because the default position among fans seems to oppose that thinking.

Fear is the lowest common denominator, for better or worse. A movie that is designed to elicit fear or horror is attempting to stimulate a more primal emotion than a comedy or drama might. Nothing wrong with that, nor with thinking that horror films are typically more simplistic than most other genres.

That might be the key to the whole thing right there. A lot of people, I suspect, watch horror movies to feel some kind of base reaction. One would hope that the reaction would be fear or terror or horror. But I would guess that for a lot of people, revulsion is acceptable, and they really don't see the difference.