WTF happened to horror movies?
No the "Saw" series doesn't count. That's just grotesque torture porn. Some images don't need to be seen and unfortunately can't be unseen.
Now seeing half naked teenages disemboweled with a machete the length of your arm...that's just good clean fun.
It seems to me that a lot of horror movies aren't trying to be scary anymore. What happened to the tension and the stalking that the unseen killer created? Just because you know who the killer is and what he's going to do to those unassuming teenagers doesn't mean that it's not scary.
The horror genre has turned into a Faces of Death shock fest...thanks Rob Zombie. Next time you feel like making a movie like "House of 1000 Corpses" pick your guitar back up and write another song...please...for the love of God and all that is actually scary in movies.
Now I won't deny that some of our classic monsters from the slasher movies of the 80's needed a reboot.
Certainly Jason's story had gone way too far and by the 5th or 6th movie was just a joke and not really scary anymore. I really don't think you can say that same for Freddy and Micheal Myers though.
I think the last decent slasher flick I've seen in a long time was the first Scream movie. It had all the classic tenants covered and was fairly enjoyable to watch....especially that first scene where Drew Barrymore was hanging in the tree. That brought back some classic Jason memories.
They may have been bloody and gory but they were cartoonish in that respect. Blood simply doesn't shoot out of a severed head like a water fountain in Vegas. The gore is hard to believe in these movies...unlike today's Hostel and Saw movies.
We did have that string of interesting Asian horror though...I really enjoyed both The Ring and The Ring 2. Both were super creepy and a hell of a lot of fun to watch. Those movies served to broaden my horizons in the horror genre. Still some crazy supernatural killer but the little girls had a little extra weirdness that Freddy could never match. And then they made The Grudge...which just didn't have the same level of creepiness to me. Maybe it's because I expected Buffy to karate chop the little ghost child in that one.
And last but certainly not least we have the zombie movies. We've had quite a few of them the last few years....some comedies, others absolutely terrifying. I personally loved the remakes of Dawn of the Dead and Land of the Dead. I also really enjoyed The Crazies. Romero is just the master of zombie movies and I can't think of a single movie he's been associated with that I didn't love. Oh and lets not forget 28 Days Later...what a great movie. Too bad its sequel was so terrible...I guess we can't win them all.
All of these great movies in the last 10 years and not one of them was as successful as these "Saw" movies...have we really become blood thirsty psychopaths? Are we simply entertained by the shedding of blood? Can't we watch the news and see enough of that? What's scary about a person falling into a pit of used needles?
It's gross...not so much scary though.
Now a giant guy you can't kill in a hockey mask...that's TERRIFYING.
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