Ok I know at the start of this I said I didn't like most horror and have then talked about the ones I do think are worth looking at, so I think it's time to take a quick look at why I don't really go for horror films as a general rule.
1. Predicitability
This is one of the key things, the vast majoirty of horror films I find very predictable. I think once you know the 'beats' of the genre it's fairly easy to tell when and where each 'scare' is going to occur. So those jump scares just pass on by, the shock reveal of the killer more often than not cruises on past without a care.
Far more than other films a horror film looks to keep it's audience off balance and on the edge of the seat so when they become so familiar half the film is already blown and then you're left with trying to find something to appreciate in the story or charactisation..and then you're really struggling.
The better entries can either subvert the typical pattern of the genre or use it to their advantage, for example Scream plays and subverts (gently)the norms of the genre but I find most (in particualr modern) horror films simply move from scare A to scare B to scare C.
2. They have nothing to say
That is to say the in most horror films once you look past the 'thrill' or the chasing and the killing or the fun of the spooking there is nothing else going on. No bigger themes to be developed or discussed just a group of teen and twenty somethings standing around waiting for the plot to happen.
Again it's the few that do have something else to them that are the better examples, like 'The Orphanage' with a focus on grief and isolation opening up the film to much more that just the spooky boy in the corner, it puts some meat on the bones so to say and it's the reason I really like 'The Orphanage' despite seeing where it was going to end about halfway through. On the flip side you'll struggle to find anything approaching a theme in the likes of 'Prom Night' Well, despite the curiours puritanical downer on sexual intercourse that the slasher genre appears to have adopted for some reason.
In other worlds they seem to be empty headed and if I'm going to watch something empty headed I'd rather watch a big dumb 'ol action film rather than something focusing on the suffering of people.
3. I have no interest in gore.
I really don't care how realistic wounding can be made look or how over the top it can be made to look. Show me a giant transformering robot as an effect, cool! Show me an oozing chest wound, meh. Can we move on to something intersting now?
And these days the focus seems to be increasingly on the gore with the likes of Saw and Hostel et al and I simply don't find that remotely intersting. Thank god for the reaction in the forms of more thoughful fare like The Others.
4. Franchise, franchise franchise
In no other genre are series milking quite so aggresivily, just look at the Halloween, Friday the 13th and Saw franchises to see it. Then wonder how these things go for so long once the law of dimishing returns really starts to bite and the cycles of stalk, slash and trap get repeated ad infintum, the same films essentially rehashed each time.
5. I don't enjoy watching people suffer.
Which is something that doesn't really need much explanation beyond the fact I will watch films where things are grim for people (like 21 Grams or Revolutionay Road) but these are films which are about so much more. I'm not saying all horror is specifically about suffering but it does form a large part of a lot of the genre and when combined with the genre's typical lack of deeper themes it just leaves you with a strange kind of voyerism which I don't enjoy.
So there you go, a brief look at why I don't enjoy or horror and why I think most of it is, well, rubbish. I do like the Scream series (well the first two at least) as they play with and reference cinematic conventions amusingly, the Final Destination films I've already covered and I've mentioned The Orphanage and The Others but beyond I don't think I own anything else you'd call an outright horror film (and already consider Final Destination as dark comedy).
Showing posts with label Horrifying. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Horrifying. Show all posts
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
Monday, 26 October 2009
Horror on film the readers digest version
Presenting a cool little website with amongst other things a potted history of the horror film. From The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) to The Descent (2005) and a rundown of some of cinema's scariest and most disturbing scenes which takes in a varied selection from the likes of Scream, Saw and Halloween to Great Expectations and (the brutal reality of) the likes of American History X and Irreversible.
Certainly worth a look
Certainly worth a look
Sunday, 25 October 2009
Friday, 23 October 2009
Wednesday, 21 October 2009
Horror Trailer Of The Day : All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
Featuring a breakout role for (probably) soon to be big thing Amber Heard a fairly standard teen slasher with a half decent twist in the tale
Monday, 12 October 2009
The Hardest of Hard Candies
Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson took a look at and deconstructed the slasher film with Scream in the mid nineties. The characters where cannily switched on to the conventions of the staple of the horror genre and the culprits played up media obsession with the influence of violence on young minds.
It was a breath of fresh air in a tired market but if you really want to see the stalker sub genre turned inside out and upside down then it's 2005's Hard Candy you want to see.
Director David Slade and writer Brian Neslon (who later teamed up for the entertaining 30 Days Of Night) bring to screen a tale of a young girl and the older man she meets through an Internet chat room. In the first third of the film we feel uncomfortable as we try to figure the man's true intentions (is it really what we think it is and hope it isn't?) and squirm at the girl's flirtations as she seemingly seems intent on plunging herself headfirst out of her depth.
But as things progress as the tension remains constant new questions emerge about the intentions of the two parties. Slowly but surely the tables are turned and, as cliche as it to say it, the hunter becomes the hunted.
Suddenly we find ourselves both rooting for the girl but strangely also empathising with the man (whose intentions are still unclear) as he is chased, terrorised and tortures. Yes Sidney Prescott may have fought back but she never tied the killer down and exacted such shocking revenge.
Most would probably baulk at calling the film a horror but this two hander with excellent central performances from Ellen Page (forget Juno, this is what put her on the map) and Jeff Kohlver starts out with an uncomfortable tension and then ratchets it up from there, not once letting let go with even the lighter moments laced with threat and a sense of foreboding.
It truly does invert the traditional roles of the slasher film and plays out the scenario intelligently enough to leave the audience unsure as to whose side they should be on. Highly recommend but be warned it is a tense experience and one sequence in particular goes far and beyond Reservoir Dogs' infamous ear cutting.
It was a breath of fresh air in a tired market but if you really want to see the stalker sub genre turned inside out and upside down then it's 2005's Hard Candy you want to see.
Director David Slade and writer Brian Neslon (who later teamed up for the entertaining 30 Days Of Night) bring to screen a tale of a young girl and the older man she meets through an Internet chat room. In the first third of the film we feel uncomfortable as we try to figure the man's true intentions (is it really what we think it is and hope it isn't?) and squirm at the girl's flirtations as she seemingly seems intent on plunging herself headfirst out of her depth.
But as things progress as the tension remains constant new questions emerge about the intentions of the two parties. Slowly but surely the tables are turned and, as cliche as it to say it, the hunter becomes the hunted.
Suddenly we find ourselves both rooting for the girl but strangely also empathising with the man (whose intentions are still unclear) as he is chased, terrorised and tortures. Yes Sidney Prescott may have fought back but she never tied the killer down and exacted such shocking revenge.
Most would probably baulk at calling the film a horror but this two hander with excellent central performances from Ellen Page (forget Juno, this is what put her on the map) and Jeff Kohlver starts out with an uncomfortable tension and then ratchets it up from there, not once letting let go with even the lighter moments laced with threat and a sense of foreboding.
It truly does invert the traditional roles of the slasher film and plays out the scenario intelligently enough to leave the audience unsure as to whose side they should be on. Highly recommend but be warned it is a tense experience and one sequence in particular goes far and beyond Reservoir Dogs' infamous ear cutting.
Sunday, 11 October 2009
Horror trailer of the day : Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Zack Synder's MTV update of the classic zombie film as mentioned in the article below
Time for the dead to stay dead?
This year George A Romero brings us the latest in his 'Dead' series with 'Survival Of The Dead' taking up events sometime after the period of Day Of The Dead it sees the efforts of a group of survivors to develop a cure for the epidemic.
Romero first found the limelight over forty years ago with Night Of The Living Dead (1968), the film was micro budgeted, starred and crewed mostly by friends of the director, was efficiently effective with it's thrills and arrived on the scene to take full advantage of the growing youthful audience that was on the look for more visceral entertainment.
What appeared to set the film apart from many of it's contemporaries was the subtext that appeared to be at work in the film. Ben, the male lead played by Duane Jones clashes with the other men trapped in the house with the survivors as to the best course of action, eventually coming out on top only to be cruelly and coldly shot day in the final moments of the film by a posse that assume him to be a zombie. His body is carried to a pyre as the film closes.
To put it bluntly the fact that Jones (as Ben) was a man of colour appears to open up the film to a whole line of questions and position of racial tension in the United State, those final scenes in particular would seem to agitate at underlying prejudices.
However when asked about Romero says that Jones was simply the best actor available to him at the time and he did not think about the racial angle when casting him. Now this doesn't necessarily undercut the themes at play here in and of itself, it would stay be fair to suggest Romero tailored the film to take advantage of what he had.
However Romero has gone on to say that even when people talk to him about the film to hims in terms of addressing racism he can't see it. That is to see the director of the film does not understand and indeed can not even perceive the reason why his film is still discussed at length to day and has not simply joined the massed ranks of similar efforts as Living Dead was by far from the first zombie film.
Romero's apparent lack of knowledge of the message seen by so many in his own film of course then calls into questions the sub-texts raised in his other following films, but has his career moved it appears he has clued into the fact that this is what gives his films strength and openly now discusses what he is trying to say with each one.
Failing to carve out a career away from the genre he'd done so much to popularise Romero returned to his apocalyptic world ten years later with Dawn Of The Day. Dawn sees a disparate group of survivors bunkered up within a shopping mall, at first he seems they have found the perfect environment to live out the horrors outside but as time goes on it becomes increasingly apparent that they have simply trapped themselves inside the beacon of consumerism.
Dawn is undoubtedly my favourite of the series. It is smartly written as it looks at the effects of (what is basically) imprisonment on a small cast of characters and does offer a critique of consumer culture and the mall life as we see the undead drawn to the mall as if by nature and watch as they shamble onto escalators as Muzak plays gently in the background. Significantly despite the desperation of the situation the film does end on a note of hope.
Day Of The Dead seven years later saw the series again return. This time things are bleaker than ever and this time we have the clash of science (in this case playing the role of diplomacy) versus the military situation. Once again the holocaust is used as a background onto which a human drama is hung as survivors clash over the best course of action and again the effects of long term isolation takes it's toll. A lot of the themes raised in Dawn are repeated in Day and the only significant difference between the two (aside the sub textual deliberations) is the addition of 'Bub' the zombie who is slowly learning to be a thinking person again.
The fact that Bub is on longer a straight forward unthinking monster helps the series to open some interesting moral questions and thoughts on how quickly a enemy can become less than human in times of conflict.
The next twenty years saw Romero struggle to make an impact away from his well known Dead series and so in returned to it 2005 with Land Of The Dead. The film is unremarkable and Romero's lack of progress in the intervening years is only highlighted by both the energetic verve and impact of Zack Synder's Dawn of the Dead reboot, the breathless unrelenting 28 Days Later and the witty eye for relateable detail of Shaun Of The Dead.
If not for Romero's name is highly likely that Land Of The Dead would have bypassed cinemas altogether. Romero again offers a critique of modern society identifying a rich and poor divide with a 'Bush' like corrupt figure in charge, this time it is clumsily handled as a theme, not the subtly of Dawn here, but a point hammered home.
Elsewhere the film feels more like a entry in the Resident Evil series rather than the shambling inevitable horror of the earlier entries. More action thriller than anything else. And don't get me started on how or why a apparently professional armed force is overrun by unarmed zombies that can't even run within seconds towards the end of the film.
Fair enough things can get out of control when you are totally surrounded by them but when the zombies advance slowly on your fortified positions I'm not quite sure how that supposed goes so wrong so quickly.
So,thus far I'd saw Dawn is my favourite of Romero's series followed by Night (which is still effective despite the lack of insight) then Day (which recover much of Dawn's ground) and lastly Land (which is basically the same as every other forgettable action horror for gore generation).
Having decide to not even try making anything else anymore Romero's quickly returned with Diary Of The Dead. Picking up events near the start of the fall of mankind it follows a group of media students and it attempts to say something about the influence of the media and our interactions with it. However it seems the film doesn't know what it exactly it wants to say (Is the media good or bad? Is the web a useful tool for the masses or an instrument of control?) nor how to really say it (the film flirts with a 'Cloverfield'/'Blair Witch' style but fails to commit). Nor does it help that Romero seems to be getting left behind by the society he's trying to comment on with ham fisted voice overs from one of the characters implying that Romero does not really understand the Internet and how it works (there is definite confusion between downloading and uploading) let alone what it means to the world at large.
Sadly there is nothing in the film itself to save it from the mishandled and heavy handed message, much like Kevin Smith Romero is a film maker when relies on what he has to say rather than on the ability on being able to present what he has to say in an interesting or imaginative way. In other words he's a competent filmmaker that no longer has anything interesting or relevant to say.
Just to make it clear I thought Diary Of The Dead was terrible and I really thing it's time for 'ol George to put down the megaphone and let the kids get on with it. I will not be surprised if Survival of the Dead does goes straight to DVD as Romero becomes increasingly irrelevant.
His Dawn of the Dead will remain a classic and Night will be remembered for so effectively laying down so many of the modern zombie film rules even if it's more interesting aspects appears to have been a happy accident. But it has to be said the George Romero has been recovering old ground since Day of the Dead and the journey is getting less effective and less interesting everytime.
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
Horror trailer of the day : Alien
The first, the best, the scariest. The original feature trialer for Alien is itself haunting and coldly effective like the very film it advertises.
Anyone who tells you Aliens is better is wrong. Up next a ramble and a rant about George A Romero and his 'Dead' series of films; which is taking longer to put together than I thought (partly due to Stargate : Bigby, as I shall be calling it, starting today with a double salvo)
Anyone who tells you Aliens is better is wrong. Up next a ramble and a rant about George A Romero and his 'Dead' series of films; which is taking longer to put together than I thought (partly due to Stargate : Bigby, as I shall be calling it, starting today with a double salvo)
Monday, 5 October 2009
Horror trailer of the day : Funny Games (2007)
It's Michael Haneke's english laguage update of his own film, based on the tale of couple taken hostage by a pair of psychotic young men it takes this basic horror premise and uses it to ask questions on our modern relationship with violence, it doesn't really manage to answer them and the final reel twist is a divider of audencies. It's also certainly not an easy film to watch and is basically shot for shot the same as the first version.
Death, strange sense of humour.
Ok, I admit it I'm going to kick this thing off properly with something that seems to be the very pinnacle of what I don't like about horror films, but hear me out.
First off all the Final Destination series barely counts as horror for me. It's much closer to some kind of dark hearted comedy. With each installment built on the premise that some people escape death via a precognitive vision but are then offed one by one by the spirit of death itself what we get is basically a series of slap stick set pieces as filtered through something of a Grimm Fairytales lens.
The brainchild of X-Files luminaries Glen Morgan and James Wong the original film sees a bunch of high school kids thrown off a play minutes before it explodes in mid air. The first real indication of some sly smarts at play comes when we as the audience seen the plane explode in back of shot whilst the characters argue about being on it in the foreground with a beautiful second or so of delay before the window shatters.
A month later and people start dying in strange accidents, strangely convoluted and over intricate accidents. And there lies the joy, once it becomes obviously evitable that the majority of the cast are doomed it's a case sitting back and trying to guess exactly how there are to meet their ends.
Each major sequence cunningly offers up a number of potential hazards that could do the deed before normally managing to combine them all into some kind of mouse trap like dominoes effect of death.
Following installments basically change the cast but keep the formula with little effort to build any unnecessary mythos around the events. Now I normally don't like films that are all about horrible deaths and awful pain, but the Final Destination series takes these tools and plays it for laughs and more importantly does ask uys to revel in the suffering of others. Once they come the deaths are quick and then it's off and on to the next one, no prolonged scenes of torture to be found. (Though I admit the first salvo of the third feel does freak me out)
Pretty much the cinema equivalent of the Ghost Train at the fair or the rollercoaster the films pitch the audience this way and that but we all know what is coming. A bit like Tom and Jerry cartoons rendered real. These film know exactly what they are and run with it, upping the ante to daftly deadly highs. Most will find they are remotely horrified but do end up with grins on their faces as they chortle in disbelief.
Reveal in the comedic violent excess with Empire's list of the ten best deaths from the series, though it will spoil the wicked surprise if you haven't seen them
First off all the Final Destination series barely counts as horror for me. It's much closer to some kind of dark hearted comedy. With each installment built on the premise that some people escape death via a precognitive vision but are then offed one by one by the spirit of death itself what we get is basically a series of slap stick set pieces as filtered through something of a Grimm Fairytales lens.
The brainchild of X-Files luminaries Glen Morgan and James Wong the original film sees a bunch of high school kids thrown off a play minutes before it explodes in mid air. The first real indication of some sly smarts at play comes when we as the audience seen the plane explode in back of shot whilst the characters argue about being on it in the foreground with a beautiful second or so of delay before the window shatters.
A month later and people start dying in strange accidents, strangely convoluted and over intricate accidents. And there lies the joy, once it becomes obviously evitable that the majority of the cast are doomed it's a case sitting back and trying to guess exactly how there are to meet their ends.
Each major sequence cunningly offers up a number of potential hazards that could do the deed before normally managing to combine them all into some kind of mouse trap like dominoes effect of death.
Following installments basically change the cast but keep the formula with little effort to build any unnecessary mythos around the events. Now I normally don't like films that are all about horrible deaths and awful pain, but the Final Destination series takes these tools and plays it for laughs and more importantly does ask uys to revel in the suffering of others. Once they come the deaths are quick and then it's off and on to the next one, no prolonged scenes of torture to be found. (Though I admit the first salvo of the third feel does freak me out)
Pretty much the cinema equivalent of the Ghost Train at the fair or the rollercoaster the films pitch the audience this way and that but we all know what is coming. A bit like Tom and Jerry cartoons rendered real. These film know exactly what they are and run with it, upping the ante to daftly deadly highs. Most will find they are remotely horrified but do end up with grins on their faces as they chortle in disbelief.
Reveal in the comedic violent excess with Empire's list of the ten best deaths from the series, though it will spoil the wicked surprise if you haven't seen them
Sunday, 4 October 2009
Eek! Halloween is a-coming
Seeing as this is the month of Halloween I figure I'll spend time over the coming days looking at, thinking about and talking about horror films. Horror as a general is genre that rarely interests me, the vast majority of it seems to be witless, soulless and craftless.
However I do find the odd film that does hold something to it other than large chested teenagers (and those can be guys or girls!) being stalked by a unstoppable maniac. So we'll be taking a look at some of those this month, alongside I imagine a couple of rants about the crappier end of the scale. I will also do my best to seek out and recommend some horror films that you may not have come across before and/or which I would actually go as far as to actually say they are good film.
Anyway a quick start with a look at a French film from last year, a first time effort for the director and writer it has picked strong buzz from the festival circuit and plays on some primal fears and motivations. Seems Europe is still full of twisted and scary things...
However I do find the odd film that does hold something to it other than large chested teenagers (and those can be guys or girls!) being stalked by a unstoppable maniac. So we'll be taking a look at some of those this month, alongside I imagine a couple of rants about the crappier end of the scale. I will also do my best to seek out and recommend some horror films that you may not have come across before and/or which I would actually go as far as to actually say they are good film.
Anyway a quick start with a look at a French film from last year, a first time effort for the director and writer it has picked strong buzz from the festival circuit and plays on some primal fears and motivations. Seems Europe is still full of twisted and scary things...
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