Why Some Say The Horror Genre is Dying
Recently I read an article in the a Newark Film Examiner by Mark Jones who makes a very convincing argument explaining his reasons why he feels that the horror genre is dying. After carefully reading that article as well as a great rebuttal that popped up over at Dread Central, I think that now would be a good time to throw in my two cents about the question at hand. Let’s start with an answer to the main question.
Q: Is the horror genre dead?
- A: No
That was my quick response; however I feel that the question being raised in Mark Jones’ article is a little more detailed than that.
Q: Is the marketing and distribution of horror movies by major studios, which turn around overtly grisly and horrific films for a small amount of money and a large return, but are of varying degrees of quality dead?
- A: no.
Allow me to elaborate.
To people that aren’t avid fans of the genre, their opinion of horror is what they see in their multiplexes as they flock to see the latest romcom situationally bland adventure of misunderstandings and random coincidences who all try really hard to be “It Happened One Night”. They see commercials for some movie by the guy who directed Spiderman. They see a poster for some movie directed by the guy from White Zombie, who they know is messed up because he has dreads and his music is loud. Maybe it’s just an ad that clearly sounds and looks like a horror movie, but has a picture of a hot girl on the front of the cover. They do not live on the same plain of genre recognition that the avid fans do.
Having said that, finding the gems in the horror genre that stand out from the pack is a job in and of itself. It’s like going to an art museum and only looking at the impressionist pieces. You spend all day listening to music on your iPod, sitting on a bench, and really taking in everything the work in question has to offer. The problem is that there are a whole lot of other exhibits all over the museum that are beautiful in their own right but you may ignore or glace over that day because after a brief look or read in the museum map, you don’t think that it would really interest you. Think about the good new horror films as the little area in the museum with the miniatures in them. They are harder to see and easy to miss, but their beauty is still there in spades. You just have to make the effort. So why don’t I drop in a synopsis from the museum’s website about how you need to make the effort to find beauty while I’m at it here.
Mainstream horror genre films haven’t gone away at all. You still have films like Saw, The Unborn, The Uninvited, Halloween 2, Piranha, and a slew of others that get released annually. Some of these films actually turn out to be good horror movies that obtain an avid fan base and do extremely well. Most others are put out in order to make a killing off of bored high school teens on their opening weekend. This is a method that was entirely different 20-30 years ago. Think back in the days of A Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th (the 80s). Those franchises all had installments that were shot on the cheap, comparatively grossed a lot of money, and also garnered an avid fan base. Throw in the Halloween franchise and you have three film series pumping out sequels that the fans couldn’t get enough of. This trend stumbled into the cultural consciousness and sooner than later, Freddy and Jason were seen all over MTV and other youth oriented events. You couldn’t find a person in the country that didn’t know who these icons were.
Simply put, it isn’t like that anymore.
Now a days, the sequel and slasher happy days of the 80s have been replaced by the remake, which is essentially a (lazy?) way to capitalize monetarily on the work that someone did years ago with building a fan base. This isn’t going to become an argument about how remakes nowadays are abundant and terrible; it’s just going to say that this is how it is now. This is the popular trend and people are sick of it. Of course, it doesn’t matter that people are sick of it as long as the money is made, so in turn we have to look other places for legitimately good horror movies.
For example, let’s hop on the horror cruise and take a trip to where the terror appears fresh and disgusting. Films from across the Atlantic such as The Signal, Let the Right One In, Descent, Inside, High Tension, and Martyrs would easily be added to some of the best genre films of the last five years. I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone drop any of those in their top five of the last 10 years honestly. You know what they all have in common? They aren’t a part of the Hollywood studio system. They are films that took chances and tried to can a three and not go in for the easy layup (that’s a basketball reference). They are the future of the genre. Not to say we don’t get any good domestic horror films though such as All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Splinter, or Teeth just not as many.
I’m not here to bash anyone’s opinions. Mark Jones wrote a great article with a number of good points and that is entirely his opinion in which he is entitled too. I do agree that from where he may be sitting, the horror genre looks like a dying monster. The truth is though it isn’t, horror will never go away, it will never falter, and it will never be outlawed. There are too many fans of the genre that will stay up all kinds of hours in order to find that one good horror flick out of ten strictly out of dedication. Web sites like this one exist in order to bring every fan of the genre together to give them a place to seriously discuss merits of horror films, their opinions on recent and classic films, as we as a place where we just feel at home. I guess what I may be trying to say is that if the horror genre is dying, then I’ll be on the boats deck playing my drum kit as it goes down. Because I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
