Why is the horror genre so completely and utterly shit?

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I also gave Session 9 a watch recently. The fact that I watched it in ten minute segments on Youtube and in the wrong aspect ratio marred my appreciation of it somewhat, but it showed admirable commitment to creeping psychological chills and atmosphere.

I wonder if Scorsese had been watching it prior to making Shutter Island.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

*Proudly stands up to be counted.* I despise it in every way. I especially hate it for being so shit all the way through, but still getting me hepped up and involved in the very last few moments, against my will. But it's just appalling.

Here me and Jemble Fred are in agreement. Humourless torturing of people isn't fun, sorry. And yes, I do find funny torture funny.

[SavageHedgehog]

I'm not sure it was humourless, but I agree it wasn't very good.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

There appears to be a Finnish film about finding an old gnarled Santa in the woods. I can't work out whether it's supposed to be horror or what. The trailer was quite funny.

[lipsink]

There appears to be a Finnish film about finding an old gnarled Santa in the woods. I can't work out whether it's supposed to be horror or what. The trailer was quite funny.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Saw it at the weekend and it's not really a full-on horror but a kind of twisted Burton/Gilliam-esque fairytale.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

The trailer was really confusing and I couldn't work out whether Rare Exports was the name of the film company or the film. Then 'A Christmas Tale' appeared. Then Rare Exports re-appeared. Hmm.

It looked truly weird.

[lipsink]

Yeah, it's a prequel to an apparently very popular YouTube short film called Rare Exports Inc (which I haven't seen) so it has that name as sort of part of a franchise. I thought when I saw it on the cinema listing it meant the film was a rare export. Worth seeing anyway.

[Jemble Fred]

I'm a sucker for any movie looking at twisted versions of mythological figures, so I'm quite looking forward to it, myself. I just hope it's been very carefully thought through...

[lipsink]

The Loved Ones.

Watch it, tis wonderful.

Thanks for the recommendation. It is indeed brilliant and quite bonkers. Has anyone seen May? I only heard about it through The Loved Ones and it's definitely worth a watch. Not all on YouTube, sadly but I managed to find it through Google.

[AsparagusTrevor]

Is May the one with the nerdy kid who

Spoiler alert

makes a friend out of other girls

[close]

?
Watched it a good few years ago, quite creepy.

[lipsink]

Is May the one with the nerdy kid who

Spoiler alert

makes a friend out of other girls

[close]

?
Watched it a good few years ago, quite creepy.

That's the one.

Spoiler alert

I found the ending weirdly touching.

[close]

The main girl in it seems to have played quite a few freaky messed up girls (she played the title role in the Carrie remake).

[AsparagusTrevor]

Recently in Dexter too, playing a rape victim with an extreme case of stockholm syndrome.

[Dark Sky]

My caveat re: this post is that I'm a huge horror fan and love all horror...even the stuff which is admittedly terrible in every way.

I'm not saying that all modern horror films are rubbish, there are quite a few worth watching, but quite frankly I can't be bothered watching the same uninspired group of kids go somewhere and bad shit happens thing that's already been parodied to no lasting effect or change. Nor do I really want to watch gratuitous gore-fests like Hostel that revel in being as unpleasant as possible- (the best thing about gore is when it's done with comic tastelessness, not when it's fetishised disturbingly).

This is just "old man" syndrome.  Yes, yes, back in the day they knew how to make decent films, yes, classics, they were!  None of this rubbish stuff!  Oh no!

You're forgetting that you're seeing everything through a filter.  For every classic which has survived and is remembered forever, there's a hundred copycat films, cheaply made to earn a quick buck at the time, then forgotten for being bland and unmemorable.  It's true of every genre, of every medium.  "Decent" horror films are around, but it depends on what you like, and how hard you're looking for it.  And what you class as "horror".

I had a friend at uni who was a huge film fan except he hated horror films.  Which seems ridiculous to me...  How can a film fan dislike the one genre which relies the most on being completely and purely cinematic, built up out of sound, visuals, and editing?  And he was insane...he loved Alien, yet refused to acknowledge that it was in any way a horror film. 

Horror is an underappreciated genre, I think, because it requires effort from an audience.  If you deny yourself the experience, you can stop yourself from being scared by it, and then come out the cinema going, "IT WAS AWFUL WASN'T EVEN A BIT SCARY".  Also, just like humour, there's different types of horror which will work for you.  Personally I find most effective the psychological ghostly stuff of Blair Witch, Ghostwatch, My Little Eye, Paranormal Activity, etc, works to make me scared...yet for other people this type of horror doesn't do anything for them.  And I've found that if they hate one of those films listed above, they're more likely to hate all of them.  And vice versa.

I also hate people ribbing on the Saw series, which is an absolute landmark in horror cinema, or just cinema generally...  Seven films, one a year, with a reasonably consistent record for quality?  (No, really...  Compare to the Halloween or Elm Street or Friday series...  The quality of those goes up and down and back and forth and it's just madness.  The Saw films are by comparison, a very solid, consistent body of work.)  And the whole "torture porn" thing is ridiculous because it gets attributed to the wrong films.  And it happened all before, much worse, in the seventies, anyway...  Last House On The Left makes entertainment out of people in utter misery and jeopardy.  And yet everyone accuses Hostel of being torture porn!  Which is ridiculous!  Hostel isn't even gory, and has a delicious black comedy edge to everything (thanks to script doctoring by Quentin Tarantino and Evil Dead 2 writer Scott Spiegel).  It's a fun film with a sense of humour.  Yet everyone was taken in by the marketing!

I am literally just ranting now, completely off topic.

Second one is best by a million miles. Sure, the first one has the whole 'originality' thing, but the second film takes everything the first one did and does it better, and is a crazy tongue-in-cheek horror film with an awesome opening scene which made me wary of log-carrying lorries on the motorway ever since.

MARRY ME

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

You're forgetting that you're seeing everything through a filter.  For every classic which has survived and is remembered forever, there's a hundred copycat films, cheaply made to earn a quick buck at the time, then forgotten for being bland and unmemorable.

I'm aware of that, but it doesn't explain how there are lots of classic 70s horror films while you could maybe call a few at a push from the noughties classics. However, this may not be worth arguing with a caveat as big as you confess to have:

I'm a huge horror fan and love all horror...even the stuff which is admittedly terrible in every way.

[Dark Sky]

Hehe, maybe I am biased, but my point still stands.

I think the Final Destination films and Saw films will go down as "classics" from the 2000's.  I think Hostel will be remembered, as well as American Psycho, 28 Days Later, REC, and Repo: The Genetic Opera, and Teeth, and Let The Right One In, and Let Me In, and Paranormal Activity, and the US The Ring, and Cloverfield, and the original Dark Water, and Shaun of the Dead, and Silent Hill, and Drag Me To Hell, and Slither, and House of a Thousand Corpses, and The Devil's Rejects, and Severence, and Creep, and Switchblade Romance, and The Orphanage, and The Devil's Backbone, and The Descent, and the remake of Dawn of the Dead.

And that's not mentioning the indie gems which never became big, like My Little Eye, or Home Movie, or Open Water, or TV series like Dead Set.

I'm just trying to think of films which I know are more universally regarded as being "good", or else have done well at the box office.  The list doesn't include other copycat films I may love, but which probably won't necessarily be thought of as stand out films from the 2000's...such as Freddy vs Jason (though it should be remembered 'cause it's BRILL).

[Famous Mortimer]

Hehe, maybe I am biased, but my point still stands.

I think the Final Destination films and Saw films will go down as "classics" from the 2000's.  I think Hostel will be remembered, as well as American Psycho...Drag Me To Hell...House of a Thousand Corpses, and The Devil's Rejects...Creep...The Descent, and the remake of Dawn of the Dead.

If the Final Destination and Saw films aren't seen as "classics" now, why do you think the future will be any kinder to them? The rest of them I very much doubt will be remembered in any other way than "weren't those films quite shit?"

(Re: American Psycho, I only don't like it because it's much more obvious in the film whether Bateman actually did the murders or not, compared to the book, and the film suffers as a result. Bale is great in it though)

[Dark Sky]

If the Final Destination and Saw films aren't seen as "classics" now, why do you think the future will be any kinder to them?

Well...some people see them as "classics"!  But really it's because they're hugely popular.  Popular stuff tends to be remembered, irregardless of quality.  We'll see, I guess.  They certainly have a huge number of fans.

The rest of them I very much doubt will be remembered in any other way than "weren't those films quite shit?"

As for the rest of them, if you honestly can't see anything to like about American Psycho, Drag Me To Hell, or Creep, then you might as well just give up now.  Go on.  Give up.  GIVE UP.  Whatever it is you do, GIVE UP IT'S NOT WORTH IT ANY MORE

Bale is great in it though

Yes, yes he is.  If he'd only ever made American Psycho and Empire of the Sun, I'd say he was probably one of my favourite actors.  Sadly, he's been in a lot of awful films where he's been absolutely awful.

[AsparagusTrevor]

We were saturated with Baleness at one point too, he just seemed to be in every new film that came out.

[SavageHedgehog]

Well...some people see them as "classics"!  But really it's because they're hugely popular.  Popular stuff tends to be remembered, irregardless of quality.  We'll see, I guess.  They certainly have a huge number of fans.

I think the Saw films will have a fairly long life, in the same way a lot of teenagers still check out all the Elm Street, Halloween and Friday the 13th films these days, even though most people know most of them aren't that good. I don't think the Final Destination films will enjoy quite the same level of luxury because they don't have the same kind of unity as a series; they are the Amityville Horror  or House of their day.

[Famous Mortimer]

As for the rest of them, if you honestly can't see anything to like about American Psycho, Drag Me To Hell, or Creep, then you might as well just give up now.  Go on.  Give up.  GIVE UP.  Whatever it is you do, GIVE UP IT'S NOT WORTH IT ANY MORE

To recreate the Drag Me To Hell experience, watch any episode of "Tales of the Unexpected". It'll be roughly on a par in terms of acting and plot, and will be shorter, giving you more time to watch something better. I think American Psycho's an excellent film, I just think it suffers a lot in comparison with the book, more so than a lot of other famous book-to-film adaptations I've seen.

[mcbpete]

Has anyone seen The Poughkeepsie Tapes? It's one of my favourite horror films of the past decade. Like Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity it has an interesting "realism" gimmick suited to low budget indie film-making but it really really works. Instead of being film-found-after-the-event like those two, it's a documentary about film-found-after-the-event.

Off the top of my head I don't think there's any graphic onscreen death but it succeeds in being very, very creepy. There's one definite shock moment and it works so well because they don't make a massive deal out of it, it's onscreen for only a few seconds. As the film is shot as a documentary it has interviews with FBI forensic psychologists and has an interesting spin on the approach used in Silence of the Lambs.

Oh and it's got the greatest post-credits shot ever.

Oh my, I 'obtained' this film based on this recommendation and I'd say it's probably the first horror film I've turned off half way through, not because of it being scary - but because it was so horrendously constructed. It was like it had no idea what angle it was going for - a straight 'mock'umentary, a glimpse into criminal investigation departments or a psychological horror. It was like the actors weren't briefed either - some going for a pseudo realistic delivery, some really hamming up every line and some just really not bothering at all. And as for the footage itself, for me this was the final nail in the coffin - cheap DV or super-8 camcorders (I'm not sure which they were aiming for) DO NOT LOOK LIKE THAT, putting the occasional horizontal-sync wobble and wildly spinning a hue-mapping filter at points does not mask the fact that it was filmed on a decent camera. It would've been far cheaper (and would've looked far better) to just buy a cheap old camera on ebay.

I mean the premise was good which is why I stuck with it for 40 minutes, but the direction, script

Spoiler alert

With the killer waiting out the house listening in: "Tim, do you ever get feelings, like feelings like somethings going to happen. It's weird, everythings been so good lately, everybody seems to be so happy and everythings like too good. I fell like something bad is going to happen" - Fuck the fuck off, no one speaks remotely like that in the real world

[close]

, and the technical details completely destroyed it for me.

[Dark Sky]

To recreate the Drag Me To Hell experience, watch any episode of "Tales of the Unexpected". It'll be roughly on a par in terms of acting and plot, and will be shorter, giving you more time to watch something better.

Oh come on!  Surely you must have been thrilled to see the first bit of proper Sam Raimi comedy horror since Army of Darkness?  They don't make films like Drag Me To Hell any more, and I'm so thrilled it exists...one of the absolute best horror cinema experiences I've ever had.

I think American Psycho's an excellent film, I just think it suffers a lot in comparison with the book, more so than a lot of other famous book-to-film adaptations I've seen.

I saw the movie for the first time pretty soon after reading the book, and was amazed by how they managed to simplify a cohesive plot out of the book and yet still manage to capture the spirit and tone of it so well.  I think it is a very, very good adaptation, despite it not capturing the language of the book.  (By comparison, Roger Avery managed to capture Bret Ellis' language brilliantly in his adaptation of Rules of Attraction!  Sadly it isn't that good a film.)  I dunno, I really love the American Psycho movie.  I think it's suave and elegant, and Mary Harron manages to capture scenes of horrific violence against women without it seeming misogynistic...an accusation which could have been labelled (perhaps unfairly) on a straight male director.  I also adore the score by John Cale, and just the fact that Harron achieves so much style on a very low budget.  Eighties Doctor Who could afford helicopters; American Psycho can afford a light shining through a window and a sound effect!

Sure, the ending is more clear cut compared to the confusing, meandering novel (not a criticism, I adore my ol' pal Bretty boy's work!) but I think that in and of itself it is a great movie, and stands up as a very good version of the novel.  Obviously there's a million ways you could film that book; Harron captured the view of it in my mind very well.  Hence my love for it!

[SavageHedgehog]

I really wanted to love Drag Me to Hell but I felt it was a little flat; it reminded me of an Elm Street sequel in the sense that it felt like a bunch of occasionally inspired set pieces rather than a truly griping whole

[eluc55]

Just to say that American Psycho is my favourite film ever, and I'm one of the few who seems to thinks the films better than the book, even if the end is admittedly less ambiguous.

Seriously, I fucking love that film.

All of Ellis' novels have been served well by cinema actually. Even Less than Zero's pretty good.

[lipsink]

Just to say that American Psycho is my favourite film ever, and I'm one of the few who seems to thinks the films better than the book, even if the end is admittedly less ambiguous.

Christian Bale is absolutely brilliant in that film. Wasn't Leonardo DiCaprio originally going to play Bateman? That sounded horrible a few years ago but actually now he's done much better work you could imagine him doing quite a good Bateman (if he did some working out).

[Dark Sky]

Christian Bale is absolutely brilliant in that film. Wasn't Leonardo DiCaprio originally going to play Bateman? That sounded horrible a few years ago but actually now he's done much better work you could imagine him doing quite a good Bateman (if he did some working out).

He could have pulled it off, but it's hard to know, really.  Mary Harron quit the project when the studio got DiCaprio on board...I think he felt it wasn't right for him so walked, and Harron came back with her first choice: Bale.

I haven't seen the movie of Less Than Zero but I'd be intrigued to.

[eluc55]

He could have pulled it off, but it's hard to know, really.  Mary Harron quit the project when the studio got DiCaprio on board...I think he felt it wasn't right for him so walked, and Harron came back with her first choice: Bale.

I haven't seen the movie of Less Than Zero but I'd be intrigued to.

I've only seen it once, and that was several years ago. But I do remember thinking it was very good at the time, albeit not as engaging as the two other Ellis films you mentioned. It's given extra resonance by the casting of Robert Downey Jr, and there are several scenes - ending included - that stay with you a long while after. Must watch that again, really.

Isn't Lunar Park meant to be getting made into a film? God knows how they'll do it, but a film about a writer being stalked by his own fictional serial killer could be fantastic if they stick to their guns and make that serial killer Bateman (specifically looking like Bale in the book) . 

[Dark Sky]

It would be amazing if Bale played Bret Ellis and the stalking Bateman personification, though that probably won't happen.  Avary tried to get Bale to do a cameo as Bateman in Rules of Attraction, but he refused.  He then tried to get Bret Ellis to do it, who also refused...

Have you read Imperial Bedrooms?  A sequel to both film and book of Less Than Zero, though you wonder why he bothered.  First book by Ellis I've really disliked.  Though it was hard not to read it without thinking of how I'd seen him give a talk recently where he acted like a bored, petulant child, then hung around with him for half an hour afterwards as he signed copies of the book where he just came across as a bit sad and desperate, flirting shamelessly with any attractive male fans.  Depressing.

[Vitalstatistix]

For my money Ellis fell off half way through Glamorama and hasn't written anything decent since..

I love the American Psycho adaptation, the Rules of Attraction one has some great bits but isn't a great whole, whilst Less Than Zero is a fun if slightly dated film which is hugely different from the book.

[eluc55]

It would be amazing if Bale played Bret Ellis and the stalking Bateman personification, though that probably won't happen.  Avary tried to get Bale to do a cameo as Bateman in Rules of Attraction, but he refused.  He then tried to get Bret Ellis to do it, who also refused...

There is a wierd deleted scene from the film (ROA), though, where Sean picks up the phone and assumes its Patrick prank calling him. Its a bit naff, but I thought I'd mention it, in case you haven't seen the DVD.