The weather is getting just a little bit colder, the pumpkin spice latte has returned to Starbucks, and Spirit stores have reclaimed their seasonal homes in empty warehouses across the nation. This can only mean one thing: Halloween is coming.
For some of us too old (or too self-conscious) to trick-or-treat, the days leading up to Halloween are used to visit the local pumpkin patch or even a nearby haunted house. But for others, the activity most synonymous with this holiday is watching scary movies.
I happen to fall into the second group of people, so by the third week of October, I have already seen all the scary movies my local movie theatre has to offer. But before I turned my sights to the nearby video store, I wanted to do some investigating. Using my go-to source for instant information, the Internet, I decided to check out what others thought were top choices when it came to horror flicks.
Everyone has a different opinion of what’s scary, and that’s probably why so many people disagree on what the best scary movies are. So when I used Google to search “greatest scary movies of all time,” it came as no surprise to me that none of the lists I came across were the same. They did have one thing in common, though. None of the movies listed were made in the last seven years, and if they were, they weren’t made in Hollywood.
So has Hollywood just run out of ideas, or is there just no material left to scare an American audience anymore?
Director George Romero’s 1978 film “Dawn of the Dead” was banned in 17 countries when it first came out. After being berated for excessive violence, Romero submitted multiple cuts of the film until it finally passed with an “R” rating in 1980. Show the 1978 version of the film to any American audience, and while it would agree the film is a classic, I doubt they’d be impressed, or at the very least shocked, by the “excessive violence.”
In 2010, we’ve pretty much seen it all. No amount of blood is too gory, no chainsaw-carrying madman too violent, and no possessed child too demonic for us.
Perhaps that’s why instead of introducing new plots in scary movies, Hollywood has taken to reusing old ones, and often quite unsuccessfully. How many sequels to “Halloween,” “Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Friday the 13th,” or “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” do we really need? It would be one thing if the sequels, or even the prequels, were close to being as good as the originals, but they never are.
When thinking of a scary movie, you might picture some form of demonic possession, a haunted house, supernatural forces, zombies or a deranged serial killer. It seems that’s what movie producers think of too, because every scary movie coming out of Hollywood is using these same kinds of scenarios and characters, basically recreating the same plots as movies that were released years ago.
Scary movies may be somewhat limited to using the same elements, but they certainly shouldn’t be limited in how they use them.
When “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” is put on the list of scariest movies of all time instead of the dozens of other movies put out each year, you know there’s a problem.
Whether you agree that certain movies deserve to make it on these lists probably depends on what you think makes a good scary movie.
Writer Del Stone Jr. used three criteria when making his top-10 list for his Salon magazine blog, and they make a pretty fair argument for what can make the difference between a good scary movie and a great one. Stone suggests asking yourself three things: Was the movie talked about?? Did it kick-start a genre? Did it scare the hell out of me?
Think about it. When was the last time you could say a movie did all three of those things?
The “Blair Witch Project” was the first movie that came to mind. This 1999 film has recently sparked a whole new genre of horror movies — the fake documentary (think “Paranormal Activity” or the recently released “Catfish”). These movies document the story of ordinary individuals who, somehow, find themselves in strange yet completely plausible situations — at least the way they’re set up to be in the films.
What makes these movies so terrifying is that they straddle the line between reality and fiction, placing the importance not just on the plot of the story but in the possibility of it being true. If we’re watching a film presented as a documentary, then we no longer have the security of being able to say to ourselves “it’s just a movie.”
The fake documentary may be the one thing Hollywood has done right with recent scary movies. Let’s just hope movie producers explore some new ways to make horror films, too. Otherwise, our kids will be watching “Paranormal Activity 6.”
With all the scary movies being produced lately, Hollywood seems to be giving “Boo!” a whole new meaning.
Send horrific ideas to jrstone3@asu.edu
