When I was a kid, my dad watched horror movies all the time.  They were really a second love for him.  In fact, in the last years of his life as he took an interest in film-making, he created a feature-length horror film along with two shorts for the Indianapolis 48 Hour Film Fest.  One was really more of a “thriller” and involved a hypnotist erasing the memories of passers-by who witnessed him murder his wife, and the second was sort of a comedy-horror about a man trying to get a refund from the funeral parlor because his dead uncle rose as a zombie.  (I’ll put links to these at the end).  He was in the pre-production stages of another horror movie when the chemo made him too sick to travel for production meetings and location scouting, and he sadly never got back to it before he passed.

In turn, my first full-length novel is a horror story of sorts.  Well, it’s really more urban fantasy, but its roots are in horror flicks.  Like my father, I’m a big fan of horror flicks.  Unfortunately, horror is kind of dead right now.  There’s a lot to be deconstructed out of horror movies when my dad was growing up.  It was the era of the slasher, of The Exorcist and The Shining.  The Evil Dead movies were just coming out, and zombie flicks were more or less the singular vision of George Romero.  What do we have now?

Mostly junk.  I don’t really pine for “the old days” or have rose-tinted glasses for a bygone era, but the truth is Hollywood is really more interested in safe bets and committee-based productions that appeal to as many demographics as possible to get the best return on their investments.  They’re a business, and they need to make money, I understand that.  At the same time, this method of production has pretty much turned American horror movies into paint-by-numbers storybooks punctuated by jump scares.

For me, there’s two movies that stick out as examples for me here.  The first is the remake for “Evil Dead.”  I just didn’t enjoy this movie.  I’ll admit the cinematography is wonderful, and I appreciate the crew’s desire for practical effects.  Unfortunately, the movie is just outright boring.  The first 30 minutes encapsulate some really tepid characterization that’s promptly hucked out the window as soon as the spooky stuff starts happening.  And this remake, like so many other contemporary horror movies, relies heavily on the characters making monumentally stupid decisions that no sane person would make.  Dozens of dead cats strung up in the basement?  Apparently a common occurrence for them.  Objects inside trash bags bound with barbed wire and books bound in face-leather?  Not a problem!

The Blair Witch remake/sequel from this year is equally weak.  Full disclosure: I wasn’t particularly a fan of the original either, but I’ll give credit where its due: it was atmospheric, and it created an entirely new genre.  The remake, however, does nothing new.  You’re given the opportunity to expand the setting, but all you do is retell the exact same story almost beat for beat?  If that’s what you’re doing, why bother?  Here again, we’re also treated to characters acting amazingly dense.  The trek into the words goes poorly immediately when someone gashes her foot open, and the entire group just says, “oh yeah, just put some gauze over the deep gash in your skin that came from a dirty rock in a wood stream, there’s no chance at all this will cause problems later!”  Even the main guy is a paramedic or something, and he just acts like she got poked by a rose thorn or something.

The real problem with horror, to me, is that its a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t scenario.  If you alter the formula too much, you don’t make your money back since you shrink its appeal.  If you stick with the formula straight on, it contributes to the death spiral the genre is in.  I’ll cop that there’s a ton of excellent indie horror flicks, and Asian horror enjoys a solid foothold.  I just want horror to be scary again rather than utterly predictable.

 

And as promised, here’s the two short films my father worked on.  You can even see me in them!