It dawned on me whilst I was filming how overdone the entire genre is, be it remakes, found footage or dumb new ideas nothing seems to click anymore. Don't get me wrong some things are still scary but none of them have the kinda throat crushing power the likes of Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers had. I say had because the Friday the 13th remake sucked and the first Halloween reboot whilst fascinating wasn't on the same level as the original. As did the sequel to the remake. A lot of franchises tend to get dumber as they go on, we only got a second movie and the dumbness had peaked.
We had something good going with Paranormal Activity but it pretty much died a death after the fourth one. Even movies based on video games can't get it right. Resident Evil as a game has only recently turned into the generic appeal to everyone rubbish it is in the last few years. The films have always been action oriented and there's no true scares too it.
And now there's remakes. Remakes aren't necessarily a bad thing, it did bring us Nicolas Cage punching a woman in the face whilst dressed as a bear.(that's the last time I bring that up I swear) it also brought us the Halloween remake directed by Rob Zombie which I could never say was bad or good but definitely worth watching. On the other hand it did bring us the unnecessary shot for shot remake of Psycho starring Vince Vaughn. A pointless idea that the world probably should've forgotten by now.
And it's not like the new stuff is any better. The fact is when we see something unique in horror films nowadays there's only a slim chance it works, the rest of the time it's just an idea that everyone else was smart enough not to use.
Horror shouldn't be a difficult genre to do sorta right surely. But I think there's more to it than that, I'm reminded of the Hogfather by Terry Prattchet and the reveal that the first tooth fairy is actually the Boogeyman. It's actually a really poignant scene where the Boogeyman admits that she used to scare kids but when she saw how humans could be far scarier than her she decided that she didn't want to scare them anymore she wanted to help them and protect them.
To draw away from that my point is horror doesn't work the way it use to because the real world is far scarier than any film. Another less serious problem is that there's nowhere to go with the genre anymore. The 90s brought us Scream and its sequels and several guaranteed to not continue careers (except for David Arquette who held the WCW World Championship whilst sleeping with Courtney Cox had I born a decade earlier he'd have lived out two of my boyhood dreams now he's just living out dreams I can't because that belt is dead and buried). And we can't make films about the characters being aware of horror rules because A) Its been done, B) it's stupid and C) If your cast is well aware of their fate why should we as an audience care?
So yeah I'm giving myself a break from scary movies for a while. Maybe I'll check in again when another genre has been sucked dry. Say doesn't Sony still have the film rights to Spider-Man and X-Men?
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