Horror Business: Why Movies Aren’t Scary Anymore

Movies like Silent House are all "pizazz" with no real scares.

BY CHRISTINE BOUCOURT

In a world where scary movies are no longer scary… screen writers are running out of ideas faster than Usain Bolt in the hundred meter dash. As movie-based award ceremonies have turned into fashion runways, what is the average moviegoer to do? A true horror aficionado can’t be satisfied with the likes of Sharknado and the endless reproductions of Paranormal Activity. We need a hero, someone to follow in the footsteps of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, someone to shake the viewers’ sense of reality to its very core, and so I pose the question: what exactly is wrong with horror movies these days?

Let’s start by rewinding back to the origin of the horror genre itself. Disregarding the many stories that are intertwined with Greek mythology, the oldest form of horror is found in folklore legends. Tales like “Bloody Mary,” “the Hook,” and “the Woman in White” have been circulating through word of mouth for centuries, creepin’ the heebie jeebies out of youngsters whose older siblings thought it would be hilarious to petrify them. Besides these “word of mouth” stories, horror comes to play in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, which dates all the way back to 1764 and historically sparks this genre, which later flourishes in the 18th and 19th centuries. The first iconic book to come from this time period is Frankenstein (1818) written by Mary Shelly. The most significant of horror-ish writers from the 19th century include Edgar Allen Poe with Tell Tale Heart and The Masque of the Red Death and even Charles Dickens with the original ghost series of A Christmas Carol and The Signalman.

The merging of horror and film world first occurred in 1908 when the motion picture was still being explored as a new art medium. William N. Selig’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was the first true horror movie, a 16-minute picture created to shock and scare audiences. The film drew widespread praise for its divergence from the norm as it explored new themes and styles, a film that dared to be different.

Another story from the Twentieth Century, and one of my personal favorites, is America’s first and most famous set of horror comics (to later become a television series), Tales From the Crypt. Other highlights of the 20th century were Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the most notorious film of the slasher genre, and Jaws which shook the nation to its core (especially down here in Florida).

The integrity of the horror genre changed during the 1990’s. There were still good movies being released, but this is when self-consciousness crept into the minds of writers and directors. They began splitting the different subdivisions of horror into sets of recurring themes. They created unspoken standards, basically guidelines for directors to follow. All so that they could recreate success through features that they knew would appeal to large audiences.  They paid less attention to genuine suspense and more to a shock factor, a pizzazz, to keep the viewers’ short attention spans at ease.

Over the years, this extra pizzazz has turned into the entire foundation of horror, all tricks and no significance. Screenwriters no longer pay attention to what would really get under the viewers’ skin and crawl around for a while. A good example of this is I Am Legend compared to Silent House. In I Am Legend, Will Smith’s character was alone in a city filled with zombie/monster/remnants of humanity-things, with his only companion being a loyal dog. He was forced to figure things out on his own, but with his dog serving as a crutch, he was able to successfully, even contently survive and do what he needed to. Then when his dog gets infected with whatever the rest of the human race has, Smith’s character has to terminate the one shred of any connection to a normal life, his crutch, with his own bare hands. So many people are absolutely terrified of that isolation, that desperate ongoing search for any sign of a cure after losing the one thing that kept them clinging to hope.  Silent House was just suspense and a big twist. You walked out there and said to your friends, “I can’t believe he was the killer!” and forget about the entire thing as soon as something else with an eerie title and a strong female lead pops up.

Have you ever found yourself jumbling several horror plot lines together in your head, unable to differentiate them? Its because so many of these “scary” stories are overdone and created with less than enough care for any real connection to be made with a viewer. We need to get back to the good old days, when films like the Shining, and the Exorcist plagued our minds, forcing us to lay in bed at night for hours, trembling with fear that the creaking sound of “your house settling” is actually a demonic serial killing escaped convict coming to murder you…or worse…make you watch the latest addition to the Saw anthology.