Horror Revival
That old favourite, the horror movie, is back - with a vengeance. But what's driving films such as The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Flightplan to the top of the box office is a very modern fear: America's global war on terror (or guilt-Mo)
By Tom Shone
In an article entitled Gory Gory Hallelujah, the New York Times relates the public's love of horror movies "to the national frame of mind. Hollywood, always quick to reflect or stimulate mass appetite" is simply "satiating the bloodlust of non-combatant Americans". This article actually appeared in 1935, as storms clouds gathered over Europe, and Bride of Frankenstein, The Raven, Mark of the Vampire and Werewolf of London rampaged through cinemas. But with America now entering the fourth year of its war on terror, and the public monitoring its fear levels by colour chart every morning on CNN, the national mood appears to have hit Hollywood in the only way it could: by becoming big business again.
Halloween came early in the US this year. After a lacklustre summer, in which most blockbusters limped home with bloodied knees, the autumn found a few survivors eyeing each other nervously. After a year of big-budget duds such as Stealth and xXx: State of the Union, Sony scored an unlikely hit with The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a horror-movie-cum-courtroom-drama that reaped over $30m (£17.2m) in its first week. In early October, it happened again: two major directors, Cameron Crowe and Tony Scott, took a tumble with their respective films, Elizabethtown and Domino, while a remake of John Carpenter's The Fog beat them to the no 1 spot. By November the pattern had become a trend, with the horror sequel Saw II making short work of The Legend of Zorro to take $31.7m (£18.2m) over the Halloween weekend.
The horror movie is emerging as one of the year's unlikeliest success stories. Over the past few months, seven horror films finished first at the US box office (Hide & Seek, Bogeyman, Saw II, The Ring Two, The Amityville Horror, The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Fog), prompting Variety magazine to see "a glut in the horror market the likes of which hasn't been seen since the heyday of Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger". With TV networks churning out supernatural series such as Invasion, The Night Stalker and Lost, the studios are leaping back on the bandwagon with remakes planned for The Evil Dead, The Wicker Man and Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes.
Dan Meyer, the president of Lions Gate International (which released the two Saw movies), argues: "Horror is just in tune with the zeitgeist. There's an appetite for this right now." He points out that, thanks to its low overheads, high profit margins and loyal fanbase of young men, horror has always been a reliable Hollywood staple. Lions Gate acquired the original Saw for $2m, and watched it reap more than $100m worldwide, making it the most profitable horror release since The Blair Witch Project. With this year's sequel, they reported that audiences were comprised equally of men and women.
The notion that horror is not simply the preserve of pasty-looking young men was confirmed by the impressive results for Red Eye, Wes Craven's shocker about a young woman on an aeroplane with a terrorist. This was followed by Flightplan, another such thriller starring Jodie Foster. Together they have formed a mini-genre of movies plugging into the public's newfound fear of flying and distrust of their fellow passengers. "I like to address the fears of my culture," said Craven. "I believe it's good to face the enemy, for the enemy is fear."
The echoes of September 11 2001 are not too hard to catch in the year's other releases. Craven wasn't the only horror maestro returning to the director's chair; the summer also saw the release of George A Romero's fourth zombie film, Land of the Dead, in which a US city comes under attack. Its tallest building is destroyed and terrified citizens stampede as their leader abandons them. Soldiers patrol ruined streets, while executives and hucksters promote war as a business opportunity and fear as a marketing tool.
The original script, said Romero, was more about social ills and homelessness, and was finished a few days before 9/11. "Everyone wanted to make lollipop movies," he said. "I couldn't get a deal. So we put it back on the shelf and sometime after the invasion of Iraq we took it back down and tried to put more emphasis on the new-normal, post-9/11 era. The idea of living with terrorism, of setting up a synthetic sense of comfort."
Whether you take Land of the Dead as a stinging attack on the somnambulism of the Bush administration or just another movie about zombies tucking into brains is, of course, central to the double-edged attraction of the genre. Because it is so cheap to produce, and plugs into such base fears, horror has an uncanny knack of hitting the cultural jugular. When the first wave of zombie movies hit in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, one reviewer of White Zombie (1932) joked that the advantage of zombies is "they don't mind about overtime".
You can understand an epoch's deepest preoccupations from a cursory study of its horror movies. The 30s zombie movies offered "a nightmare vision of the breadline", in the words of horror-film historian David Skal. In the aftermath of the second world war, the Frankenstein pictures shaped up as a cultural dumping ground for the processed images of men blown to pieces, and the shell-shocked fantasy of stitching them back together again. In the age of the atomic bomb and the death camp, cinema's images of terror grew larger and more mechanised, culminating in the Godzilla pictures. And the sexual revolution spawned by the pill and women's rights resulted in films such as Rosemary's Baby and Demon Seed, in which women's bodies were violated by demonic outside forces.
Surveying the classic horror films of the 1970s, from The Exorcist and The Omen to Carrie and Alien, the biggest single fear of the baby-boom generation would appear to have been, simply, parenthood. After the teen revolution instigated by Lucas and Spielberg, the focus switched back to the teenagers: it was the physical transformations of adolescence, augmented by fear of Aids, that lay behind the carnage wrought by the slasher fits of the 1980s - Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street. The masked psycho killers of these films reached their most sophisticated embodiment in Hannibal Lecter - but the figure of the serial killer, looming increasingly large in US culture, also sounded a death knell of sorts for the Freddies and Jasons of this world. America's bogeymen no longer smacked of the supernatural, but hailed from your neighbour's backyard, within the reach of criminal psychology, forensics and the FBI. The studios went through a phase where they didn't want to call a film a horror movie; everything was a "psychological thriller" or a "suspense movie".
Which is why America's war on terror may be the single biggest boost for the horror genre since Haley Joel Osment claimed to see dead people. Once again, America finds itself facing a nebulous, wraithlike enemy that scatters and regroups whenever you strike it, growing a new head every time it is lopped off. Throw in a gnawing sense of self-indictment, and you have the fertile shadowy ground in which horror likes to grow.
By Tom Shone
In an article entitled Gory Gory Hallelujah, the New York Times relates the public's love of horror movies "to the national frame of mind. Hollywood, always quick to reflect or stimulate mass appetite" is simply "satiating the bloodlust of non-combatant Americans". This article actually appeared in 1935, as storms clouds gathered over Europe, and Bride of Frankenstein, The Raven, Mark of the Vampire and Werewolf of London rampaged through cinemas. But with America now entering the fourth year of its war on terror, and the public monitoring its fear levels by colour chart every morning on CNN, the national mood appears to have hit Hollywood in the only way it could: by becoming big business again.
Halloween came early in the US this year. After a lacklustre summer, in which most blockbusters limped home with bloodied knees, the autumn found a few survivors eyeing each other nervously. After a year of big-budget duds such as Stealth and xXx: State of the Union, Sony scored an unlikely hit with The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a horror-movie-cum-courtroom-drama that reaped over $30m (£17.2m) in its first week. In early October, it happened again: two major directors, Cameron Crowe and Tony Scott, took a tumble with their respective films, Elizabethtown and Domino, while a remake of John Carpenter's The Fog beat them to the no 1 spot. By November the pattern had become a trend, with the horror sequel Saw II making short work of The Legend of Zorro to take $31.7m (£18.2m) over the Halloween weekend.
The horror movie is emerging as one of the year's unlikeliest success stories. Over the past few months, seven horror films finished first at the US box office (Hide & Seek, Bogeyman, Saw II, The Ring Two, The Amityville Horror, The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Fog), prompting Variety magazine to see "a glut in the horror market the likes of which hasn't been seen since the heyday of Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger". With TV networks churning out supernatural series such as Invasion, The Night Stalker and Lost, the studios are leaping back on the bandwagon with remakes planned for The Evil Dead, The Wicker Man and Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes.
Dan Meyer, the president of Lions Gate International (which released the two Saw movies), argues: "Horror is just in tune with the zeitgeist. There's an appetite for this right now." He points out that, thanks to its low overheads, high profit margins and loyal fanbase of young men, horror has always been a reliable Hollywood staple. Lions Gate acquired the original Saw for $2m, and watched it reap more than $100m worldwide, making it the most profitable horror release since The Blair Witch Project. With this year's sequel, they reported that audiences were comprised equally of men and women.
The notion that horror is not simply the preserve of pasty-looking young men was confirmed by the impressive results for Red Eye, Wes Craven's shocker about a young woman on an aeroplane with a terrorist. This was followed by Flightplan, another such thriller starring Jodie Foster. Together they have formed a mini-genre of movies plugging into the public's newfound fear of flying and distrust of their fellow passengers. "I like to address the fears of my culture," said Craven. "I believe it's good to face the enemy, for the enemy is fear."
The echoes of September 11 2001 are not too hard to catch in the year's other releases. Craven wasn't the only horror maestro returning to the director's chair; the summer also saw the release of George A Romero's fourth zombie film, Land of the Dead, in which a US city comes under attack. Its tallest building is destroyed and terrified citizens stampede as their leader abandons them. Soldiers patrol ruined streets, while executives and hucksters promote war as a business opportunity and fear as a marketing tool.
The original script, said Romero, was more about social ills and homelessness, and was finished a few days before 9/11. "Everyone wanted to make lollipop movies," he said. "I couldn't get a deal. So we put it back on the shelf and sometime after the invasion of Iraq we took it back down and tried to put more emphasis on the new-normal, post-9/11 era. The idea of living with terrorism, of setting up a synthetic sense of comfort."
Whether you take Land of the Dead as a stinging attack on the somnambulism of the Bush administration or just another movie about zombies tucking into brains is, of course, central to the double-edged attraction of the genre. Because it is so cheap to produce, and plugs into such base fears, horror has an uncanny knack of hitting the cultural jugular. When the first wave of zombie movies hit in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, one reviewer of White Zombie (1932) joked that the advantage of zombies is "they don't mind about overtime".
You can understand an epoch's deepest preoccupations from a cursory study of its horror movies. The 30s zombie movies offered "a nightmare vision of the breadline", in the words of horror-film historian David Skal. In the aftermath of the second world war, the Frankenstein pictures shaped up as a cultural dumping ground for the processed images of men blown to pieces, and the shell-shocked fantasy of stitching them back together again. In the age of the atomic bomb and the death camp, cinema's images of terror grew larger and more mechanised, culminating in the Godzilla pictures. And the sexual revolution spawned by the pill and women's rights resulted in films such as Rosemary's Baby and Demon Seed, in which women's bodies were violated by demonic outside forces.
Surveying the classic horror films of the 1970s, from The Exorcist and The Omen to Carrie and Alien, the biggest single fear of the baby-boom generation would appear to have been, simply, parenthood. After the teen revolution instigated by Lucas and Spielberg, the focus switched back to the teenagers: it was the physical transformations of adolescence, augmented by fear of Aids, that lay behind the carnage wrought by the slasher fits of the 1980s - Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street. The masked psycho killers of these films reached their most sophisticated embodiment in Hannibal Lecter - but the figure of the serial killer, looming increasingly large in US culture, also sounded a death knell of sorts for the Freddies and Jasons of this world. America's bogeymen no longer smacked of the supernatural, but hailed from your neighbour's backyard, within the reach of criminal psychology, forensics and the FBI. The studios went through a phase where they didn't want to call a film a horror movie; everything was a "psychological thriller" or a "suspense movie".
Which is why America's war on terror may be the single biggest boost for the horror genre since Haley Joel Osment claimed to see dead people. Once again, America finds itself facing a nebulous, wraithlike enemy that scatters and regroups whenever you strike it, growing a new head every time it is lopped off. Throw in a gnawing sense of self-indictment, and you have the fertile shadowy ground in which horror likes to grow.
posted by Basil Epicurus at 12:59 AM
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