Sunday, October 30, 2005

Oh my God! Tomorrow is Halloween! Happy Happy Joy Joy!

I know what you’re thinking, “Eric up your medicine dose.” I say to thee nay! For Halloween is most verily my favorite holiday. Alas, gentle reader I have to make yet another complaint against all that which is trying to kill my fun. Namely, Hollywood can’t make a decent horror movie to save its life.

I love movies really I do. Give me a good old scary movie and I’m one happy nerd. The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project and Psycho all make me giddy. Granted they all work on different levels by they all rock my socks none the less. That being said The Blair Witch Project was the last decent horror movie I’ve seen and that didn’t even come out of mainstream Hollywood.

Stephen King’s fine work about horror fiction Danse Macabre said that there are three ways to scare people, you can horrify them, terrify them or gross them out. Hollywood has forgotten the first two almost entirely and has settled for movies that are one long series of gross outs. Granted the current level of Hollywood’s film making in general is sad. So I should suppose that horror movies would follow suit. But I don’t really care about other movies really. So with that in my I shall save Hollywood a lot of research money and tell them what needs to be done.

1.Have characters people care about. See that when it really hits the old fan, we will care and feel for them. That makes it scarier for the viewer. You don’t want bad things to happen to people you like. By having stupid or annoying characters in the movie the audience loses all interest in a big hurry.
2.STOP IT WITH ALL THE GROSS CRAP! I get it you can show me all this nastiness. I understand. But it’s not scary. It just makes people want to barf. There is a large difference.
3.Build some tension. The Blair Witch Project builds a lot of tension by making it almost first person. You see the events as the characters see them. You don’t know what’s out there and neither do they. That’s why the movie works. If there’s no tension in the movie then no one cares and you’ve lost.
4.Stop trying to make all the villains cool. Hannibal Lecter is a crappy villain. He is way too likable. You should never like a horror villain. Never! Norman Bates is not snuggling material nor should he be.

I hate to sound so whiny but I want some good horror movies. It’s in the spirit of the season after all.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home