The life and death of horror movies

I remember the first time I saw the Exorcist, I was plagued with nightmares for weeks, months and years on in. It is the frightening tale of a young lady possessed by a demon and her mother's rigorous attempts to have it extricated from her daughter's body through an exorcism. The look, feel and sound of the Exorcist was, and still is pure, unadulterated evil. The most frightening aspect of this movie is the reality of it. The idea that it may actually happen to someone you know, maybe even you. "All work and no play make Jack a dull, dull boy," wrote Jack Torrance, the main character from another film that yanked me out of my tree when I was young. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is a psychological thriller about a man who exchanges his soul for a glass of scotch. Snowbound in an old ski resort in the mountains, the family serves as caretakers until dear old dad slowly goes insane and then stops at nothing to kill his oblivious wife and telepathic son. There is very little gore or anything visually disgusting in the film. Not unlike the Exorcist, the Shining uses sound, music and timing to unravel the minds of its viewers.

Walking out of the Edwards Cinema a few weeks ago and having watched a creepy and eerie little film aptly titled Paranormal Activity, I can attest to not being this freaked out in a movie theatre in quite some time. This feeling is refreshing and leads me to consider the overall value of today's horror genre.

Today it seems, horror movies are created to accomplish nothing more than to gross people out with their horrid slice and dice scenes, buckets of blood and guts and gratuitous violence. The trailers used to lure in would be viewers usually include the same old quick-flashing gruesome effects, chilling voice over's and even scantily clad starlets.

In the theatres recently are the same old underperforming slasher-films like Saw 6, The Step Father, Jennifer's Body and Sorority Row, not one of them garnered a critique higher than 3 stars. In fact, the current genre has fallen so low that even the remakes of classic horror films such as Psycho, Halloween, Friday the 13th are so unbearably bad that most horror film aficionados refuse to watch them.

Lately, I have had no real reason to drop eleven bucks on a horror film but Paranormal Activity really gives me hope for the future. The horror flicks of today fixate on the visual aspect and leave nothing to the imagination. Even directors admit that even though their films are deemed a horror, they end up creating more laughs than screams.

Horror films used to have the unique ability to tap into your psyche and leave you just a scared as the characters you are watching. They should be original, suspenseful, have likeable characters and demonstrate some semblance or reality, or be somewhat believable. Hopefully, horror film directors will hone in on the fact that a real sea change needs to occur to save the dying art.