It isnt even a case of you either love them or hate them.
People watch horror films because they want to get scared; i guess. And horror movies are rated in two ways.
The first way to rate horror movies is how scary they are. Jump scares is what people relate to horror movies; for me it is more psychological horror - more on that later.
The second way is by the ending. No matter what happens before the ending defines the movie. That is the case with thrillers as well; but horror movies HAVE to end in some way or the other and definitively. The ghost/spirit/murderer has to meet some sort of end.
Great build up poor/cliched ending = bad film.
Terrible build up great ending = good film.
As a fan of the genre it sickens me. As someone who aspires to become a film director but hasnt the means or the contacts it hurts to see a great idea wasted.
I wonder; the person who makes these films has to have an idea what he wants to show the audience. Then how can the final product go so wrong? Believe you me it is rare these days to find a good horror film; in fact the 70s and early 80s had some brilliant films which laid the foundation for the present directors; and most of the new horror films are unoriginal/ cliched or just remakes of those glorious years. These days the Far East make good horror films and they are remade almost always substandard.
I will start off with the Slasher subgenre.
What is the Slasher subgenre. To make it as simple as I can; it involves multiple murders of generally typecast teens by some unknown person who ends up being someone they know.
The murderer can be one of the teens themselves or someone's parents or some escaped convict. Even movies that involve sharks and other predatorial animals and aliens fall under the Slasher genre.
Wikipedia has a page dedicated to Slasher films and is an interesting read. I will not be rehashing anything from there and this will just be my views.
I will start with the Bad.
I have yet to see the original Prom Night. I did see the remake recently that was hyped up and i was disappointed. It was bleeding obvious who would die (almost in what order too) and who wouldnt by the time the characters were established. Lead white couple; black couple and secondary white couple. If you havent seen the movie; there are spoilers of sorts here but dont worry it wont do you any harm.
Ok so the secondary white couple will die first. Since the lead here is a woman; she will either survive or die last. So - from the black couple the guy will either survive or die second last. (not being racist here btw). It is just so obvious.
Thought i would mention Shark Night 3D here; when we saw the trailer we laughed as it showed an attack on the lead black guy and we felt that he didnt even survive the fuckin trailer! As it turned out he did.
Another point about Shark Night 3D is that the film could have been much better than it ended up. The idea was original for once but the acting - which is almost always below par for horror films - and just the way it was played was a real let down. It's like ordering your steak well done and finding it red in the middle.
Scream was a much better film. While it does fall short when compared to some of the great Original films like Halloween; Friday the 13th; Nightmare on Elm Street and the kind it is clearly the best of the latest bunch of Slasher films. Even the first sequel and the 2010 movie Scream 4 were well made.
What made Scream better than the others was it had smarter characters; especially Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott while most Slasher films have dumb teens who do not even strike a chord with the audience. When a character is strongly made then the audience wants the character to survive as well. I mean; who cared if Brittany Snow died in Prom Night? Or Paris Hilton in House of Wax?
Also; Scream created an iconic new villian in Ghostface. I wanted a Ghostface mask. The acting was good as it was a stellar cast if you consider the age group that the actors had to be; the scares were good and you genuinely did not know who the killer was. Kudos to Wes Craven and Scream deserved the plaudits and the money it earned.
But who can forget the movies that began it all? Halloween still is the best pure Slasher film ever made. It made a legend of Michael Myers as the masked truck driver who terrorizes a young Jaime Lee Curtis who needed a full ten years to diversify from her scream queen title in A Fish Called Wanda. Four years before that Tobe Hooper made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Another pioneering film based loosely on Ed Gein that was a major success.
For me the best horror films are those which dont just fuck with your eyes but fuck with your mind as well. Ridley Scott's Alien in 1979 and John Carpenter's The Thing from 1982 (albeit a sort of remake of 1951's The Thing from Another World) are both films that do not fall exclusively in the Slasher genre. But that is what they are.
People are killed. And you dont know who is killing them.
But - in this case it is not 'Who' is killing them; but 'What'.
Both films have strong leads- infact even the 2011 prequel of The Thing had a very good performance by Mary Elizabeth Winstead and was a much better film than what people said - and they have a watertight plot.
What makes The Thing such a solid horror film is despite the plethora of visual scares the main sense of tension that the film creates is that the 'Thing' could be any one of the people in the film as it metamorphosises into the person or animal it consumes. They dont know who it could be and you dont know who it could be.
Both Alien and The Thing have a killer that makes you go - 'What the fuck is that thing?'.
Critical to the films is that you hardly see the creature. The thing in The Thing is only shown a couple times and H.R. Giger's Alien is never shown in full which leaves it to the audience to imagine what the whole thing looks like - This was a major source of disappointment in the poor David Fincher directed Alien 3 which has an amateurly animated Alien that looks like it had been pasted on the screen. In Alien 3 the alien is shown in full and it looks like a lizard bringing down the curiosity and hence the fear to almost nothing.
Also key to both films is the settings. While The Thing is set in Antarctica Alien takes it a step further and is set in space - the Tagline for Alien 'In outer space no one can hear you scream' is one of the best ever made. These are both claustrophobic settings and that transcends into the audience. These are clear signs of a well thought out production. Alien is to the alien genre what 2001: A Space Odyssey is to the science fiction genre; well ahead of the times and films so good that they are almost impossible to better despite being 33 and 45 (incredible) years old.
In conclusion; slasher films these days ask you to leave your heads at home and watch as people get killed. They want to scare you with someone popping up from somewhere and try to be smart by making the killer one of the cast. The best Slasher films are those where who does the killing doesnt matter - you know who the killer is in Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and you know something is killing people in Alien and the Thing. Or even if you dont know who the killer is; the development of the characters is important.
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