CMonster wrote:If you look at the word horror outside of film it comes from the Latin word that means "to bristle with fear". Thus, the term general came to mean something that causes a feeling of frightfulness, shock, etc. Then as films emerged with the aim of eliciting these emotions they were put into a horror genre. On method for getting this feeling is blood and gore but that is only a small part of it. Saying that a horror film is simply blood and gore for the sake of blood and gore is ignorant. That's like somebody showing you a bunch of Adam Sandler films and then saying that you refuse to label The Big Lebowski as a comedy because comedy films are based on cross-dressing, fart jokes, and occasionally slipping into a wacky yelling voice/wacky high-pitched voice. Horror is a broad term full of sub-genres just like comedy is. Limiting all horror films to slashers full of blood is crazy.
Agreed. It's unfortunate when people who are wilfully ignorant to a genre then roll on in and attempt to educate people about that same genre which they haven't bothered to understand the breadth and range of -- and with an emphasis on puritanism no less ("Gore! Porn! Unwed teenage mothers!").
So what if the majority of "horror" films are terrible slasher garbage? It doesn't change the fact that great movies like
Psycho,
Halloween and
The Shining are also horror movies. To judge a genre by the dominant trends within it, and not recognise the superior works as being a part of that same genre just because those trashy others exist, is just plain foolish. We may as well say that top westerns like
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly and
Johnny Guitar shouldn't be considered westerns because the vast majority of films within that genre are banal and boring -- or, indeed, that comedies without Adam Sandler aren't comedies because they don't fit the same mould.
Even then, the suggestion that a movie cannot be artistic or well-made because it features gore and a body count is nonsense. By my reckoning, the strongest horror movies of the past ten years (
The Devil's Rejects,
Halloween II,
Pan's Labyrinth,
Fear(s) of the Dark,
Wolf Creek) have been both violent and artful -- and absolutely make one "bristle with fear." (Or at least they have moments of breathtaking tensity.) They're also much more well made and shot than Oscar-bait duds like
Black Swan. Not a single image in Aronofsky's film can compare to those in
Halloween II or
Pan's Labyrinth.
Still I must admit that I've always found it amusing to see people claim that movies like
Silence of the Lambs and such aren't actually horror movies, just so they can justify their own enjoyment of the film without having to abandon their reductive, pretentious ideas about horror or feel like a hypocrite (which self-righteous people always are).
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My top 10:
The Devil's Rejects -- A more structured alternative to the mad schizophrenia of House of 1000 Corpses, in which Zombie didn't seem to know what he was doing. It's a grim, gorey road movie with a great villain's performance from Bill Moseley
Fear(s) of the Dark -- An eerie, wonderfully drawn animated horror anthology. People often let foreign-language movies get away with all sorts of shit just because it's all in a different language, which is why it's baffling that legitimately great foreign movies like this one get completely overlooked.
Halloween II -- The only great movie in the Halloween series since Carpenter's original. Rob Zombie's always dismissed, but he's one of the most visually and thematically explorative directors working in horror. It's perhaps the first slasher sequel in which you get a palpable sense that all the characters who survived the first movie have been inextricably changed.
Land of the Dead -- Probably the most undervalued of Romero's "Dead" series. Dennis Hopper was a hilarious stand-out.
The Mist -- A conventional Stephen King adaptation but an excellent one all the same, that actually gets mileage out of Marcia Gay Harden's fundamentalist hysterics. Her performance, set against those of a cast that seems unbelievably normal (i.e. you can identify with many of them in a way you can't with many Hollywood characters), make this a horror film more about an ill community (in a way reminding me of the Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street") than giant space monsters from the other side of madness.
Pan's Labyrinth -- A visually astonishing, emotionally involving blend of fairy-tale fantasy and skewed history whose final act is consistently as tense and chilling as the best moments of Del Toro's earlier Devil's Backbone. That's high praise, too.
Resident Evil: Afterlife -- A kinetic delight that transcends the imagined limitations of post-Romero zombie films. It's also super badass and cool
The Strangers -- The closing scene is a fumble, but the rest is wonderfully suspenseful and atmospheric. Bryan Bertino does so much of what new horror film directors should do, including getting a negative review from Ebert.
A Tale of Two Sisters -- Probably the most problematic of the films in my list but still a great trip. Watching the whole thing unravel towards the end made the moments of excess seem worth it. The bastardized remake should be avoided at all costs.
Wolf Creek -- Has the best villainous performance since Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher. Probably the most discomforting horror of the decade, it's another that got a zero from Ebert -- the highest compliment a horror movie can get.
