I really love scary movies. Actually, no. I love-hate
scary movies. I love them because they are entertaining, and evoke a reaction
from me, but I hate them because I feel like they are all the same. This
sameness has made scary movies from the past few years a lot less interesting
to me. I get it… the kid is possessed, the priest can’t expel the ghost, and the
doll is haunted.
I
like the metaphor of art being valuable because it is unique and not mass
produced, and when it is mass produced, it becomes less valuable. That is
really the reason why I have struggled with loving scary movies lately. They
are the same mass produced stories being repeated over and over again. In fact,
Scream, one of my all-time favorite scary movies, is being made into a TV show
on MTV this summer.
Obviously,
I have quite an opinion on how scary movies should
be. That is the Critical Theory part of me trying to improve the horror genre.
I think change is what makes film such an exciting medium. Some of the most
talked about movies were talked about so much because they did something different.
For example: Inception. Inception
blew everyone’s mind at the end, because the audience didn’t know what to
expect. The Cabin in the Woods kind
of did this for horror by having a surprise ending, and even though they used a
ton of clichés, they used them to mock the horror genre to add a sense of humor
to the film.
Luckily,
there is a new film that just came out that gives me hope for scary films. It’s
called It Follows. It has an 83 on
Metacritic.com, which is very high for a horror film, and the highest score for a
horror film in years! I know that my generation might value entertainment over
other measures of quality, but I’m hoping that these high reviews for this film
will push film makers to keep pushing the envelope by not relying on the same
basic story lines.
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