Bringing Scary Back

As you may be able to tell from some of my past posts, I think perspective is important. I don’t dwell too much on the past, because I think that in general people spend too much time trying to relive the past. But you can’t ignore the past either, and the past if analyzed correctly can provide the perspective that one needs.

So what’s the point of that intro there? Fear; specifically the question that was recently raised on a site I frequent, on whether horror movies have gotten worse as of late.

In many ways this is the same as the “bad anime” matter I posted about a couple weeks ago. But there are a few deviations to the formula from that discussion about anime, a reflection of the general change in the industry.

Unlike anime, which is a rather broad genre that has few limits, horror is a genre that is very limited. Horror can fit into the anime category, you can’t do the opposite.

That is part of another problem, which is the fracturing of the horror genre. Horror used to be just horror – monsters and supernatural beings and events. Today’s horror genre now encompasses a lot more thriller to it. Many movies labeled as “horror” are about nothing more than people running away from rather normal killers – demented perhaps but still just normal killers. I’ve long thought this isn’t really horror. It may be “scary” but that’s what makes it more of a “thriller” than a “horror”. It’s a hard distinction to make, which is probably why the two genres are so often considered synonymously linked. I believe that there must be some level of impossibility or supernatural twist to make it real horror – the killer getting shot in the head or heart and not dying, at least, absent some forced explanation like a bulletproof vest or some contrived escape.

Then you have the somewhat newer horror-romance genre of normal humans falling in love with monsters. This gets you stuff like Twilight, where vampires hardly act like vampires and fighting high schools angst filled battles with werewolves over a single girl. As a consequence, the monsters that would normally drive the horror element are continually portrayed in a less than horrifying manner. Basically, they’re not scary.

So the question is has horror has become less scary? While we have examples like the Twilight series, there are also the examples of the Paranormal Activity series, one of the most frightening movie series of the last decade or more, or the Walking Dead series on TV.

But there is also the video game angle. Resident Evil, Bioshock, and other series have come out in the horror genre, but have generally received less play than other game titles in other genres.

As I noted earlier, one of the main drivers of the appearance of the lightening of the horror genre has been in the fact that the genre has splintered somewhat away from its traditional roots. There are so many things involved now that are not part of what used to be the sum total of the genre, which as a result means those movies, TV shows, games, based on the genre are less focused. It’s hard to make a scary story with vampires and zombies and whatnot when you have to spend so much time playing out some absurd romance angle.

The second main driver is that what used to be scary isn’t anymore. Zombies by themselves used to be scary. Back then the basic idea of a person who was dead, now not being dead, walking around trying to eat people, was scary enough. Those zombies used to be slow and lumbering, which made them less scary because you could outrun them by just jogging. What’s more, they used to be easy to slow down because as a rotting, decaying, corpse they fell apart easily. So they added the bit about being able to propagate by infecting others through biting, thus allowing the “first” zombies to infect healthier subjects to become stronger zombies that weren’t so easy to stop.

Of course from there came the imperative of explaining how one becomes a zombie in the first place, which led to the zombie no longer being really supernatural beings from Hell, but more often than not the result of human activities and experimentation. Zombies also stopped slowly lumbering about, and became fast, and even in some cases able to run. Unfortunately the answer for how the zombies came about now takes up more of the story than ever, again diminishing the attention paid to the actual part about scaring audiences.

The third factor is timing. It used to be that horror movies were reserved for the occasional Friday the 13^th, or Halloween each year. It was generally rare for a horror movie or game to come out at any other time of the year. When the genre started to take off in the 70s and 80s many studios jumped on the bandwagon and started making more and more horror stuff. But people got tired of it all, and the genre started to dry up. So there was a period where horror again became a rarity. Then the appetite for horror was stoked again, and there was a great number of works produced to take advantage of that change.

This cycle gets to the basic point; the genre is still plenty scary if you aren’t a student of the genre. If you are a part of the ride up in this cycle, where you see most, if not all, horror films that come out, or play a ton of horror games, the genre itself will seem rather stale after a while of indulging in it. It’s like eating your favorite ice cream twice a day, every day on end. Eventually you will simply get tired of eating it (as well as likely put on a ton of weight).

Many of those complaining about the state of the horror genre right now are those who have been most entrenched in it. They have seen every monster that is out there, most of the scenarios, there is only so much innovation that is left with the given slate of horror movie possibilities in terms of monsters and their associated stories. And establishing a successful, acceptable, new horror theme takes a lot of time and effort, which will not be visible until after it has been completed.

Has horror become less scary? Only if you’ve acclimated yourself to it. If you haven’t engrossed yourself on horror movies and the like, chances are you aren’t a particularly big fan of them, and chances are you can still be given a good scare. If you have, you’ve likely inoculated yourself against the scary stuff. You’ve been scared so many times in the past that there’s little that can scare you now.

Like with the example of anime from a few weeks ago, the relative number of great horror stories has likely not moved much one way or another, only perception has. There is so much out there now, all the time, that the expectation is that there will naturally be a lot more gems. Unfortunately that isn’t the case. When horror was small potatoes only the best of the best convinced people to give it a shot. Now that it is routine, it gets the shotgun treatment – put lots of shot in the air and see what lands a hit.

The good scares are still out there, there’s just more stuff you have to sort through to find them than there used to be.