2 Comments

• Brian in Colorado
  Posted January 9, 2013 at 4:41 pm | Permalink

  Interesting thoughts from Matt on waning interest in horror. I’m pfo (60+) but my interest in horror hasn’t gone away, particularly anything nihilistic. On the other hand, action flicks no longer interest me. Fell asleep during “Avengers.” Thought Hulk was stupid. Since I don’t enjoy slashers, I’m wondering if the narrow, repeated tropes are indeed what has become disenchanting.

• Tony Bleak
  Posted January 10, 2013 at 8:51 pm | Permalink

  It’s all about the repetitiveness. After the third time you’ve seen a masked killer hack apart some teens, it begins to get dull. The same goes with zombies, vampires and werewolves. I’m not saying a new wrinkle or take on one of these subjects can’t make a film stand out, but the genre has always eaten away at itself by rehashing the same stories. This is why we often see cycles in what is popular in horror. When J-horror first started, it was new and felt fresh, but after the third or fourth long-hair ghost girl we loose interest in those stories.

  Then, as we get older, Hollywood breaks out the old stories that used to make money for them and starts showing them to the new/young audience that hasn’t seen a bunch of horror films. To us, we’ve been there and done that, but the new teenagers are just starting to experience the thrill of seeing their peers be chased down and slaughtered by masked killers.

  I also attribute this cycle of uncreative clones to the people of our generations that grow up and want to make horror movies “just like” the ones they loved as a kid. They shouldn’t be trying to make the next Halloween or Friday the 13th, but trying to find something new to say within the genre. They shouldn’t want to be the next Carpenter or Craven, but take their lead from directors like Cronenberg and explore other aspects of the human condition. I’m not saying make more body horror films, but find something new and interesting to explore.

  Then that just brings us back to who the target audience is for horror. The average movie going teen doesn’t want an intellectual film that breaks down the abnormal psychology of a separated conjoined triplet living with the attached ghost of his deceased twins, and that kind of subject matter is usually too dark and “juvenile” to find the adult audience that it is trying to reach.

  It’s not true that it has all been done before. There are new stories to tell and new ways to tell old ones. It’s just hard to get a studio and investors to take a risk on the new stuff. Meanwhile, us veteran horror fans loose interest in going to see Slice & Dice Part IV 3D: The New Re-imagining of the Remake of the Original Horror.