Horror Future Grim - Times Online
This guy doesn't really bring anything new to the table. It's almost like ready a highschool essay.
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http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle3539894.ece
Name a film that has scared the hell out of you. Does it haunt you to this day? I thought so. Were you terrified by the relentless tension, or a single terrific twist? Does it feature an iconic scene - Jack Nicholson chopping through the bathroom door, for instance; or a sausage popping out of John Hurt's chest? Is there a ghost as creepy as the caped dwarf in Nicolas Roeg's elegant masterpiece Don't Look Now? Or is your favourite fright movie besotted with the hillbilly freaks to be found in Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre?
In short, what are the secrets of the perfect scary film? Roeg has a theory. “We live in constant danger. When we see a good scary movie we are haunted by the sense that ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I'.
“But I think the things in our lives that we fear most - indeed so much so that we don't even want to discuss them - come in the disguise of the familiar. That's what I saw in Daphne du Maurier's novella of Don't Look Now. I saw two people in a desperate and tragic situation who failed to see the further danger that was stalking them.”
I have my own lopsided ideas. I saw The Exorcist at a woundingly young age and I'm still struggling to repair the damage. To my mind, William Friedkin's controversial 1973 masterpiece about the exorcism of a 13-year-old girl is the scariest - and most psychologically treacherous (at least to Catholics) - horror movie ever made. Never mind the pea-soup vomit or the foul-mouthed antics of Linda Blair's demonic child. It is the feeling of invasion, of ceding control to a malevolent other, that makes me bite the seat.
The damage The Exorcist inflicted on my psyche as a teenager might look like a distant ripple, but the nightmares have had 20 years to recede. On the eve of writing my history O level exam I had an encounter with fear that was pure Friedkin. Sitting in a school attic in the middle of the night, bored stupid by the Hundred Years War, I scribbled a strange name across a blank page of A4 - probably to check if my Biro worked. Life has never been quite the same.
The name meant nothing to me. I can't even remember it. But the moment I wrote it down I froze. I had an Exorcist conviction that I was being assaulted by a spirit trying to possess my mind.
The surprising thing about sheer fear - what a doctor would describe as a chronic panic attack - is the physical grip it has on the body. It's like plugging your hand into an electric socket for half a minute. The metallic ringing sound in your head is tinnitus at full volume. It took years to tame these bouts of panic.
I once talked to Paul Schrader about the strange grip of The Exorcist. The veteran American director, who spent millions of dollars finishing the failure Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist explained why no number of imitators can match Friedkin's film. “The metaphor is extraordinary: God and the Devil in the same room arguing over the body of a 13-year-old girl. It doesn't come much purer than that.”
There has been no lack of imitators in the wake of The Exorcist. But the paucity of fresh ideas in the horror genre is now a genuine issue. The imminent arrival of two shivery, chalk-and-cheese films from Spain - a ghost story called The Orphanage and a reality TV thriller, Rec - emphasises just how parched the English-speaking market has become for good horror.
Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's Rec is a pelting vérité nightmare about a television crew locked in a city tenement with a flesh-eating virus. The Spanish equivalent of the National Guard hems the hapless civilians in the building under pain of death for those who attempt to escape. There are tanks on the streets and wild rumours about secret genetic experiments that have gone horribly wrong.
The satire about repression is as bald and brutal as the shapely young television presenter's fight to survive. The footage shot by her camera crew sustains the illusion of spontaneity. The jump moments will make you scream. The premise is a crude copy of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later - but the echoes of the Franco days cut to the bone.
Juan Antonio Bayona's eerie mystery The Orphanage is an infinitely more subtle story. The scares here are hidden. It is the story of a campaigning mother, Laura, who wants to turn the now empty orphanage she grew up in into a home for disabled children. Her happy memories of growing up in this rickety old mansion are cleverly contradicted by small flashbacks laid in every room like depth charges. Laura's seven-year-old son starts spinning unsettling tales of invisible friends and their cruel games.
Produced by Guillermo del Toro, who made Pan's Labyrinth, The Orphanage treats the grief left by the country's political past, in Bayona's words, “like an open wound. Unlike the English, Spain has no tradition of ghost stories. We have had to invent our own ways of discussing the taboo.”
According to Hamish McAlpine, a leading producer and distributor of independent horror, this is exactly what Hollywood should be doing. McAlpine believes the genre in America has hit the buffers. “Horror has basically run out of track. It is repetitive, boring and profoundly unimaginative. It does well at the box office because a lot of kids have not seen the recycled horrors first time around.”
McAlpine's company, Tartan, has been instrumental in introducing extreme Asian cinema to the rest of the world, and Hollywood lost little time pasteurising every scary frame.
He is withering about the quality of these glossy remakes. “Every one of them has been execrable,” he says. “There isn't a producer in the world who would proudly own up to one on his CV. It's utterly symptomatic of Hollywood's chronic lack of imagination about horror.”
Much pleasurable fear has been squandered. The manner and speed with which critical hits are cloned has diluted our interest in good scares. Good twists are hard to find. Suspense and brains have been steamrollered by psychopathic reality. The torture pornography of films such as Eli Roth's Hostel is now the staple of date movies.
Some directors have tried dressing-down their films to try to rediscover that vertiginous element of spontaneity. The Blair Witch Project set the pace. Alfonso Cuarón's grungy vision of the apocalypse, Children of Men, could have been designed by Swampy.
Should we be unduly worried? Frankly, yes. Horror is the stock exchange of the movie industry. “It's a boom and bust business,” says Sean Hogan, a British horror director who is currently working on a novel experiment to make a anthology film called Little Deaths with two other award-winning directors with equally scary track records: Andrew Parkinson and Simon Rumley.
“But if the industry does goes bust it's not going to stop the horror,” Hogan continues. “They are dirt-cheap to make. You don't need famous actors. The only difference is that there will be infinitely more crap.” But I don't believe that the era of good fright movies has come to an end - Rec and The Orphanage show there are ever more sophisticated ways to make us shiver.
The Orphanage is released on March 21 and Rec on April 11
Watch out: scary films to come
One Missed Call (April 4) Director: Eric Valette. Stars: Edward Burns, Shannyn Sossamon. Students receive phone calls from the future in which they hear themselves being killed.
Funny Games (April 4) Director: Michael Haneke. Stars: Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbett. Michael Haneke's horribly unnerving remake of his own film.
Shutter (May 2) Honeymoon couple stalked by ghostly images on their holiday snaps.
The Happening (June 3) Thriller about a family on the run from a shattering disaster.
