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Please bring back the ironic, winking mock-horror films.
This new brand of snuff-flick horror is absurd – and they make me queasy.
The Scream franchise, which playfully mocked the conventions of the horror movie genre and tickled rather than severed bones, has given way to a new breed of cinematic butchery – silly, way over-the-top exercises in gross-out special effects. No laughs, but buckets of blood and gore and barrels of severed body parts – all shot in close-up. The camera never blinks.
Films like Wolf Creek, Hostel, Rob Zombie’s grisly efforts like The Devil’s Rejects and the Saw series have ushered in a new horror – or at least a return to the old horror.
Like old horror films from the ’70s, these are most definitely low-budget B-movie affairs.
The difference is that vast improvements in special effects technology mean you don’t need big bucks to make that scene of some guy shuffling off his mortal coil as a result of a large spike through the eyeball convincing – and likely to make you heave your large popcorn dusted with salt and vinegar. (Both the gore and the popcorn are equally disgusting.)
I have resisted acquainting myself with this bloody new wave of horror films for two reasons – I don’t particularly like horror films and I detest gratuitous displays of violence.
So I missed Wolf Creek and Hostel and the first Saw, and it was with some trepidation that I rented Saw II earlier this week.
If some of the nuances and character motivations have eluded me because I didn’t fulfil the research requirements by seeing the original Saw, well, sue me. I’m still traumatized by that spiked Venus flytrap-thingee that made a pincushion out of some poor dude in Saw II.
Gross, and stupid. That sums up Saw II. No details of plot needed – there is a quick setup and then we are trapped along with the other, mostly comely young people, in a booby-trapped house, at the mercy of the murderous killer nicknamed Jigsaw.
The comely youngsters get picked off one by one, of course, in truly nasty fashion. (Toward the end we get a twist, and a neat setup for No. 3.)
That’s the point. As nasty, gross and sick as possible.
Saw II, Hostel and the like are all about how far – or low – can you go. They are about scaring the crap, to be indelicate, out of an audience that does not scare easily, and wants to jump out of their seats.
It is a very young demo that goes out on the first weekend to see these movies, which often end up Monday morning No. 1 at the box office.
The box office tends to fall off dramatically after the first week, but not before these films are in a nice profit position before the inevitable Halloween DVD release. This new wave of horror shows no sign of abating.
I’m no sociologist, but it makes sense that there is something to the theory that the target demo is eager to see more graphic and imaginative depictions of violence, thanks, in part, to the graphic and imaginative depictions it has grown up with in video games, movies etc.
It is not necessarily a desensitization to violence, it’s just pushing the envelope – every generation pushes the envelope a bit further.
As for this return of grisly horror, director Joe Dante told AP last month, “Everything goes in cycles.’’
That means we may be giggling at horror films again soon, instead of reaching for a barf bag.
Scare tactics are bizarre, indeed.
SAW II – original rating: 2 SUNS (out of 5); DVD rating: 2 SUNS (for the creative gore, dude)