David Cronenberg Classics VS Modern Horror: The Battle

Well, it's almost Halloween again, so that means I'm actually going to have to talk about horror movies at some point! Yes, I know, what a shocker. But enough about that. Let's talk about David Cronenberg.

If you don't know him, well, you'll want to after this – the man is famous now for making movies about Robert Pattinson riding around in limousines, but back in the day, he was famous for horror. Really fuckin' good horror, too. The kind of horror that was unique, creative, weird and trippy, full of social commentary, interesting characters, interesting visuals...man, they were just so goddamn good. What do we get now? Dime-a-dozen exorcist possession flicks, remakes and torture porn. It's just about enough to make you want to build a time machine and head back to that time to experience it all firsthand.

I mean really, where's the contest? In The Fly, Cronenberg wowed us with a tale of a man tampering with science and turning into a monster. There was also a subtext about aging and disease and even a bit near the end that tackled pregnancy in the face of disease. It was a powerful film and was actually about something. Through Jeff Goldblum's frenetic performance balanced against the horror of his on-screen co-stars, there's a real sense of tragedy and horror at what he's going through which mirrors real life decay, disease or just aging – as well as the terror of a man messing with science.

What is Dead Silence about? A fucking dummy makes dumb ghost stories happen while the worst detective in the world digs up puppet graves. Where's the social commentary?

Real horror doesn't just come from the director shoving something scary in your face and saying “boo.” There has to be some kind of story or concept that reflects something in reality – or else, what incentive is there to give a shit? Yes, to some degree horror movies can just be mindless entertainment, as any genre has a subset like that. But we've reached an oversaturating point when movies intended for that purpose fail at being entertaining.

In Videodrome, Cronenberg lays on the satire thick, weaving a tale of the modern day obsession with violence on TV and making it into a warped, psychedelic tale of a smarmy TV station exec who becomes embroiled in a strange otherworldly cult's conspiracy to take over the world. It's completely bizarre and insane, but you do get the point driven in – if with the subtlety of the nails hammered into Christ's hands.

What do we get in Sharknado? “LOL, bad movies are hilarious! Look how bad we can be! Isn't it totally ironic and crazy how bad we're being? But it's on purpose, so you can't criticize us at all!”

There's just no comparison here. In the old days, movies weren't afraid to be totally off-the-wall crazy to drive a point in, in the name of both artistry and entertainment. A film like Videodrome, despite being completely batshit, had a real direction to it and a point to what it was trying to say: modern TV is too gratuitous and violent. And it wasn't afraid of using the most over the top, grotesque imagery to get there, because that's what satire is supposed to be – going all the way back to A Modest Proposal, satire is about being as subtle as a jackhammer to the face. It's about being totally off the wall and ridiculous to drive home a point. (Well, yes, you can be subtle about it too. But that's not the kind I'm talking about here.)

Movies these days don't seem to get that on the whole – a lot of films these days are ashamed to be that way, as being over the top is seen as bad and not cool. So instead, we just get stuff that's ironically bad, removing itself from criticism by going “well, I meant to make something horrible.” Surprise, that's not how it works – you won't be remembered.

In Scanners, Cronenberg tells a surprisingly emotional and dark tale of the journey of a special psychic man (a “Scanner”) to help save the world from what he's told is an evil Scanner. I don't want to spoil too much of it for those of you who for some reason haven't seen it yet, but it's actually a very deceptive story about trusting in large powerful corporations (or whatever deity holds its influence over you) and about belonging to a group – nothing is as it seems. The film is a tortured epic and tells a story about corruption and lies.

One thing the film is great at is explaining its very complex and multi-faceted universe – as this is a science fiction tale about things we don't normally experience in real life, it's obviously necessary to have some explanation and exposition in there. But it's done tastefully. When this movie explains shit, it keeps those explanations short and lets you know the facts without being egregious about it. And you do care, because you want to see the main character succeed and you're interested in what the hell's going to happen next – so the explanations have more gravity. Going off that, you also have NO CLUE what's going to happen – it's not a predictable film and so you're actually sitting there wondering what's going to happen, and thus the exposition is important for that reason.

In The Conjuring, the exposition and explanation are there because the movie has no story. When the psychics Ed and Lorraine Warren are telling the characters what's going on, it's really just because the film had no other substance – there's no real emotional connection or depth to this story, no reason for the audience to care. It's just explaining and explaining and explaining, followed by jump scares, with a possession exorcism climax.

What am I supposed to be invested in there? The film's story – what scant little there is – has already been done a thousand times over, so you can't even fall back on the novelty of a unique idea to cover up for the lazy writing.

I don't even think Scanners is necessarily a perfect film – it's got some flaws. I don't think lead actor Stephen Lack is that great (certainly not good enough for the amount of screen time he has) and, as the movie goes on, I do find it gets a bit slow at times. However, its intrigue, message and overall journey from beginning to end are satisfying and interesting to watch. You at least got the sense of a powerful story being told overall. With The Conjuring, it's just empty – empty “go quiet followed by loud noise” jump scares, empty story clumsily trying to fill its own inadequacies with more exposition...there's just no imagination.

In The Brood, Cronenberg weaves a cautionary satiric tale of new age hippie medicine and healing practices, combining that with a very dark and surprisingly touching family story about a father trying to do what's best for his little girl, while also struggling with his wife who's gone crazy. Lead actor Art Hindle is just incredible in this, delivering one of my favorite lead horror actor performances. You get a real sense of his struggle and the weight on his shoulders. I especially like the scenes where he interacts with Susan Hogan's character, his daughter's teacher who he almost has a budding romance with – it's very tender, fragile and a little sad, and the emotions are complex.

The scares come from the shocking and brutal murders committed, apparently, by tiny gremlins which have a connection to the wife's therapy sessions at the new-age place. It's a strange concept, but the murders are grisly and the way the characters react to them is very honest, dark and tragic – it's just a great story.

What do we get in World War Z? Cardboard cutouts of characters re-enacting the same old zombie apocalypse you saw in a billion other movies, only with zero substance or connection to the characters. It's got to be a world record for making the zombie apocalypse more boring than sitting through your high school calculus class.

If you really like any of the movies I've been slagging here, well, that's your prerogative; I'm sure there can be arguments made for enjoying these films as there can be with anything. However, I just think something has to be said here.

Yes, some of what I've said could arguably be called elitist in this article, but is that a bad thing? Elitism is quality control. It's caring about what comes out of a medium you love and having opinions. It doesn't mean I look down on anyone for thinking differently than I do here, it just means I think horror could do well going back to some of the creativity of its earlier years with directors like Cronenberg at the helm. Make of this whole thing what you will; it's just one guy's rambling. And if you haven't seen any Cronenberg flicks yet...well, make it a priority to do so this Halloween.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

Why do modern horror movies suck?

Modern horror movies suck. Or a lot of them do. People who like the genre or even just watch it casually often espouse similar views and pose the question: why do modern horror movies suck so much? Well, fortunately I am here to help explain the problem. How am I going to do this? By going to my local video store and pointing out examples, of course. If you think I’m being incredibly cynical by judging these movies based on their covers and descriptions without ever watching them, well, maybe I am. Maybe I am just jumping the gun here and being too judgmental.

But honestly, just look at some of this shit. This is the kind of sewage you’re likely to find in any video store just sitting on the shelves un-rented. And why not? We’ve seen the same things over and over and over again in horror. Let’s take a look at our first candidate for a whipping, Paranormal Asylum.

Let’s just start a check list here…

[x] Pale ghost girl with only the whites of her eyes visible, with a vacant look on her face that mirrors that of brain dead drug addicts or people who actually watch these films – two groups who would overlap quite well in a Venn diagram, honestly.

[x] Cheap dark blue lighting that seems to forget there was anything in the horror genre before Paranormal Activity.

[x] Shaky cam frame to illustrate that the movie will have some kind of “found footage” element to it.

[x] The word “Paranormal” in the title. Almost an immediate candidate for the garbage bin these days.

Without even knowing what this movie is about, I’m already tired of it. I mean Jesus, did they miss a single cliché? This is like when you go to some shitty local grocery store chain and they have regular Oreos for an inflated price, but their own cheap knock-off brand for three bucks less. It’s just pure whitewashed blandness! But hey, let’s not stop there! Let’s pick it up and look at the back of the box.

“Mary Malone (aka Typhoid Mary) was committed to a NY insane asylum to live in solitary after being blamed for spreading Typhoid Fever in the early 20^th century.”

Okay, not too bad so far – a pretty decent historical backdrop. Nothing indicating that it will be great, but maybe it won’t be that bad…until we get to this sentence:

“Now, nearly 100 years later, two best friends and aspiring filmmakers are setting out to find out what really happened.”

Gee. What a unique plot idea. Surely they’ll find nothing, go home and live the rest of their boring lives without any interruption, right? I mean, surely nothing BAD will happen…

“What starts as a simple investigation turns into a battle for survival, as they discover Mary may be dead, but she’s certainly not gone! In her quest for vengeance, torture and death appear to be the only outcome.”

Torture and death? Aw man. I was hoping she was going to bake them cookies. I am just so shocked that something bad would happen to these characters in the horror movie with the dead zombie ghost girl on the cover posing for this month’s issue of Miss Undead USA.

Why would you make this kind of shit? If you’re making a movie, and you think you have this inspiration, this drive or passion – is “supernatural ghost revenge torture movie” the best you can come up with? HAVE AN IDEA. THINK. USE YOUR BRAIN. Jesus. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to skip the whole “friends in the 2000s take a road trip with video recorders and encounter ghosts and demons and stuff” bullshit and just make a historical horror film about Typhoid Mary? Wouldn’t that be cool? I think it would. But that would require a brain. And actually doing real work and not just aping everything that came before.

It just points out one of the chief problems with horror movies now and back in the old days. These days, it’s easy to make a movie. Technology and a greater knowledge of how it’s done have made it something that anyone can do. Provided you have the money to buy a good set of cameras and a video editing program, of course - but even the latter is negligible with certain, ahem, "Internet services." And with the increasing amount of resources, you can not only make a movie much more easily than you could in the old days, but you can distribute it too, and have it stocked in video rental stores and Redbox machines everywhere. Even if no one rents it, ever, you still win because it’s out there.

You can put it on Netflix streaming, and they’ll keep it up on there forever because it’s cheaper than haggling with big studios to put legitimate movies on the site. As Netflix is so omnipresent in the movie market nowadays and is so cheap, more people come across these films. The increasing number of these cheap-ass bargain bin movies means that more people see these (as in, they see the covers and notice them) instead of legit, good and creative horror films – which DO still come out, just not as much in comparison to the sheer landslide of shaky-cam shit with blue lights, set in insane asylums and featuring titles that contain the word “Paranormal.” It’s just a no-win situation.

Back in the old days, yes, amateurs could still make movies. I would never claim there weren’t rip-offs. Sure there were. People could make movies in their garages with their buddies and if they were lucky, maybe they’d hit it big and have their movie gain somewhat more of an audience. But there wasn’t anything like what we have now. The big studios still put effort into scaring audiences. They still had to try – audiences wouldn’t accept bargain bin shit on the level that they do now:

Yeah. Real great cinema there…surely these will be remembered in the same breath as Kubrick’s The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Sigh. But that’s just the way it works in any medium. Something catches on because it has some kind of context in which it matters and makes an impact. The studio, whether it sees that or not, cares about the profit made, which inevitably does happen when something catches on like The Exorcist did.

Caring about profit is the nature of the beast – it is how these corporations work and keep making money. So when movies like The Last Exorcism 2 or The Conjuring or The Possession oh-so-wonderfully grace our mainstream theaters, they are not the work of some insidious (or Insidious) corporate evil plot to destroy the genre, as much as I like to pretend they are. They’re simply tools of the money-making wheel that keeps on turning, nothing more.

So, with that said, what’s the next movie on our tour through bargain bin horror on video store shelves?

Uh, no. No, no, no. NO. I refuse to believe that something called “Heebie Jeebies” can be anything resembling quality. That’s unbelievable. Right off the bat you just throw all caution to the wind and come up with something so stupid even Bill and Ted would turn up their noses at it. That is an accomplishment.

So what’s this one about?

Haunted gold mine…reopened after 150 years…horrific supernatural creature emitting a maddening mist that paralyzes its victim with fear or “Heebie Jeebies”…yeah, I dunno movie, you’re not instilling in me any great confidence here. You couldn’t just title it “Fear” or something? Because you really can’t make the words “Heebie Jeebies” sound scary. There is simply no way you can pull that off and have any kind of serious effect. If it’s supposed to be a comedy, well, good job if you were trying to lower the bar as far as you could, I guess. Maybe they were trying to outdo Jeepers Creepers for the worst name for a horror movie ever.

But hey, that’s another big trend with modern horror…trying to be all ironic and silly. Why bother actually writing jokes and being clever when we can just give a movie a stupid name, or make it bad on purpose?

Horror is about ideas. It’s about taking what people are afraid of in society or just in their own minds, and putting it on screen. It is an imaginative doctrine, a trade of sorts that needs something to jump off of. In the 50s and 60s, it was the fear of the Atomic Bomb that kept horror movies going. Then with the post-war culture, it was the fear of disillusioned psychopaths and killers among us as regular human beings. The 80s brought a wave of cultural satire films that talked about consumerism and the rise of Reagonomics. In the 90s, we got urban legends with Candyman, the soulless repercussions of corporate America with American Psycho and the reality-bending terrors of The Sixth Sense and Jacob’s Ladder, which ask us to participate more actively in the viewing and think about what we saw before, and how much of it was “real” in the film’s world.

And honestly, there’s been some really good parallels to our current situation in modern post-2000 horror films too. The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity have brought a wave of new “found footage” films which aren’t a bad idea in principal. We live in the generation of do-it-yourself. We are obsessed with experiencing things firsthand, recording them, and showing them to the world. Why do you think Facebook and Twitter are so popular? We love recording ourselves – we have the camera away from the horrors outside and pointed them inwards, holding them ourselves, wanting to see personally what lies out there waiting to scare us. We want to be part of the experience.

Films like [REC] and V/H/S, for example, have taken traditional horror stories and done them up the modern way by placing the camera in the viewer’s hands and letting us see the action as if it were actually happening to us, rather than to a detached third party like in a traditional narrative. There are pluses and minuses with this style as with any new trend, and I don’t even really think their full potential has been realized.

But, as with anything, there’s a lot of shit you have to sift through. As I said earlier, the fact is, horror movies are easy to make. They always have been, really; they’ve always been a DIY endeavor and have prided themselves on being a genre that didn’t need big-budget props and effects to be effective. Horror was the redheaded stepchild of cinema for so long, existing in the underground as a “B” movie artform for decades. Recently it has caught fire in the mainstream, but even so, the “B” ethos will always be there. And like I also said before, the current generation of “look at what I can do” has people making their movies and getting them out there for very little cost – even though the profit they gain back may not be earth-shattering, at least their names are out there. And that matters more than it may initially appear. Notoriety is its own form of currency.

Via Facebook and other mediums like local film shows and festivals you can submit to, these directors can get their movies out and become well known in niche communities. With an artist and the right low budget regional production company behind them, wallah, their low-grade, cheap movie becomes a reality, spreading through Netflix and video stores like wildfire. They clog the arteries of the horror genre like dairy products for a diabetic. And so the cycle continues and we get…

And no, I'm never finishing that series.

The negative effect of this is not just that there are bad movies around. It’s that really GOOD new horror flicks, such as Absentia, Pontypool or The Children, get buried in the morass and don’t get any of the attention they deserve. Take a look at Absentia:

That pretty much looks like any old random ‘ghost’ movie you’d find these days. But it’s really a complex story about a woman who lost her husband and has no idea what happened to him. He just went missing. The story unfolds as a complex drama about these peoples’ troubled lives, and also as a bone-chilling atmospheric horror film about what happens when people go missing. It’s an interesting movie because it takes a very real concept – people going missing with no explanation – and turns it into something larger than this life, giving us an explanation for it, but a terrifying one that maybe we would have rather not known at all. In these times, with our paranoia after 9/11 and the general distrust we have for strangers, a film like Absentia plays to those fears. It’s quite brilliant.

But because it appears alongside films like this in the Redbox computer or the video store…

…it doesn’t get noticed as much. Yeah, Abandoned Mine is awesome, I’m sure. A movie about teenagers going into an old mine to celebrate Halloween really sounds so vital to the genre, doesn’t it? More like Abandoned Hope for Humanity. Or Abandoned Rectal Thermometer.

So those are the big problems with horror now. Too much low-budget crap cheaply stocking the shelves of stores and Netflix/Redbox instead of good stuff, too little effort on the part of studios to actually put out good stuff. Too much copying of what came before, without really paying attention if it’s quality or not. But these things are just how the industry has come to be, for better or worse. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs.

What can we do about it? Pay attention to good movies. Don’t be satisfied just watching every single home-invasion or ghost possession film out there when they hit theaters. Dig around a little bit. Be open minded to stuff you may not have noticed – foreign films, underground films, et cetera. Care about what you watch. Every little bit makes a difference.

Fortunately, none of the crappy movies I took pictures of for this piece are going to be remembered at all. They are just like any number of other obscure films from the 80s and 90s that just got forgotten as time went on. But there are some movies out there that have a widespread influence on every modern horror film, which I think I’ll take a look at to commemorate the scariest month of the year. What’s first up, you ask? Well…

“Let’s play a game…”

All images copyright of their original owners. Thanks to Reel Video for having those DVDs in your store so I could take pictures of them!