H3rc on H0rror.

If someone reached out to shake your hand and then slapped you across the face when you reached to receive it, you wouldn’t shake their hand again. Yet whenever a new “scary” flick comes out in theaters people flock to go see it, just to be slapped in the face by the movies overall horrible quality. Perhaps it’s the bad acting that draws the audience to the film. Or maybe it is the bandwidth-hogging, network-clogging, absurdly annoying flash animations that visually rape us each time we decide to log onto Myspace.
Whatever the case may be, the movie will stink and will hardly be scary. By the way, I don’t count quiet scenes interrupted by a Tourette-like outburst from something, scary. That’s just instinct that makes some of us jump. There is nothing scary about a loud noise. The unexpectedness of the noise scares, but the noise itself is not scary. Scary is when an audience member leaves the theater disturbed by something. Most people hear the term “scary movie” and think of such films as Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Nightmare on Elm Street, but scary movies can also be documentaries or even cartoons.
I’m going to quote Michael Caine from Batman Begins and say, “People are afraid of what they don’t know or understand.” This is very true. People don’t like things that are different. To make a scary movie, the makers must first realize some truth or thing that will make the audience uneasy, and exploit it. The scariest things I’ve ever seen are the most realistic. Those haunted house specials that come on the History Channel or Discovery Channel around Halloween used to keep me up at night when I was younger because it was real people, who lived just like I did, but all this unreal stuff was happening to them. It could happen to me too. And that is what made it scary…not the monsters or the ghosts, but the fact that it was just regular people being attacked by ghosts. Why? Nobody knew…except some old plump lady with a funny voice, but who would believe her…she could be a witch!
My Dad and I used to watch the X-files around that same time period…the mid/late 90’s…and the show never bothered me, two Hollywood stars running around chasing a monster or taking pictures of a funny looking light…very unreal. Then the show created a COPS-like episode where the cameraman chased Scully and Mulder around just like it worked in the regular COPS episodes. I never finished watching that episode; it bothered me so much I left the room. Only very recently, thanks to the magic of the Internet, I was able to re-watch that episode. That’s when it hit me: I was scared because I had been such a big fan of COPS (still am) and then all of a sudden I’m watching a COPS episode where there is a monster running through a neighborhood killing people. It could be my neighborhood. It was presented as something real, not a bunch of pre-set shots and special effects, but it was the real shit.

Movies need to do that. Make it real. Cloverfield was a step in the right direction…a nice step too. A regular guy, filming just like a regular person would, moving just like a regular person would, in an environment where a regular person could be in. All this regularity evaporated by this behemoth that is wrecking NYC. Because of all the regularity, when the monster attacked something in our brains clicked and told us, that’s not right, and adrenaline was let loose. The whole monster concept was debatable, a stretch beyond belief, but it could happen. What worked was everything else. It didn’t bother me nearly as much as that episode of the X-Files, but then again there is 10 years of maturing between that and this too. I think the movie would have been much more scarier if it were like a terrorist attack involving small pox or some viral epidemic. That is much more realistic and has a good chance of happening. It would make the audience uncomfortable and uneasy for a while, and that is what a good scary movie should be able to do. If I can remember the name of it, there was a show on like CBS or NBC a long time ago where they were showing how inadequate the US would be if a virus outbreak were to occur. It was show similar to Cloverfield in that it was presented as a home video shot by a teenage boy chronicling the entire ordeal. I cannot remember the title of the show, nor can I find clips of it, but I vividly remember being weary of such an attack for a while after viewing that show.
In the end I doubt much will change as far as horror movies are concerned. But I really wish I would one day get to see a truly scary movie. Something that changes the way I see things…the Jaws of my generation.

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