“I like scary movies! Like ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost’.”
I said these words as a 4-year-old and, like a toddler, I was naive. Naive to hope any future horror movie could ever exceed the bar set by Casper. Naive to hope any would even be worth my time.
I could talk about how I hate the idea of paying money to be scared. I live in St. Louis, I can drive 20 minutes at night and be scared for free, and it’s way more realistic than sitting in a theater.
Also, why do I want to be scared? What kind of psychopath wants to be frightened instead of feel comfortable and secure? You’re already going to have it when you graduate and start paying off your student loans, so why waste money now when you have a long life of payments to be frightened by?
My beef isn’t even with not wanting to pay to be scared. I mean, it is, but the production of horror movies is way worse than any other problem I have with horror films.
The entire market is saturated with thousands of films that follow the exact same formulated plotline. I’ve boiled every movie down to one of these three formulas:
- Family moves into bad home, one member of the family goes crazy, everyone but one member dies.
- Kids try to contact dead people, evil spirit possesses one of them, a couple people die.
- Scientists (etc.) go against the laws of nature, experiment gone wrong, many dead people.
And can we talk about how predictable the scary parts are? The music and close-up shots give it away every time.
Go ahead, think about it. The worst version of these movies are from the “artsy” point of view where everything is shot from a handheld camera. A headache, bad acting and predictable plot? No thank you.
Oh and the ‘homemade video’ types somehow always include random shots of naked women that almost never have to do with any other part of the movie. I’m sick of it.
This entire industry has succumbed to lazy writing and mediocre actors. Demand more from your horror movies and maybe you’ll actually be scared for once.
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