This month, we bring you a special four-part series examining the past, present and future of the horror genre, with a new article to be posted each week. This special feature debuts with Part 1: What Ever Happened to Rosemary’s Baby? — A Manifesto Regarding The Slow, Suspenseless Death Of Horror.

[This month, we bring you a special four-part series examining the past, present and future of the horror genre, with a new article to be posted each week. This special feature debuts with Part 1: What Ever Happened to Rosemary's Baby? -- A Manifesto Regarding The Slow, Suspenseless Death Of Horror.]

Rule #1: Any genre can have a bad movie. But the worst movies will always be sci-fi or horror.

It’s widely accepted that there are no good comedy films anymore.

I know, I know.

My saying that prompted you to think of two movies this year that contradict that. Well, my real point is that: there were only two. Max. But we can accept that, and the reason why is because we know comedy is hard. We all practice it in our daily lives, and it’s challenging. Good comedy is endlessly inventive; it’s universal, but also cerebral. A good comedy film appeals to you, but also to a seventy year old grandfather, and an eighteen year old high school student. To see it at its best is exciting not just because of the actual quality, but because of that scarcity.

In contrast, horror should be easy for movies to duplicate. “Should” being the operative word. In real life, we feel nervous walking alone down the wrong street. A sudden electrical blackout can kick our adrenaline in on high. Just going through life, we watch incomprehensible, unfathomable events outside anybody’s control happen to those around us, to those we love. In short, horror surrounds us everywhere, and when we don’t see it, our imaginations frequently invent it.

And this is probably why, in general, the most recent crop of horror movies is failing so abysmally. When movies try to instill fear and fail, they magically jump genres and enter the realm of comedy. Right now, we’ve reached a sad state of affairs: you stand a much better chance of going to the theater and actually laughing if you see a horror movie as opposed to a comedy.

Going back to Rule #1 of this multi-part exploration of the many flaws (and comparatively fewer triumphs) of modern horror cinema, the worst movies will always be sci-fi or horror [we’ll leave sci-fi out of the discussion from here on out, but you can generally assume that it’s implied]. Being dry, super-technical, and probably obnoxious about this, the reason is that other genres solely require empathetic imagination (imagine you met that girl/guy, imagine your mom died, etc.) whereas horror and sci-fi require empathetic imagination, situational imagination, and the adoption of a nonrealistic interior logic.

Movies can easily match your empathetic imagination, and even frequently outdo it, through your body’s uncontrollable response to music, dialogue, and plot clichés/cues/tropes. But, with respect to the average supernatural, fantastic, or futuristic situation, your imagination will often be left disappointed, because it can so easily outdo what you’re seeing. Additionally, the film’s world-building has to draw you in; you have to accept its self-contained interior logic, or the absurd incongruity between what you see on the screen and the actual world you’re accustomed to will leave you laughing at the film’s portrayal of its own reality.

In short, all movies are dumb and your brain knows it, but it’s more likely to let movies that happen within a world approximating ours slide. Not so for the fantastic. And that’s why, even though we know that Debra Messing having to hire a male prostitute as her date to a wedding is totally absurd, it still seems less ridiculous to us than when Kirsten Baker hears spooky noises and responds by stripping and jumping in a lake to skinny-dip in Friday the 13th, Part 2. Both events are actually only equally unlikely, but our innate bullshit detector tells us that the second one is faker, because of the supernatural murdering nonsense surrounding it.

Rule #2: Pick an archetype and run with it.

But, when they’re done well, nothing can match a great horror film. And there are plenty of great ones. But, the sad fact is, more than any genre, horror has some basic rules that must be obeyed. And, unlike in other genres, when the rules are messed with or subverted in horror, the results are frequently terrible.

Horror, done well, is mainly about archetypes. You can take whatever modern concern you have and make a horror story around it (c’mon Pulse…cell phones?), but it will generally suck compared to an effective reinterpretation of an ancient myth or fundamental human or storytelling concern. The reason is that horror, being primitive, works best on a primal level.

So, all classic (and most good) horror films pick one key cultural archetype to terrify you with and work the rest of the proceedings around that. Take a tired example like “The Haunted House” and think about the genius films that antiquated concept has inspired. Skipping the obvious, you have more innovative riffs like a) Haunted House in Space (Alien), b) Haunted House in multiple houses (Halloween), or c) Haunted Hotel (The Shining). A successful and more recent counterpart is d) Haunted Multifamily Complex (Session 9).

Every great horror movie can be summarized in this way: you cannot find an exception. They convey and generate intimate fears via big concepts. Nightmares (Nightmare on Elm Street), Satan (The Exorcist), the sea (Jaws), and even the very idea of horror archetypes (It) have been used to create the most effective horror films. Tweaking this and switching the “Big Picture” to something new, ephemeral, or arbitrary typically results in total failure, because there is no way you can impact the viewer identically using, say Gingerbread Men (The Gingerbread Man), a fear that nobody has, versus dark, confined spaces (The Descent), a fear that many people have.

Rule #3: Horror films after 2004 are so different from what preceded them that you can quickly label the former New Horror, and the latter Old Horror. If you’re trying to see or make a good horror movie, shoot for Old Horror.

The awareness and popularity of horror films is always cyclical, hitting the general public in waves. While horror movies might currently be prominent in the public consciousness, they’re also reaching a nadir with respect to quality. Yes, excellent new horror movies are being released, and will be celebrated and discussed in a later portion of this series; but right now, they are far overshadowed by the absolute dreck that’s being released and rewarded at the box office.

If I have to pick a big flaming zeppelin of a franchise that inspired this manifesto, I’d probably say that it’s Saw. The average viewer watches it and simply observes that it’s a piece of shit, without feeling the need to stop to think and wonder why. Investigating deeper, it’s easy to see that the real reason why it (and its predecessors, sequels, precursors, etc.) sucks so ridiculously is that it blithely breaks so many rules with no specific intent or possible benefit to be gained.

Even on a superficial viewing, Saw:
a) is unrelentingly modern
b) involves no archetype
c) features a “themed” serial killer (a trend so ridiculous that it probably deserves its own article)
d) leaves no threat to the imagination
e) inspires no suspense by revolving solely around explicit torture, and
f) has a tacked-on twist ending that adds nothing to what preceded it

Its sequels add the following infractions by:
g) committing a-f again
h) turning the first movie into a formula, as opposed to the first part of a story, which might happen to be different from events that follow it
i) not learning from mistake e and insisting on amplifying the gore, further reducing the element of suspense

Of course, instead of being treated with the disrespect it deserves, the Saw series has been incredibly successful, generating over half a billion dollars worldwide. But, more alarmingly, Saw has become the inspiration to the new breed of horror movies, which currently constitute the majority of new releases.

During the last phase when horror was popular (1996-1999), Scream, which was a very good horror movie, inspired any number of shitty teen slasher flicks that, when watched, could instantly be labeled as Scream derivatives. But at least they were trying to rip off something worth emulating; now we’re just watching poor imitations of something that sucked to begin with. Basically, these movies have totally lost touch with, have no connection to, and cannot claim to be inspired by legitimately good horror films. [Another approach would have been for them to be both original and good, but why ask for French Toast when you can’t even order a freezer waffle?]

So the real question that this series will ask is, What Ever Happened To Rosemary’s Baby? But not just Rosemary’s Baby. Whatever happened to The Shining? Whatever happened to Psycho?

Prior to the rise of the slasher film, many of the best directors of their generations (Speilberg, Polanski, Kubrick, and Hitchcock to name a few) cut their teeth on or made masterpieces within the horror genre. So, what happened in the early 1980’s that caused legitimate directors to decide to completely eschew it? Forget exceptional voices; why are there so few adequate voices in horror? And how many fucking years in a row can they release a new Saw movie on Halloween?

Part 1 of this series, which you just read, made the cursory argument and then stated the case:
horror movies are currently broken. Part 2 asks how we’ve gotten here, and tries to assess the dearth of talent working in the genre. Part 3 will be an analysis of common mistakes that serves as a guide for what not to do (and on what not to see). Part 4 will be the voice of optimism and observe that, even though most new horror releases are terrible, there are notable exceptions and some highlights of the genre have been created within the past few years.

In the end, my hope is that if we can better articulate what horror fans want and don’t want, we have a better chance of getting to watch higher quality movies. Derivative, mindless horror requires the same amount of financial resources to produce as exceptional, innovative horror; it’s just that the first one is missing direction and creative spark. Here’s to hoping Hollywood takes notice and we can add momentum to a return to form for the genre we love.

Read other articles in this series:
Part I: Whatever Happened to Rosemary’s Baby?
Part II: The Lost Boys
Part III: Darkness Falls
Part IV: The Shining