It’s safe to say that the horror genre has evolved in numerous ways since the days of famous moviemaker Alfred Hitchcock, the first film adaptations of Stephen King’s numerous novels, and the reign of the “scream queen” Jamie Lee Curtis. In fact, the genre has come so far in terms of special effects that important criteria such as plot and casting have taken a fall.
For instance, we have the entire Paranormal Activity sequence. When the first film hit theaters, the idea of a low budget, homemade horror film based on the idea of ghosts, spirits, and demons sky rocketed, bringing about attempts at this idea such as Paranormal Entity, Episode 50, and even the newest Grave Encounters (and Grave Encounters 2) films. Although each was creative in their own way, their base seemed to overlap with each other leaving an “I’ve seen this before” sensation with many audience members.
On another note, we have the vampire craze. By this, I don’t mean Robert Pattinson’s character in any of the Twilight films. Instead, I wanted to look at Hollywood’s take on the traditional Nosferatu. Modern day adaptations create far more complex of a character than the 1922 German film, but I’m not sure it has been done to “terrifying” levels. For instance, there is The Descent, which was released in 2005 and ran very similar to I Am Legend, where the vampire-like creatures lived in the dark. In this film, however, it was a cave that left a group of hikers trapped with bloodthirsty creatures that couldn’t see, but could hear echoes, leaving the group almost helpless. Although this is a strange twist on the vampire that seems interesting enough to draw audiences in, it is also one that leaves them literally disgusted. The amount of gore completely overran the film, making an interesting plot almost unwatchable.
Of course, not all films have terrible plots, and the special effects in The Woman in Black were fantastic, but casting caused somewhat of a pitfall. Most everyone knows who Harry Potter is by now, and those same people see Daniel Radcliff are immediately thrown when he has the lead role in a horror film as a widower father. However, about halfway through the film, audience adjusts to the new role, and most will agree that they were scared multiple times from then on. Insidious used scare tactics very similar to those of The Woman in Black, and both were highly appreciated by audiences. However, were they truly scary, or were the special effects, music, and even sounds just well executed creating a good movie instead of a scary one?
On this note, I’m going to turn to Sinister. Immediately after leaving the theater, I swore it was the scariest movie I have seen in a long time. The plot, casting, and special effects all blended together beautifully, creating this first scary movie I can honestly say had me interested the entire time. Most movies lose their audience when they go into detail about the backstory, but Sinister’s backstory of Bagul, the child stealing demon, was concise and to the point, and the movie lost no scares in explaining it. On top of this, the film didn’t have to resort to unimaginable amounts of gore to get its point across. Overall, I believe this is the first horror film that was able to take every aspect of a scary movie, extract the components needed to not only set it apart, but also keep it in a traditional light, and to execute it so well that it was an instant hit.
In all, I find that recent movies have lost their touch in terms of horror; however, there is always time to change that. I think with the creation of more movies along the lines of Sinister, Hollywood will finally be onto something better.