Horror isn't Scary
2020-08-18
The 20th century had fantastic, iconic, culturally-important horror movies. It doesn’t take a film buff to say Alien or The Exorcist were great films. Even low-brow slashers like Halloween or Texas Chainsaw Massacre are staples. But there’s not many great horror movies made after 2000. I expect that’s chiefly due to our culture changing.
Fear of the Unknown
Back in 1970, the idea of demonic possession or a monster in the woods wasn’t totally farfetched. A lot of reasonable people might shrug and say "it’s possible", and when put into a scary situation would be more than likely to imagine such things actually occurring. These days, though, every single person has a high-quality camera on their person at all times. We’re recording millions of hours of video every day, and every corner of the Earth is extensively mapped out and photographed from space. There really is no place for a monster to hide, and if aliens or ghosts were something that affected really people; we’d have evidence of it by now.
Horror is strongly based in not knowing or understanding what’s going on. Something strange, out of place, or downright wrong is what sets us off. But that’s not really enough - because something scary needs to feel plausible to us. A giant mutant zombie jumping out of the trees to eat us might provide a jumpscare, testing our primitive instincts for survival. But it’s not enough to really get under our skin. To do that, you need to build a story that feels like it could actually happen - it can’t strictly violate the rules we’re used to seeing in the real world.
We know there are no monsters in the sewer, no witches in the forest, no aliens in the desert. We’ve never found convincing evidence of ghosts or possession. Few people really hold out any serious belief that these things are true, anymore. It’s not plausible. This is one reason why so many aliens make appearances in modern horror movies - we genuinely don’t have the faintest idea what’s out there. It could be a megacivilization, a floating parasite, or maybe an unknown effect that drives people mad. But there are no aliens here.
We just know too much to be scared of these things.
Things that still scare us
The most successful recent horror movie was definitely Get Out. But as good as it was, it fell apart the more of it was explained. The idea of people being forced against their will to do things, of sinister people hiding behind smiling exteriors, and intimate partners manipulating us are plausible things. A secret cult of northeasterners that mind control and bodyswap with victims? Uhhhh, not sure about that. That goes double for Us, a studio-mandated spiritual successor about psychopathic government clones that was beyond disappointing in concept and execution.
There’s also good fare for dystopian horror. The world is, frankly, falling off the foreseeable cliffs that we’ve been hurtling towards. Distrust is everywhere, people can’t even have a conversation about how to save lives without descending into bickering over useless details. Parents are forcing children into life-altering procedures against their will, doctors and science are corrupted by interests beyond scientific inquiry. The world is… pretty scary. There’s material there.
But when it comes to monsters, there’s very little to go around. Any monster would have to be introduced, because we know no monsters exist. Introducing something new reduces how plausible it is. But, as long as the monster isn’t just in a single place, it’s possible to scare people. Bird Box is a good example of creative monsters that are never seen, and not in any one place, but constantly surround us and cloak us in paranoia. And now, we’ve got a pandemic which has been drummed up to such hysteria that healthy people who face no risk from infection are genuinely terrified of getting a cough. Something like 10 Cloverfield Lane, with its air of paranoia and uncertainty of the threat, can still grip us. Individual monsters may be outdated, but an aura of implied danger is still effective.
Not here to pitch
I’m not a filmmaker, i don’t pretend to be. I’m an audience member. And i’m just speculating on how horror, more than any other genre, is being forced to adapt to changing times. I want to see great horror movies, and it frustrates me that so many contemporary horror movies are not just poorly-executed (horror has always had its share of low-budget entries), today they’re also poorly-conceived.
So here’s to filmmakers that take horror seriously, and maybe we’ll find a new breed that introduce us to something that can scare us again.
