Spring Break
Revisiting horror films
Ross Leonard
Issue date: 2/13/09 Section: Diversions
With the new "Friday the 13th" being released this weekend, I decided to take a look into remakes in recent years to see how badly they missed the point of staying true to the original. After doing some research, I discovered that there have been a lot of remakes in the last 10 years. What happened to the originality of today's writers? Just to name a few, here are a couple of the remakes I found: "The Amityville Horror" (2005), "Halloween" (2007), "The Hills Have Eyes" (2006) and "The Omen" (2006).
It seems the turn of the millennium ushered in a new trend in making horror films: remake the classics.
The creativeness in horror movies seemed to run dry at the start of the 2000s and cliché spook tactics were beginning to be the premise behind the movie. I can only watch a ghost or ghoul appear as a mirror closes so many times before it loses its effectiveness and becomes predictable from the start of the scene.
No dynamic directors have emerged with a new style that everyone raves about, with the exception of James Wan who propelled "Saw" into a cash cow. What happened to Wes Cravens and John Carpenters and their timeless characters like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees? Scaring people use to be an art; now it's just about seeing how gory and graphic you can make things look. We have taken advantage of the new technologies and focus too much on how real we can make the blood and guts look.
Classic movies use the unknowing as a main tool in frightening viewers. Nothing is scarier than not knowing where someone is, when they'll pop out or if there's even anyone there at all. Let the viewer's imagination take control and fill in the blanks. Good scary movies rarely even have the monster in frame. In "Halloween" (1978) we see Michael without his mask on for two seconds, maybe, but do we care that we don't see his face? No. We don't need to see his face; it's unimportant and makes the story that much more mysterious and scary. One of the things that bothered me in the 2007 remake of "Halloween" was that he was nearly 8 feet tall, drawing too much attention to himself. An 8-foot-tall giant can't sneak around in dark corners to kill unsuspecting teenagers.
It seems the turn of the millennium ushered in a new trend in making horror films: remake the classics.
The creativeness in horror movies seemed to run dry at the start of the 2000s and cliché spook tactics were beginning to be the premise behind the movie. I can only watch a ghost or ghoul appear as a mirror closes so many times before it loses its effectiveness and becomes predictable from the start of the scene.
No dynamic directors have emerged with a new style that everyone raves about, with the exception of James Wan who propelled "Saw" into a cash cow. What happened to Wes Cravens and John Carpenters and their timeless characters like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees? Scaring people use to be an art; now it's just about seeing how gory and graphic you can make things look. We have taken advantage of the new technologies and focus too much on how real we can make the blood and guts look.
Classic movies use the unknowing as a main tool in frightening viewers. Nothing is scarier than not knowing where someone is, when they'll pop out or if there's even anyone there at all. Let the viewer's imagination take control and fill in the blanks. Good scary movies rarely even have the monster in frame. In "Halloween" (1978) we see Michael without his mask on for two seconds, maybe, but do we care that we don't see his face? No. We don't need to see his face; it's unimportant and makes the story that much more mysterious and scary. One of the things that bothered me in the 2007 remake of "Halloween" was that he was nearly 8 feet tall, drawing too much attention to himself. An 8-foot-tall giant can't sneak around in dark corners to kill unsuspecting teenagers.
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