Give or take a few bumps, the surge of the horror genre has continued unabated since its re-emergence following the sleeper success of Wes Craven’s 1996 post-modern slasher Scream.
While Scream’s $100 million US domestic gross forced Hollywood to reacquaint itself with horror’s commercial potential, the revitalisation of the genre was given an extra dimension by the real-life terrors of 9/11 and the second Gulf War – all of which neatly reflects the two most common drivers of horror boom times, commercial viability and volatile socio-political climates.
The recent slew of torture porn films and extreme horror as popularly personified by the Hostel and Saw franchises as well as by euro offerings such as Martyrs can be seen as directly descending from such real-life ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ incidents such as the live video beheading of hostages by Islamic militants and treatment of prisoners of war at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison camp. And this is not a new correlation. Back in the ’50s the post-war atomic bomb paranoia produced a new genre of film where helpless humans were attacked by monsters created by atomic experiments or by something eerie hanging out in the atomic testing wastelands of New Mexico.
In the late ’60s George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead commented on everything from race issues, civil rights and the escalating Vietnam War but it was the full realisation of the grimness of US involvement in Indochina that were to provide the golden age of horror as an army of fresh young filmmakers cut their teeth on low budget frighteners that opened at the end of that fateful War and made savage statements about the conflict and in particular the US’s involvement in it.
The best of these movies, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left all reflected misgivings about that murkiest of conflicts. Whether it was broken down teens infringing on the life of a family of isolated slaughterhouse workers, a stranded family entering the land of a group of genetically contaminated desert cannibals or a gang of scummy villains seeking refuge in the house of a couple whose daughter they have violated and murdered, the message was clear – stay out of other people’s homes and other people’s way of life or get what you deserve.
Indeed, Papa Jupiter, the cannibal patriarch in Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, addresses this directly in a memorable monologue to the charred remains of a father of a group middle class interlopers when he chastises the corpse for coming to his world and ‘sticking your life in my face’. So it’s not surprising that we are getting similar reflections on such events as the invasion of Iraq, government sponsored torture and beheadings on the Internet. Chainsaw, Hills and Last House have all been remade in reflection of these current turbulent times and it’s perhaps not surprising that all three remakes represent some of the better offerings of the current horror surge.
Of course, in the film world, money talks also and horror remains a unique genre in that it doesn’t require budget or marquee names to make profit. Indeed, when Hollywood does inject big budgets and star names into horror you more often than not get commercial and critical disasters such as Sandra Bullock’s Premonition and Hilary Swank’s The Reaping. The big draw of the horror genre is the genre itself and with no need for star names the current crop of horror films are able to populate their cheap casts with throw-away TV stars and reality show wannabes. While horror movies keep making ROI in their opening weekends and the world stays in such a state of tumult, it’s safe to assume that the genre will continue to thrive.
