Stephen King's IT returns to the big screen and audiences are floating with glee. Are we ready for a resurgence for horror movies? I think we are.
“Do you like scary movies?”
Over the past weekend, I celebrated my 24th birthday by seeing It, based on Stephen King’s book about an evil clown, in theaters with my best friend…who is terrified of clowns. I always found it unusually that I, a film enthusiast who is not a big horror movie fan, would willingly go see this movie based on a 1,136-page horror book with gruesome violence against children and preteens, child abuse, misogyny and homophobia, sexual references and an infamous sex scene. Oh, and the clown eats children. It’s bizarre to say the least.
Fortunately, the movie focuses primarily on the relationships between its main characters, the Loser’s Club, and their confrontation against their own personal fears. Instead of, you know, the totally necessary detail about the clown’s worst enemy being a turtle. Yeah, Stephen King's books are interesting.
And It (Ha, unintentional pun!) is still #1 at the box office. I can think of no better time to reflect on the resurgence of the horror genre.
Between the 2000’s and 2010’s, you were lucky if you can find a uniquely original horror movie. Many of which was going to be a American remake of a J-horror (Japanese horror) movie with a creepy dead girl or a “reboot” of a 70’s and 80’s slasher that you watched growing up that is officially ruined by Platinum Dunes, Transformers director Michael Bay’s production company.
The only way those slasher reboots can get any worse is if Jason Voorhees used a bazooka instead of his famed machete.
NEW BLOOD
Luckily for us, a new breed of terror comes in the forms of 2012’s Sinister, followed by New Line Cinema’s The Conjuring. Upon release, Sinister earned $18 million and ended its run with $77 million at the worldwide box office. That’s not bad. But then the following year, The Conjuring made nearly $42 million in its first weekend and ranked #1 at the box office before ending its theatrical run with a gross of $318 million worldwide.
To give you a bit more perspective, this movie was released in the same month as Pacific Rim, Wolverine and (shudders) Smurfs. Four years later, The Conjuring launched a whole franchise with a third Conjuring movie and a new spin-off in the works. The newest installment, Annebelle: Creation, have already garnered $291 million towards the end of what is considered the worst-attended summer movie season in the past 25 years.
If you’re wondering why I just bored you with box office numbers, that goes to show that moviegoer’s taste for horror is acquired. Speaking of this year, I did a quick Google search just to see how many horror movies were released this year alone. I can at least name five more horror movie titles this year than I can with any other year.
WHY WE LIKE WATCHING HORROR MOVIES
Dr. David Zald, Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, conducted a study that showed that some people’s brains lack what he referred to as “brakes” on dopamine release. This allows people to be more attracted to fear. Dr. Bryan Roche, Lecturer in Psychology from Maynooth University in Ireland explained:
“Fear and pleasure are very closely related. The same physiological reactions occur in both cases, and in fact using a polygraph machine to measure heart rate, pupillary dilation, electrical skin conductance, breathing rate, and other physiological activities will not really tell you whether a persons is afraid or excited.
“For some people the experience of watching a horror film creates physiological feelings that are always interpreted as “fun”, “a short thrill” and so on. But for others, the feelings in their bodies are interpreted as “terror” or other similarly negative states.”
Whether they subconsciously aware that they are watching the movie in a safe place, the audience can develop pleasure out of the genuine and manufactured fear that a horror movie generates. Horror movies are pretty much like roller coasters.
HOW DO HORROR MOVIES GET MADE?
Firstly, the movie sets the tone for the next hour or so by opening itself with atmosphere right away. It should hook you as well as something like this.
It is a dark, cold night. In the center of the woods lies a cabin molded from old wood from the blackest oak trees. You walk closer to it. The grass and twigs move and break at your every step you make towards the cabin with nothing but your foolish curiosity to arm yourself with. The sounds of the woods begin walling in on you, as if every creature are now giant man-eating monsters on the prowl. The night is growing hungry.
The key difference is this quote will be written in novels and screenplays, however movies, being a visual and sound-based medium, must convey the exact same imagery like you just did in your head. Once that’s done, stories naturally go onto establish your protagonists, attempting to making them likable for you to cheer them on by giving them time to develop as, you know, people. They can either be kids, teenagers or adults. Most horror movies nowadays prefer to focus more on the blood and the gore factor, hence ditching that last part and reducing them into the typical archetypes. Horror fans like to call them “meat”. I wonder why.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the final girl. You know, the one who doesn’t break Randall’s three simple rules to abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie?
I’m really sorry. I love that movie.
Now you know your characters, the movie will immediately jump to sequence. Now we have establish the story. What is happening? Who is the killer? Did he die? Why did he die? Why are your characters in a place where there is a killer? Some of them start partying in their small cabin with drinks, some weed and/or hot fun in the bedroom. We stuff up the movie with stuff for the characters to talk about and do.
Finally, we have arrived to the roller coaster. This is where and how we raise the high stakes. The killer is upon us, your protagonists start to die, the rest are trapped but there is nowhere left to hide! All her friends are dead. The non-blonde cute girl who doesn’t like partying, the fore-mentioned “final girl”, must depend on her wits and her determination to survive as she evades the killer at every turn! He almost got her! But she stabs him in the shoulder and the eye! The killer falls off a cliff and the girl catches her breath. She is safe.
She looks down the cliff to find the body. Sike! The killer tries to pull her down with him, but she kicks him off and he continues his descent to the depths of hell.
How’s your heart rate? I know that’s a whole lot of story that happens in one paragraph but that is how basically how suspense works and that is how you make good horror.
TIME FOR NEW MONSTERS
Once we start getting movies like Get Out and It, I kind of contemplate on what took Hollywood so long to realize that the horror genre needed a facelift, but I already know the answer. Those remakes I mentioned earlier during the 2000s?
Everyone has seen the originals a dozen times, however those remakes have tried absolutely nothing to alter the formula or allowed them to stand on their own. If I tell that scene takes place in a slasher movie, what do you think would happen here?
Exactly.
Filmmakers figure out that moviegoers are too familiar with the horror movie tropes and need something fresh, so they search for new novelties. That’s how we got a horror movie about a young interracial couple visiting the girlfriend’s parents in a eerily sinister suburban neighborhood that doubles as political satire or Edge of Tomorrow except with a masked murderer killing a college girl in different ways. In other words, they are subverting the audience’s expectations of what they are typically capable of.
In the case of It, I believe the filmmakers behind the movie, including director Andrés Muschietti, incorporated another returning trend: the 1980’s. Movies today would borrow inspiration from movies released during that decade, like The Goonies, E.T., and A Nightmare on Elm’s Street, which they would emulate the period’s classic tones and themes of movies of that period with nostalgic allure. A great number of 80’s action and thriller movies feature young children placed in perilous situations, i.e. dealing with bullies, supernatural forces, aliens, the government, high school, etc. There is no better decade I can imagine for the events of It that fit better thematically and stylistically than the 1980’s.
With It‘s recent box office success, do you think It will bring horror movies a return to form? Let me know in the comment section down below!
Comments