I Love Horror – A horror blog devoted to the critical, analytical, and cynical assessment of the horror industry and horror films.

King’s article in Entertainment Weekly can be found here.

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It’s incredibly rare for a horror movie to frighten, especially when you consider the big-budget, special effects laden abortions that Hollywood has been churning out as of late, so it’s always nice to see someone like Stephen King, an icon for the genre and purveyor of three-page long descriptions of curtains, to provide his scathing yet subtle opinion of big-budget horror films and their inherent inability to frighten the viewer. Unfortunately, fear is subjective, and citing a horror film’s potential to frighten as the rubric upon which it must be graded is simply a bad idea. There are so many amazing horror films that AREN’T scary, but are still excellent in their own right. Fear, however, exists on so many levels, that no movie can possibly scare everyone who views it. I’m sure I’m just stating the obvious, but it’s true. One of Mr. King’s major points is the claim that the The Strangers, despite being a major Hollywood release, actually offered up genuine fear, but for me it was nothing but cheap, predictable scares sullied by piss-poor acting and awful direction. This doesn’t mean it was a bad idea like, say, the entire Leprechaun series or anything Platinum Dunes puts out. There exists a little French film called Ils that features pretty much an identical plot, yet it’s so perfectly executed that it scared the Hell out of me, and it didn’t rely on the cheap scares or excessive gore that plagues these big films.

Conversely, let us look at a movie like Event Horizon. Now, given its director and hit-or-miss acting, the prospect of this film frightening someone might be laughable. Gross generalizations aside, it did in fact make the light beside my bed a gift from God, and I’ll tell you why: it focused on real fears. Sam Neil, being the physical embodiment of a place worse than Hell itself, terrified the shit out of me. This is precisely why a movie like The Exorcist remains one of the scariest ever made. The concept of a little girl possessed by a demon focuses on what is perceived to be completely plausible and very real fear to many, thus causing it to affect the viewer on a level a quick scare can’t. The fear lasts and doesn’t dissipate once the credits role. Of course, I’d be remiss if I ignored the outstanding direction, acting, soundtrack, and everything that goes into making a good film good, but that’s for a whole other article.

King touches upon one thing that mirrors one of the biggest issues I have with horror movies, that being the apparent need to explain the motives of the antagonists. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead exemplifies how explanations and background are secondary to the story, as any explanation for the zombie outbreak is relegated to speculation. King says it best when he writes, “nightmares exist outside of logic.” By leaving it up to the viewer’s imagination you’re in effect utilizing one of the most effective tools for conjuring up fear. Offering up an explanation moves whatever is happening in the film away from the realm of reality, and in the end, the fear has the tendency to dissolve once the viewer comes to grips with the fact that what they’re watching isn’t real.

One final point concerning King’s article is his opinion of M. Night Shayamalan’s newest abortion The Happening, citing the director’s understanding of fear in its success over the other supposed big-budget fear fest, X-Files 2. The whacky exploits of Mulder and Scully notwithstanding, I’m simply going to assume King was coerced into writing that, as there is no way that he can, as a horror writer, believe what he wrote. An R-rating does not make a movie frightening, and while The Sixth Sense may have been chock full o’scares, The Happening is just one mangled corpse away from being akin to torture-porn, that most reviled of all sub-genres, and in the end it fails on an epic scale.

Despite the grievances I have with King’s article, he sums up the point I’m trying to make (at least regarding fear) perfectly when he says, “Horror is an intimate experience, something that occurs mostly within oneself, and when it works, the screams of a sold-out house are almost intrusive.” This is precisely why movies like Saw and Hostel fail in their attempts to frighten. They’re just…gross. All the fear is visceral – the result of an instinctive nature to look away when someone is getting their head sawed open or their eyeball removed with a drill, and that’s just unfair. Unfortunately, as long as these movies keep making money, someone will keep writing them and, sadly, we’ll keep seeing them.

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