Horror Movies

I used to watch horror movies by the dozens. Of course, the form is in decline now, so we are lucky to get even one good one--let alone a great one--in any given year. Horror movies are my first love and it saddens me to see them in decline. Anymore, I see them as a faded Southern Belle in a Tennessee Williams play--once beautiful, but now tawdry.

It wasn't always like this. Every so often, something sparks an interest in the horror genre and a new cycle of films and filmmakers appear to vie with the classics in the field. Right now, that renaissance is overdue. The great horror filmmakers of the past are now either gone or have simply descended into irrelevance. The less said about the late careers of John Carpenter, George Romero, Dario Argento, and Tobe Hooper, the better. Only David Cronenberg seems to plug along, year after year, pursuing his own imp of the perverse in increasingly daring and challenging films, but even he seems to have been co-opted by the art houses.

Fortunately, there are rumblings on the horizon. The last revolution in the genre took place on the fringes and that is where the next one will appear. The end of the Twentieth Century saw genres collapsing and exploding all at once. Something will emerge from the wreckage. Nightmares are immortal and timeless.

Well...that was then and this is now. In the intervening years, the horror genre has enjoyed something of a renaissance. The period since 1998 (as of this writing) has been one of the genre's periodic boom times. Exciting things have happened in the genre, though, as I note in the last paragraph above, most of it has happened on the fringes. If you gauged the health of the genre solely from the marquee at the multiplex, the last decade has been particularly lean. But even in the face of a stagnant mainstream, horror has flourished in all sectors of moviemaking: independent productions like Frailty and The Blair Witch Project; foreign productions from Asia and Europe (the big horror film for 2005 may well be a Russian film); and even some of the big studio product from Hollywood (The Sixth Sense, Sleepy Hollow). The genre has diversified, too. It is no longer held hostage by the slasher movie, even in the wake of Scream and its imitators. Horror films of all types are being made now, not just cheap rip-offs designed to cash in on a first-weekend audience of teen-aged boys (though even THOSE films are still legion).

Part of it is the times we live in. When people are scared, horror films flourish.

Of course, it can't last. We are already seeing a market glutted with garbage, especially at the multiplexes. But this boom time has already lasted longer than I expected. I suspect that twenty or thirty years from now, the next generation of horror fans will look back on this period fondly and say that this was one of the golden ages.

As a final note, beware: I admit movies into the canon of horror movies that you might not think of as horror movies. This is deliberate. After all, "horror" isn't really a genre at all--it's an emotion.