Interviews
Do you think that the horror genre has resurfaced in America?
Only in the sense that mainstream movie going audiences have once again embraced the genre, which has in turn piqued the studio interested in backing horror film with some semblance of a budget. Horror will always be the bastard stepchild of the motion picture industry, even when a film like Silence of the Lambs or Pan's Labyrinth makes mainstream waves, the films are re-labeled as Suspense thrillers or Supernatural Fantasies. It's the nature of the beast. Just consider what occurred when Midnight Cowboy became the first X-Rated film to win the Oscar for best picture. The film was re-released with no alterations, now bearing the rating of "R". It's image over content every time. That being said, I don't believe that horror has ever left the underbelly of Hollywood. Films have been driving people into theaters to face fears and bear bloody witness since man first cranked the handle on a motion picture camera and obviously in popular art centuries before film stock was invented. Maybe one of the best examples early "butts in the seats cinema" is Thomas Edison's 1903 film "Electrocuting an Elephant" which, like most primitive cinema is little more than a clip of an event, in this case the event is the actual killing of Tospy—a Coney Island animal that was responsible for the death of some park patrons. Edison essentially shot the film not for posterity but for promotion of electrical power. It's a disturbing film to say the least and arguably on par with the displays of cruelty seen some 80 years later in Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust.
What movies do you think would be credited for this increase in popularity?
In the past 10-years, the rebirth of horror as a viable theatrical market for studios belongs to two men Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson. It's inarguable that had Craven and Williamson not made Scream, then some filmmaker, somewhere would have eventually reestablished genre cinema. But, Williamson had a finger on the pulse of pop culture at that time. Remember that Scream came out just two years after Quentin Tarantino delivered Pulp Fiction and that film really redefined how characters interact with each other on screen. It opened an audience up to a style of language that, if they weren't steeped in something like the theater of David Mamet, they probably had never seen before. Scream works for two reasons, the dialogue is self-aware with out being self-parody and Craven had the foresight to cast actors who actually looked like American High School students (despite the fact that Skeet Ulrich and Matt Lillard were 26) This was in direct contrast to the Beverly Hills 90210 casting scenarios that were taking place all over the map and something I believe propagated the popularity of the film. Kids could identify with the film, and it offered a twist ending, something that most of the young viewers in the aisles were not used to. With the studio success of the first film, Scream suddenly found itself as the father of a whole new generation of teen horror films, for better or worse, it made the market viable again for studios who see nothing more than the bottom line of cheap productions with windfall box office and home video receipts. The genre could never be expected to sustain the amount of Urban Legends and I Know What You Did Last Summers that came in the wake. So, the masses begin to fade again and fringe filmmakers started to take the side stages and that’s what brings three other influential projects into the spotlight: The Blair Witch Project, Cabin Fever and The Ring. Blair Witch reminded studios that they could buy completed horror films for next to nothing and turn them into Box Office gold, which lead directly to the need, three years later, for Lionsgate to shovel out an ungodly 7-figure sum to first time filmmaker Eli Roth for the rights to distribute Cabin Fever. Just after that Gore Verbiniski's re-make of a Hideo Nakata's 1998 J-horror film Ringu set the world on fire for an Asian influx. The thing that makes those three films stand apart is that they were all successes in different ways. Both Blair Witch and Ring passed the coveted 100 million dollar mark. Blair Witch re-defined guerilla marketing while The Ring introduced Western audiences to the stylistically heavy values of Eastern cinema. Cabin Fever was a success on two fronts. It only cost about 1.5 million (before marketing and acquisitions) and it brought in over 20 million in US Box Office. It also took extreme violence back to the era of the late 1970's and early 1980's before congressional groups and religious organizations began to denounce the extremism of the genre cinema in the late 80's
Do you think that horror movies have always attracted people, but have been "taboo" until now?
The simple answer is I believe horror films have always attracted people and will always attract people and that the only things that are taboo are that way because of puritanical values embedded in American Society. What we might refer to today as taboo—take Takashi Miike's film Visitor Q for example—a film about a father who visits a prostitute who is his own daughter—is that something designed to shock us?—make people say "How could those sick people make a movie depicting that?" Well, consider that the Sophocles play Oedipus Rex is 2,400 years old and depicts a son who is sleeping with his mother. In both Oedipus and Visitor Q, the incest brings about the destruction of the family. Is it so shocking to us that Miike filmed this, or are we disregarding a long and varied history that only reinforces that what we think of as surprisingly new ideas but are in actuality are older than anyone cares to remember? For a more Christian point of view, it might be noted that in the Bible, Lot's eldest female children seduce their father after their mother's death in order to carry on the family line. Taboo? Only in the sense that "descent society" does not care to discuss them—unless they’re on tabloid TV talk shows custom made to make you feel better about yourself by ridiculing others.
Do these movies attract all types of personalities?
I know a lot of people that will never watch a horror film. It's part of their nature, no better, no worse. After all, horror films are a genre of movie making and like music, art, sports or politics, different things appeal to different people. I don't think that horror film fans are all cut from the same cloth, although I do find that horror fans are generally looking for the visceral thrill of the movie going experience. It's the same gene that makes people jump out of airplanes or ride roller coasters or patron Michael Bay productions. I don't mean to say that horror film aficionados are adrenalin junkies but the correlation is there. Talk to enough horror film fanatics and you'll find that the most of them became horror fans because they saw a film as a kid, it gave them a rush, and they were hooked. It's easy to go to a horror con and see all the people traipsing around in black leather and chains with latex wounds open on their ashen faces and say "look at those freaks" but that stereotype belies the fact that some of those people are doctors and lawyers—type A personalities that were celebrated all their lives—standing next to the introverts and the outcasts of their high schools all for the love of being scared.
Do you think that these movies increase the likelihood of a person becoming more violent, or become obsessed in the same manner as the movie permits?
I believe that film as a medium can inspire, in the same way that art, music and religion can inspire but to say that genre films increase the likelihood that the populace will turn into mass murders because they watched Halloween is asinine. I'm no psychologist but I am of the opinion that horror films don't make murderers. I don't know anyone who has killed someone. I never hear of any proven fact that says, "I watched The Shining 9,000 times then hacked open the bathroom door and slaughtered my whole family." I think that if a serial killer or a deranged lunatic kills someone in a manner that they saw depicted in a horror film, then that's happenstance—that person would have killed another person or themselves one way or another regardless of whether they saw a film or not. Obsession is an entirely different animal. Are Star Trek fans considered obsessive, I haven't heard of any Trekkers (never say Trekkie or they'll kill you…haha) stockpiling stun guns and zapping random passersby? Like I said before, I think that the mindset that allows one person to take another's life exists long before the outside stimulus ever arrives. People were certainly killing each other (and in inventive ways—see the Spanish Inquisition) long before film existed. Frankly if they stopped killing each other, where would horror film biopics be?
What parts, if there are any, of our society or culture helped allow for this popularity?How has horror changed in the past years of your knowledge concerning horror?
I want to take these two questions and blend the answers together for the sake of brevity, because I feel that the points are interconnected. Earlier I cited Thomas Edison's film "Electrocuting an Elephant". Sometime later, in 1962, Italian filmmakers Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi shot a psuedo-documentary titled Mondo Cane. This film was a travelogue of strange cultural practices throughout the world. Mondo Cane is really the grandfather of Reality Television and Reality Television is what I think has desensitized modern viewing audiences and forced Horror back to the Grindhouse era of exploitation. The dismantling of the Hays Production Code in the late 60's and the birth of the MPAA (a subject we'll get into later) allowed filmmakers a level of freedom that they had not experienced for generations. Couple that new freedom with the barrage of brutal and graphic images that were being brought into American homes during the tenure of the Vietnam war, The Watts Riots, the Kent State Massacre, and a Petri dish of filmmakers matriculating in film schools and on college campuses that were inundated with bizarre mixture of free love and shocking violence, and you get Exploitation Cinema. This is the generation of moviemakers that saw the rise of 42nd street as a hotbed of every manner of extreme film going experience. As the 1980's progressed political powers in Washington and the rise of the Moral Majority were determined to protect the American Family from these horrors. Not just an American phenomenon, but abroad as well, as the notorious Video Nasty list in Britain illustrates. So, as the mainstream movie going experience became tamer, cable television started to creep into the mix with edgier content. When the human consumption of giant grubs is primetime fare on a show as wildly popular as Survivor (A moment that strangely mirrors an early scene in Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox) then cinema has to adapt or it becomes irrelevant. This was as true with the mass marketing of the Cinemascope process in the 1950's as it is with the increased violence, sex and digital effects that permeate the films of today. Simply put, movie studios have to up the ante to compete against what your average viewer can watch on CSI three nights a week for free or download off of YouTube at their office desks during lunch.
Has this change affected horror's popularity?
Before you can address this, you need to consider who horror films are marketed to—and that’s teenagers. For the most part, my feeling is that teenagers experience a pack mentality. This comes, as I believe, because at that time in life, the greatest desire is to be accepted. I know today that I'll never have friends that were as important to me than the ones I had between 6th and 10th grade. Developing identities forces us into not only internalizing our own struggle but those of the ones closest to us. It's this kind of mindset that makes watching a horror film with your buddies such a cathartic experience. It's the exact reason why movie studios have now and always will (despite what they say publicly) market horror films to a 14-year old audience. It's responsible for the PG-13 horror film as much as it's responsible for Hostel. It's both ends of the spectrum. If they can't get 'em with clean cut WB Television Stars and jump scares then they'll get 'em with silicone enhanced sexpots and buckets of bloody gore. Same audience. Different product. Same result—big box office. The only constant change that exists in horror is the need to one-up itself. The difference between other films and horror is that horror has actually needed to revert back to it's 1970's heyday to give the kids what they want today, where other films, by virtue of technological advancement are actually breaking new ground (at least visually).
Do you think that horror movies have increased the amount of violence and gore?
I tried to cover this in my previous answer, but I would like to take a moment to offer a direct thought. Compared to 25 years ago, I do not think that horror films have increased their level of violence. I do believe (as I've stated before) that in the past 5-years horror films have been forced to reconnect with that lost era in order to return to its gore soaked roots. Horror was for the better part of the late 1980's and most of the 1990's still suffering from an increased family values platform that sent the genre backwards in terms of extremism—a move that has reversed itself due in large part to an influx of foreign filmmakers as well as homegrown directors like Eli Roth and Rob Zombie. Are films better or worse today? Now that’s a more complex question.
Do you believe that the rating systems for movies are correct for horror movies today?
I believe that the ratings system is too politicized to be an effective tool. I fear that with the death of Jack Valenti that the MPAA has degraded to a state that is beyond repair. The MPAA, the theatre owners, the motion picture studios and Congress have been discussing or enacting censorship for years all in the name of protecting the public from material they do not believe we have the intelligence to evaluate for ourselves. They can get away with what they do on a large scale by invoking the "protection of our children" clause. The number one issue with the rating system is that it does not encourage filmmakers to create adult oriented films. The handful of NC-17 productions that have been released by major studios have been poorly received a fact that I believe is only due to limited appeal in subject matter and lack of marketing because television stations and newspapers refuse to run ads for film of that degree. It's censorship from news organizations that is most disturbing. If theater owners won't book the films and newspapers won't run ads, how is anyone supposed to see the movies? In terms of helping the cause, I believe that DVD is the worst thing to have come along in years. By selling the "Uncut" and "Un-Rated" versions on DVD the studios have found a new way to increase their bottom line. They get the watered down box office take as well as the bump on Un-Rated DVD sales making the films extra profitable. The only thing that is going to solve the problem is for an Un-Rated or NC-17 film to break at the box office (and we're talking the 100 million dollar mark) maybe then studios will begin supporting edgy productions—it certainly helped increase the public perception of Foreign Films and Documentaries when Life is Beautiful and Fahrenheit 9/11 made major dents in the Box Office. Incidentally, like horror, the heyday of documentaries and foreign films in the U.S. was the late 1960's and 1970's. It’s also interesting to note that those were the times when much more sexually explicit material was making it’s way into mainstream movie houses.
Do you think the technology and graphic effects have improved? Did it contribute to the popularity?
As I mentioned before, I don't think that technology has helped the horror genre in the way that it has bolstered Sci-Fi or Action films. Most of gore effects work that was pioneered by Tom Savini and KNB effects in the 70's and 80’s—or Dick Smith and Ray Harryhausen years before that—is more tangible and at times inarguably grittier than what is on display in the theaters today. A prime example is the shotgun to the head sequence in Bill Lustig's Maniac. The effect work by Tom Savini in that film is second to none and exceeds any manner of digitized death sequence I've ever seen. For a direct contrast, one would only need to look at two films. George Romero's Dawn of the Dead—long heralded as a masterpiece of effects work—and compare it directly to his later film Land of the Dead which largely employed computer effects. Of interest in the comparison is that KNB FX who created the splatter for Land of the Dead is the brainchild of Greg Nicotero, a student of Savini, whose first big break came working for Romero 20-years earlier. I'm not knocking KNB; frankly the company has done more for FX in the past 20 year than anyone in the industry whose names aren't Lucas, Jackson or Cameron, I just find the progression of the "Dead" films direct proof that often, less is more.
What's a good example of graphic improvement?
Effects should be seamless. In my opinion the best work is work you never notice on screen, be that backgrounds that were once matte paintings which can now be expanded on in the universe of the computer. A lot of tech people will tell you "oooohh the computer can change the color of [This Character's] eyes." I say, "So can contact lenses!" and they don't cost thousands of dollars of production dollars!
Do you think that this increase of popularity will have adverse (or positive) effects on our society as a whole?
As a cycle, I ultimately see horror as the playground of youth. It's something that teenage boys and even teenage girls watch together. As each new group ages, most of the kids that make movies like the remake of When a Stranger Calls successful, fall by the wayside as adults. Most of them will just not love film at all the way they did when, the best thing you could do on a Friday night was meet your buddies at the multiplex for a communal flick. By that rational, I don't think that movies can change the world—at least not fiction films. In the same sense, I think the "CSI effect" which has teenagers lining up at colleges to become forensic scientists is an interesting phenomenon. It might be argued that that has a positive impact on society. I'd be lying if I said seeing a Saw film is going to change your life, unless your goal is to become a filmmaker. Horror cinema has always been a stomping ground for first time filmmakers. It's perceived as an easy in, the budgets are tiny, if your friends can't act, you can always douse them with enough blood and make 'em scream till they can't speak anymore. The proliferation of microbudget filmmakers and distributors like Brain Damage, show us that even the poorest of moviemakers can get their stories on the screen. Things like that can be argued as a positive movement in the film industry. But, as for overall society, consider the worldwide box office grosses. If you discount The Sixth Sense and Jaws and other films that are not true bloody visceral horror films (or have suffered the fate of being re-named Action Thrillers and Suspense Films) then the highest grossing horror production is The Exorcist with about 440 million (good enough for 72nd place). The Exorcist is almost 35 years old. You have to go all the way to 224th place to find The Ring and 226th to find The Blair Witch Project. Despite horror's recent successes those numbers are just not profound enough to change minds about the genre let alone about life. In a world where the nightly news and the morning paper is infinitely more disturbing than a hundred Hills Have Eyes', I can't imagine that something from the mind of John Carpenter, James Wan, Dario Argento or even George Romero will do much more good than give fans a fun time with your friends on a Friday night.
(BONUS QUESTION for KICKS) Lastly, do you have any movies that are a MUST see for a quickly growing fan of Horror?
At its heart, this question is impossible to answer. It is easier for most people to work backward. I say that because moving from an MTV styled slash fest like See No Evil or Saw II to Val Lewton & Jacques Tourneur's 1942 classic Cat People is a drastic step—never mind looking back at Silent Films, Italian Giallo's, the relative complexity of J-horror or the outright metaphysical underpinings of Spanish director Alejandro Jodorowosky. I would take a look at what you love then try and decipher what films inspired that. It might be easier to watch I Walked With a Zombie after you've seen Tales From the Crypt: Ritual. Horror is organic, it does no good to watch a Paul Naschy film, or a Lucio Fulci film, or a Mario Bava film just because someone told you their stuff was great. I know people who can't understand for the life of themselves why I think Herschell Gordon Lewis is a genius. But I didn't go right to Lewis. I started with John Waters then I moved to Russ Meyer and the I got to H.G. Lewis. It's a path, and that one right their took me the better part of a decade to travel. My first Dario Argento film was Tenebre. If I started at Inferno I don't know that I'd have kept going and once I got through Argento I was off to the Mario Bava. Even then, I started with a more accessible film (in that case Planet of the Vampires). What I'm trying to say is that it's a long way from The Ring to the Guinea Pig films. The must see American Films almost all exist in the 1970's. I would recommend a book called The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Horror: by Phil Hardy, it's out of date now (last updated in 1995) read the synopses and see what interests you. If you'd rather watch then read, rent some of the docs like The American Nightmare, Going to Pieces and A Decade Under the Influence. Take notes of the stuff that looks cool. It's that, or pick a director and get obsessive…that's what I did. I usually grabbed the most accessible film by a filmmaker and if that worked for me, I'd just start at the beginning of their career and work forward. It was always more interesting for me to see the progression of a filmmakers work than to just hit all the highlights. I did the same thing with actors. However you do it, do it on your own terms, because one things is certain, horror fans are fanatical and they'll all tell you why they think their favorite is the be all end all of the genre whether you want to hear it or not.
