HORROR SUB GENRES PART 1
Although people who don’t love the gushing blood like we do, people who don’t see the value in watching a heart get ripped out an eye squished under a foot—in short, people who are sane—tend to lump horror together in one simple category, (the easier to ignore it,) we true believers understand that the entrails don’t go in the same bowl as the flesh, and that the heart, which technically is an entrail, requires a different Tupperware container then the rest of t

The Phantom Knows

he entrails, because the heart is special.
The same is true for sub genres of horror. Over the summer, we’re going to list these sub-genres as we understand them, and give a brief description of what they are. We’re going to need your help with this, as the only way to tally a complete list is through maximum engagement. We’re lovers of horror, not experts, and we’ll miss thing. But if you all chime in and remind us of the things we’ve left off the list, we’ll be able to compile a better list.
For instance, we have two sub-genres—Monster Film and Slasher Film. Then take two of my favorite horror movies, Jaws and Alien. To which sub genre do they belong? The obvious answer is “Monster Film,”—both of them focus on a larger than life non-human antagonist that is unstoppable. But if you take a second look at the structure of these movies, you begin to see that they’re constructed like slasher films—A small group engages with the monster, and one by one they get picked off. (Although in the case of “Jaws,” it’s one-by-BOOM, because only Robert Shaw dies.)
If we get enough of these cross-overs, we may have to start a new sub-genre. In the meantime, we adore these mutated freaks for the genius they embody.
First up—the Monster movie—coming soon.
CS

What really scares you?

Seriously. I’ve seen the standard horror crowd. They jump when Freddy pops up out of nowhere. They yelp in alarm as Jason machetes another camper. But very rarely does the fear they felt stay. It’s not real fear, but a faint whiff of the real thing. As soon as the scene is over, a wash of relieved laughter rolls towards the screen, and the movie goes on. They leave the theater happy and joyful, perhaps even a little self-congratulatory that they “survived” the experience.

That’s all well and good and as it should be. We want to sell popcorn, not induce catatonia and angina. But—true horror. What is it?
My Dad took my little brother Mike to see a horror movie once. It was called “Dead of Night” or something like that. This would be in the 70s. I didn’t see it, we sat through another movie at the multi-plex. Afterwards, Mike was a little unnerved, and my Dad, trying to lighten things up, described the movie to the rest of us in tones that suggested how outrageous it all was. Apparently, there was a scene where the monster attacks a doctor with a hypodermic syringe, screaming “You owe me this! You owe me this!” Far from settling my brother down, who was all of 8, my father’s description “You Owe Me This!” tensed him up even more.

We got home that night, and Dad found the paper. There was an ad for the movie, a creepy negative shot of glaring eyes. My Dad put the ad up to his own eyes, and yelled “You owe me this!” to my brother.

Mike ran from the room, bursting into hysterical tears. Dad ran after him, trying to make up for the poor joke, and corralled him. He struggled in Dad’s arms, seriously freaked.

There’s no cool end to this story. Nothing like “My brother would never watch a horror film again,” or “Mike killed Dad a year later, with a syringe.” But I think that night, my brother glimpsed true horror. Perhaps it requires the kind of open heart and trust that only a child can bring to the table.

CS

The 5 Ass-Kicking Horrors of All Time.

We could either do this list in decades (50s, 60s, etc.) or in general. If we’re going by decades, here are my 5;

Ass Kickers by Decade
1.)    (90s) Jurassic Park
2.)    (80s) Dressed To Kill
3.)    (70s) The Exorcist
4.)    (60s) Psycho
5.)    (50s) Horror of Dracula

There may be some debate about whether some of these are horror films. We’re open. Bring it on.

If you wanted to do a general list, here’s mine;

Ass Kickers
1.)    Alien
2.)    The Thing(1951)/The Thing(1982)
3.)    King Kong
4.)    Invaders From Mars (1953)
5.)    Jaws

This is gonna be a running series, so everyone can log on with your opinions. There’s no right or wrong. There will be more. Have fun. Cram it!

BKW

It always cracks me up when the entertainment pundits cackle and crow about how horror has died as a medium. Right. I don’t know how these pundits qualify themselves for their jobs. Perhaps they write on their resumes that the law of gravity will expire tomorrow, and when the paperweights still cling to the desks by the end of the next business day, the editors call the poor deluded fool and say “You must write about entertainment trends and/or economic forcasts.”

I say to them all now, please just give it up. Step away from the keyboard. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Any sane person can easily recognize that not only is horror alive, it thrives.

King Kong, a mainstream picture by Peter Jackson, had scenes of horror as grisly as any we’ve seen—a dinosaur having it’s upper jaw ripped off, giant slugs with teeth devouring sailors (they couldn’t find more fragrant food?). Watchmen showed a scene where Dr. Manhattan casually explodes two gunmen. Then, in one of the few original visual moments, we see a blood splattered moll stare up at the remains of the men—bones and viscera dangling from the ceiling. (That’s just one example of many I could cite from that movie, which I loved.)

“Bones” shows at least one horribly dessecated corpse per episode, usually accompanied by a computer re-enactment of how the poor guy (or gal, or child) may have died. “Bones” is a primetime TV show, approved for the whole family. (Hey, there’s no sex, after all.)

I’m going to skip video games as too obvious an example. But soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps trained on video games, play thrash rock over the tank headsets while shooting.

Horror isn’t dead. It lives, deep in our embrace, for we have taken the blood, guts and violence into our arms and our hearts. This generation, our generation, is the horror generation, for better or worse.

CS

What spirits haunt the tree?

Real horrors are frightening. They’re more terrifying than Hollywood make-believe. When you were a kid and you walked by a cemetery… you would imagine hearing voices talking to you from the graves. You’d see the dead walking toward you. Of course, you were scared shitless.

It’s Saturday night. You’re ten years old. You’re watching Chiller Theater. It’s midnight, your parents aren’t home… you start hearing strange sounds, noises. Next, you think you’re seeing things. Shadows, figures, or “monsters”.

You’re alone in an unoccupied parking lot. (Three stories high.) The wind is kicking up. The moon is almost full. You’re unnerved. You hear the distant footsteps of a stranger. You become tense. You fumble for your keys. A cool chill sweeps across your neck. Apprehension grips you. Your eyes and ears play games on your mind. You become fearful.

You’re nine. Your sister has locked you in the closet. It’s dark. You can’t even see your hand in front of your face. You feel you heart beating faster and faster. Sweat appears on your brow. Your mouth is dry. Panic sets in. You begin to bang on the door. Harder. Harder. You scream in terror.

Real fear is different from film fear. Your imagination is greater than anything that can be shown. No monster, no stranger or movie is as terrifying as what you imagine in your own head.

Real horror lies with us. We scare ourselves. Look at that strange tree!! What’s that weird noise? Oh, my God!

BKW

I wrote a 5 Minute Horror short called Rain. It’s about a woman driving on a lonely road late at night… Oh, yeah, it’s raining.
What intrigued me about this story is this… Our hero is a pretty woman. It’s late at night. The rain is the monster. The trip across the landscape is the obstacle.

There’s something about traveling late at night (that old Twilight Zone, The Hitchhiker; Blood Simple; Close Encounters of the Third Kind), raining that late and driving (Rising Sun, Blade Runner, Frailty, Identity).

I wanted to create mood, have a monster, a good-looking gal. For my monster, I chose the rain. I’m one of those people who are fascinated by rain. Its texture, color elasticity. I wanted the rain to be the “Thing.” I wanted the woman to be threatened by the “Thing”. A monster that has a sound, a look and a presence. I wanted the rain to not only be water, but to morph into this “Thing”, this monster.

The woman is driving down a lonesome country road. All of a sudden, it begins to rain. Lightly at first, then torrential. It’s late and the woman is tired. The pounding of the rain is the music in the film. We only hear the woman’s thoughts. She never speaks. It’s almost a silent film.

Rain hits the car and creates eerie sounds. Water slams into the windshield and morphs into mini-demons, monsters. Panic races across the woman’s face. Rain continues to pound the car. Rain morphs into horrible hands that engulf the car. Woman screams, closes her eyes… opens her eyes to reveal, nothing!

Woman drives off down the road. We hear the car crash. Silence…. Rain stops… silence… off in the distance, we hear another car approaching… It begins to lightly rain. (Fun huh!)

BKW

Have you noticed all the 5s up around lately? $5 lunch at Teri and Yaki, 5 this, 5 that? Go ahead and take a moment, look around your neighborhood and see how many 5s you spot.

Look, Ma! 5 Fingers!

Is there something about that number? Alan Moore suggests in “From Hell” that 5 has Masonic (as in the Free Masons) significance. I’m sure our hands would agree, and our feet.

With these troubled economic times, $5 seems to be what the dime was to the Great Depression. Doubtless many future Obama supporters will want to get his face on the $5 bill, to commemorate his presidency and the economic era he struggled under.
We here at 5 Minute Horror want you all to know, we were here first (and 5th) with a clear understanding of the transcendent power of 5, showing 5 minute horror films that give you 5 times the entertainment of a fifth of scotch. We beat the competition by a mile.
5 miles.

“Who Watches the Watchmen?”

I do, motherfucker! Four times so far! And I’m buying the Special Edition DVD, with the Black Freighter featurette. I’m going to spend days out of the remainder of my life watching that perfectly flawed film, showing it to my grandkids (“Close your eyes, Timmy, the man’s about to explode.”) and I will die with the movie playing on my eye screen (‘cause in the future, they’ll have eye screens.)
Sure it’s being panned. Critics were sharpening their knives the moment Mr. Snyder got the green light. Even Alan Moore, the un-credited co-creator of the series, my personal hero and private dancer, claimed that there could be no possible movie to be culled from his masterful work. (Mr. Moore, from my very distant awareness of him, has always struck me as a transcendentally generous creator, and at the same time, an occasionally punitive and unyielding human being, evidenced by his falling out with Steve Bissette and Bill Sienkiewicz, and his side-line potshots regarding The Watchmen.)

None of that matters. It’s a great movie. I’ll explain…

The first thing we must deal with is the persistent comparison of the movie to the graphic novel. Almost every review I’ve read or heard begins by praising the comic, and then following it with a line such as “The movie, however, fails to deliver on the promise of the blah, blah blah…” Thus begins the litany of all that The Watchmen isn’t.

I get that. I agree completely. The movie is not as good as the comic book. But here’s the thing—I wouldn’t want the movie to be as good as the book, because I’d be tempted to stop reading that incredible series of comic books. Moore and Gibbons pulled out every stop, from front cover to back-up features, to create a multi-level, multi-media bombardment of hyper-reality. The result is a mystical house of cards that won’t fall down, or to use Dr. Manhattan’s analogy, a multi-faceted diamond. Movies, more limited in how they tell a story (they won’t even let us do flashbacks or voice-overs anymore, for chrissake) can only show us one side at a time.

But movies can provide the visceral, cinematic experience of The Watchmen, and that’s exactly what we got. A pared down, chopped, channeled and exquisitely realized version of the perfect graphic novel. We’re looking down our nose at that? I’ve got an idea—let’s try enjoying it instead.

The other challenge that Mr. Snyder bravely took upon himself, and one that the critics missed entirely, was the medium gap. The Watchmen is about nuclear war and power, but at its core, it’s about comic books, like no other book has ever been about comic books. For one of the first times, the art form regarded itself. How could a movie create the same paradox? Every character would have to go, replaced with movie stars from the 40s and 50s. Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Jimmy Stewart and Bette Davis band together to fight Mel Gibson, who is controlled by the ancient Kate Hepburn. That movie would have accurately captured the subtext of The Watchmen.
Think the critics would have liked that one? Think anyone would have liked it?

An audience seeing a movie like that would have laughed their asses off. And this is the key point I want to make, and the real reason that critics have snubbed my movie.

Film has often been called a visual medium. It is also the medium of irony. A voyeuristic detachment has grown over time in American film audiences. People don’t give their hearts to characters the way they used to. Every once in a while, a movie breaks through the defenses. We call them “tearjerkers,” an ironic appellation. Irony makes us laugh at horror films when we should scream in terror. It’s made Tarentino’s career a possibility, where the film reference is as important as the film itself. Studio executives compliment each other with the word “smart,” (“Oh, you had a meeting with Jim? He’s very smart.”)  The industry drips with irony, the #1 national export.

There’s very little irony in The Watchmen. The heroes don’t wink at the camera as they put on their costumes. No one jokes about tights and long underwear. Mr. Snyder never apologizes that his characters wear costumes, and with one exception, he never bothers to explain why they do it. He wastes little time with origins, accepting the heroes with comic book innocence. The few self-referential jokes are either lifted directly from the comic book, or tightly adapted from the same. (“I’m not a comic book villain, Dan.”)
Nope, no irony here. Just love. That’s what The Watchmen movie is, a labor of love. A wide-eyed, open-hearted declaration of fealty and devotion, from one true fan.

Let others snipe at the movie for what it isn’t. I love The Watchmen for what it is.

Why aren’t we frightened at horror movies anymore? We have the Saws, Hostels, Nightmare on Elm Streets and Friday the 13ths. These movies are full of shocking moments. “Boo Moments,” I call ‘em. Most recent horror films have 4-6 such moments per film.
Now, I love “Boo Moments”. I enjoy the jolt I get from these depictions of heads flying off of somebody’s body, a heart being pulled out of someone’s chest, a spiked death mask about to clap onto a guy’s head. All in their own way are good moments… but, do good moments add up to a frightening film?

Mood and atmosphere play a big part in fright. Elm Street and Friday the 13th both take place during the night. (Darkness is a prime element for mood.) We’re scared of the dark cuz monsters hide in it. Our fears come to life in the dark and jump out at us.

Saw and The Thing take place in desolate and remote areas. We’re trapped in a warehouse and an arctic station. Atmosphere suffocates us. Chokes us of our breath, takes away our spirit. Atmosphere creeps up on us. It can be slow or fast, but it grabs you and holds you.
“Boo Moments” don’t creep. You’re scared for a few moments and then let off the hook. A good fright movie works on you slowly and starts to strangle you with mood (visual and audible) and feeling… Will we survive the film?

Today’s films pack a lot of “Boo Moments” but not enough frights. Building tension is hard to do. An ax to the head is easy. Creating characters that are complex or conflicted is tough. Exploding body parts is child’s play. What we need today from horror films is to change the landscape. We horror fans will follow any good story, interesting characters and terrific effects.

BKW

The debate is this… today’s horror is defined by gore. But, is gore horror, or just horrible. Cutting, slashing and dismemberment… is this scary?

Displaying gruesome acts isn’t the essence of a fright. A heart dripping blood hanging on a maniac’s hook isn’t scary! A psycho tearing out the eyes of some scantily clad co-ed isn’t scary!

The acts of terror aren’t “the acts”, but the build up to the “acts”. Who’s about to be killed? This is as important as how someone’s to be killed? (The reason the Friday the 13th franchise never worked as a fright film. We never cared about the victims, we didn’t know them… the jock, the babe, the smart one, the dude in the wheelchair. Labels in place of characters. A bunch of horny teens in the woods. What else? We know more about the killer than the victims. If we don’t get behind the victims, we side with the killer. {Think Freddy Krueger, Norman Bates.} How sick is that? How sick does that make us??)

A terrific chiller… Wait Until Dark. Stars Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman living in a basement apartment in New York City. Her husband brings home a doll stuffed with smack. The blind woman doesn’t know this, nor does the husband. A collection of con-men descend on her apartment to get their drugs. A series of cons are pulled on Ms. Hepburn, but she’s such a crafty blind lady. Finally, Alan Arkin attacks her. Ms. Hepburn turns the tables by making her apartment totally dark. The climax as to what happens is truly thrilling. (Rent the video!) Why? Cuz we got to know her, her weakness and her strength.

A tasty modern horror franchise, Scream, works for the same reason. We have Sydney (Neve Campbell) and Dewey (David Arquette). Both are flawed characters. Syd had lost her mother. Dewey is a Barney Fife cop. They’re challenged by crisis and rise to the occasion. We cheer their victory cuz we know who they are! We scream for them cuz we care if they live or die!!

We cared about Ripley (S. Weaver) in the first two Alien films cuz we know about her situation. (A woman of power in a man’s world.) She’s not even second in command. How does a woman’s voice get heard in space? (“In space, no one can hear you scream.”) In Aliens, Ripley is protecting “her” child. (The one she was too busy to have while pursuing her career.) We root for her and the child. We want her to succeed cuz we have a history with her. As the series went on, we cared less and less about Ripley cuz we had nothing at stake in III and IV.

One of my favorite splatter films is Scanners. As gruesome images go, it’s a classic! It’s void of character connection. The main guy is a test tube homeless “scanner”. He has no personality or real history. We don’t connect with him. His sinister brother, played by the wonderful character actor Michael Ironside, we do connect with. He’s evil… Does evil things… He’s got an agenda we believe. The frights are first rate. A guy gets his head exploded is ass-kicking. It was so cool that Brian DePalma used it in The Fury.

Good slice & dice films are out there. We can make a list if we want to. My point is this… A little effort into character helps the films become involving. Gore is great… especially when a character we care about gets it in the middle of the movie. We’re shocked! Surprised! Hurt! A 30 second jolt is fun, but a chill that stays with you your whole life is priceless.

BKW