Scott: Okay, so Halloween is upon us, and with another quickie sequel to Saw due on Friday, it's as good a time as any to talk about the current state of horror, a genre which many find useless but to which I pledge my undying (or is it undead?) allegiance. Granted, in order to get to the meat, you have to gnaw your way through a lot of gristle and bone first, and many critics don't have the stomachs for it. And yet I find that even bad horror movies often have more to say about the times—or least, they reflect the times better—than their more respectable counterparts in other genres.
Take the Saw franchise, for instance. Right now, the Saw and Final Destination movies are among the most bankable brand names in horror, and the studios putting them out can't make them fast enough. So why are people showing up to watch essentially the same story play out over and over? I imagine most would say they like them because the deaths are always novel, coming as they do by way of elaborate Rube Goldberg devices set up by a psychopath (Saw) or via Manos: The Hands Of Fate (Final Destination). But you can always look to genre films to capture the tenor of the times, and I would argue that these two franchises exploit a deeper fear among young people, post-9/11: Namely, that they have no control over their own destinies. Death could come at any time, and even if they can see the gears at work, they can't do anything to stop it.
Granted, the two franchises seem different on the surface. The puppetmaster in Saw merely puts his victims in situations where harm can come to them, and it's up to them to make difficult choices to stay alive. But those choices are of the Sophie variety: Sure, you can make it out alive, but in order to find the key to unlock the time-activated bear trap attached to your head, you'll first have to find the key lodged in your cranium. (Here's a rusty spoon. Have at it.) As I said in my review of Saw II, it's a little like a schoolyard bully grabbing a weakling's arm and doing the "stop hitting yourself" routine. Any sense that the victim is in control is entirely illusory.
As for Final Destination, that's a clearer case. I actually find these movies intriguing conceptually, because there's no tangible enemy in them; these poor teens are running from Death in the abstract, and trying futilely to dodge their role in the grand design. If you think about it, that's about as close as a dopey teen horror flick is going to get to The Seventh Seal. (Though I guess Bill & Ted got there first.) They're playing chess against Death, and in this case, Death is Garry Kasparov. I'm not sure what possible investment an audience could have in a character in one of these movies, because they have to know that it's always checkmate time for the humans. I guess it's just cool to watch some woman get beheaded by a log.
Of course, having all the protagonists potentially die has gone from completely taboo 10 or 20 years ago—when the "last woman standing" premise was more common—to a new cliché, thanks to the surprising influx of gritty, visceral throwbacks to the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Since those represent some of my favorite (and least favorite) recent horror films, I'll save them for later.
So let's hear from you, Noel. What do you like? J-horror? Americanized J-horror? Remakes of classic and non-classic horror films from the '70s and '80s? Mechanized death? Super-realistic torture? And more to the point, are these our only choices?
Noel: I find the idea of J-horror fascinating, because of what it says about the Japanese—namely, their anxieties about wayward youth and the dangers of living in a technophilic society. But so many J-horror films are interchangeable, with their longhaired little girls, ominous clicking, and incomprehensible plots. And the American versions? Well, they straighten the plots out some, and they keep a lot of the creepy imagery, but few have found a way to update the themes so they resonate with our culture. You know how everyone makes fun of the Japanese version of American English, which gets the words but misses the meaning? That's how I feel when I watch a Hollywood remake of a J-horror film.
I think you're right that the most relevant-to-American-youth horror films today are torture-fests like Saw and Hostel, and I agree that the relevance is tied to 9/11, but I think it goes beyond the fear of unexpected tragedy. If you look closely at Hostel—and Wolf Creek, for that matter—what they're really about is what happens after everything goes to hell. When that kid in Hostel is strapped to a chair with a chainsaw-wielding sicko heading toward him, we in the audience have to ask what we're hoping to see. Do we just want him to escape and get the hell out of there? Or do we want to him to get hold of that chainsaw and exact revenge?
(Of course, there are some who want to see the dude in the chair get cut a little first. These are the same people who can't stop watching the footage of the World Trade Center collapsing.)
My problem with these kinds of movies is that I don't find their kill-or-be-killed approach all that satisfying, intellectually or aesthetically. Look, horror movies aren't that hard to make, really. They're all about sound design and screen space, and any semi-competent director can figure out when to drop into an eerie hush and when to keep the audience's eyes trained on the dark shadows in the corners of the frame. So just because a movie scares me doesn't make it a good movie. It's how it scares me that matters, and whether it plays on something more than the fight-or-flight response.
Do I think that there are modern horror movies that do that? Yes, but I'm going to dodge the question about what they are for a moment, and throw some questions back to you. How much does the "taking the ride" aspect of a horror movie affect your appreciation of it? And does it matter whether it's a ride you've taken before?
Scott: I think you're dead-on about Americanized J-horror, which definitely loses something in the translation. Part of the problem is that the original Japanese directors are doing some of the translating themselves, like Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge and The Grudge 2 (doesn't this guy get tired of doing two versions of the same movie?) or The Ring 2's Hideo Nakata. (That not remotely scary sequence with the deer still makes us chuckle in these parts.) I was initially jazzed by the idea that certain J-horror conventions—the ghosts with the blank faces and odd hitch-walks, the pale children frozen in trance-like states, those disturbing little undercurrents on the soundtrack—would replace the cheap shock effects of their American counterparts, but it never really materialized. I thought Gore Verbinski's remake of The Ring, the opening salvo in the American J-horror movement, did a surprisingly good job of streamlining the plot and capturing the unique tone of these movies. Truth be told, I thought it was scarier than Nakata's original, and certainly more comprehensible on a narrative level.
In spite of the reasonable success of The Grudge 2, which I attribute more to its PG-13 rating than any great anticipation from the masses, I don't see the J-horror craze lasting much longer in the States. The American versions have failed, as you say, to locate any thematic resonances that might speak to kids stateside, which really just leaves a pile of effects that are quickly losing their novelty. And then there's the fact that chief J-horror innovators like Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse) and Takashi Miike (Audition) have been wondering off into other territory: Kurosawa's Bright Future and Doppelganger indulge his weakness for existential ennui rather than trying to scare people, and Miike, though he'll no doubt continue to push his craft to new extremes, has recently branched out into the bizarre abstraction of Big Bang Love, Juvenile A, and the restrained, Poe-like creepiness of his Three… Extremes entry. But that's what artists do: They refine, expand, and try to stay fresh, which is why there's an expiration date on the Shimizus and Nakatas, who are just cashing in on faddish facsimiles.
As to your question about "taking the ride," I'll confess that that's a big part of why I'm attracted to the even the schlockiest horror films that come down the pike. ("Hey, you want me to review that not-screened-for-critics When A Stranger Calls remake on Friday? No sweat! And while I'm at it, how about a review of the incredibly silly 1979 original?") As you say, it isn't that difficult to make a horror movie, at least as far as delivering the shocks. That whole cat-on-a-tin-garbage-can effect still works on us because we're helpless to stop it: It's dark, we're tense, the music is ominous, and we know something's coming, but we don't know precisely when, and we can't help but flinch when sound and image come together to say "Boo!" Hardened horror junkie that I am, there are still moments when I'm looking off at the curtains and exit signs, even when the movies are doing nothing to earn my distress. All that said, playing with sound design and screen space may not seem all that difficult, but you can certainly make some important qualitative distinctions between the way a Val Lewton protégé does it, and the way some Michael Bay protégé does it. Figuring out how to get under viewers' skins in a lasting way—as opposed to those cheap jolts that wash off you like rainwater—is what separates artists from hacks.
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