Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [110]
Scaring remained a priority, but not the only one. Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, each of which inspired franchises, mixed in elaborate visual gags and one-liners to make the carnage go down easier. As Freddy Krueger, the child molester/ killer in Nightmare, Robert Englund became the biggest star of the genre since Vincent Price, mainly on the strength of his charm. Unlike Jason or Michael, Freddy had personality, a weakness for catchphrases (“better not dream and drive”), dopey word play (“Feeling tongue-tied?” he asks a victim tied to a bed by tongues), and a predilection for a certain word that makes him sound like a catty teenage girl (“Bon appétit, bitch”; “Welcome to prime time, bitch,” etc.). He sells his material with an admirable professionalism—and by the fourth or fifth sequel, he became the Jay Leno of serial killers.
“I always thought all horror is comedy,” said Joe Dante, who directed the The Howling and the wildly popular Gremlins. There were many more such darkly funny movies made, but eventually the laughs started drowning out the screams, and critics and audiences stopped taking horror seriously. This is also how the first golden age of horror ended: with the classic Universal monster movies forced to meet Abbott and Costello and The Three Stooges.
The ironic sensibility of Scream took hold of the genre in the late nineties with movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer and inevitably grew tiresome, inspiring much broader satires such as Keenen Ivory Wayans’s 2000 hit Scary Movie, which sent up dozens of horror movies, including Scream. It was a spoof of a spoof. But while Scream and some of its imitators tried to be scary, they didn’t always go for the jugular like the movies from the 1970s. They followed the rules of the New Horror, but not the spirit. The jokes and the slyness sometimes got in the way of the dirty work of making you shudder. Horror became family-friendly. Many of the studio efforts were not even rated R.
This led to another backlash in the late nineties led by bloodthirsty young film geeks who wanted to push the limits of good taste again. Some of them believed that the essence of horror was not in jokes and coddling audiences. “I hate when people say horror is a roller-coaster ride,” says Rob Zombie, who directed The Devil’s Rejects and the remake of Halloween. The next cycle of horror included gruesome movies such as Hostel and Saw, which stripped out the comedy and concentrated on gore and vile, ugly exploitation—except this time, with huge budgets. The result was what critic David Edelstein called “torture porn,” a description that didn’t give enough credit to the ambition of these films, but did capture how they tried to reclaim the sense of forbidden that the movies had when audiences saw them in dirty theaters in Times Square.
Eli Roth makes the same argument that Wes Craven did about his movies’ extreme gore—that these scenes are widely misunderstood and that they are actually antiviolence. Updating this political argument, he claims that the subtext of movies like Hostel is the anger about the Iraq War. Some critics agree, but George Romero doesn’t. “I don’t see it about any collective angst,” Romero says. “I go to these conventions. There are gore clubs, gore magazines—that’s where this torture porn grew out of.”
In many ways, the gore clubs grew out of the endless popularity sparked by Night of the Living Dead, but Romero doesn’t see himself as connected to torture porn. It may sound like Romero has become like one of the critics who slammed him many decades ago for too much on-screen violence, but his experience tells him that the political meaning of these movies is often grafted onto the movies after the fact. It’s notable that the directors of his era are