Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [111]
“There was something about putting this music to this guy cutting his ear off,” Craven said. “It just made me angry. It’s funny, because I left the theater in Spain and this guy jumped in front of me and said: ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘I can’t believe I scared Wes Craven.’ That was Quentin Tarantino.”
The horror cycle is still spinning. It never stops. Hollywood has become dependent on these movies, and in particular those made in the seventies. The meta-horror comedies and the torture porn represent opposite sides of the genre, but they grew out of the same tradition, one flexible enough to inspire self-conscious love letters to the movies and visceral assaults on the senses. That artistic pool is deep, and directors keep returning to it. Serial killer movies are still building on the formulas of Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The postmodern horror made fun of those same movies, and the more ghastly new movies stole ideas and shots from the seventies in the same way that directors from that era took from Hitchcock. Horror scenes in Asia and Europe have exploded in the past decade, providing new spins on seventies horror in movies like the Japanese romance-turned-horror Audition, and French stalker gems like High Tension and Them. Other subgenres are taking horror in completely new directions with a revival of interest in the ghost story in Asian horror and an emphasis on scary movies based on found footage sparked by the success of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity.
The New Horror has been so successful in expanding the genre that it’s helped bring about a revival of the Old Horror. Hammer Film Productions has returned and is producing again. William Castle, who died in 1977, is celebrated in art house theaters. The actor Denis O’Hare has said his portrayal of the flamboyant vampire king on the hit TV series True Blood was inspired by Vincent Price. In perhaps the most striking sign of the times, Roger Corman won a lifetime achievement award at the Academy Awards.
In Hollywood, the most dominant trend, besides the timeless popularity of the vampire movie, may be the proliferation of remakes. Just as Broadway producers have revived almost every decent musical ever made, producers in Hollywood are constantly looking to recycle. With a few exceptions, the directors from the golden era did not return to their own material. Studios often wanted to hire younger talent to give a fresh spin on Texas Chain Saw or A Nightmare on Elm Street. But for many artists who came of age in this freewheeling era, a remake seemed like a betrayal of their accomplishment. John Carpenter and Brian De Palma both turned down the job of directing Fatal Attraction in part because the movie was too similar to Clint Eastwood’s 1971 stalker film Play Misty for Me. So they certainly were not going to repeat the movies they had already figured out.
Since the studios often cared more about exploiting the brand than creating a compelling scare, the directors of these remakes rarely attempted to dramatically refashion the material. Not only are the new remakes often conservative and safe, but even when trying to be faithful, they usually miss the point. The glossy new production of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre replaced the ramshackle aesthetic with a slick, hyperactive sensibility that makes the teenagers in the backwoods of Texas look like soap opera stars. The Last House on the Left was in part a comment on the corruption of violence, but the remake, which ends with a scene of sadistic violence, cheers on the parents when they take revenge. Any tension in the movie between the adrenaline rush of violence and the ugliness of it is erased. The dirty, documentary feel has been replaced by something slicker, filled out by a cast of young, cute actors.
When Rob Zombie made his ferocious, entertaining new version of Halloween, he not only took Michael Myers out of the standard