[Stingy Jack]

I think horror films (and stories) really reached its peak back in the 70's. People then were living with the horrors of the Vietnam war and the results of the 60's counterculture revolution. And horror writers really played on these feelings. Here you have Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and Stephen King's early work.

However, when the 80's came along, horror began to suffer. It stopped being about "scary" and became more a contest of which film could produce the highest body count. It had abandoned intelligently made stories where the scares came in calculated doses (like Psycho, Hell House, Something Wicked This Way Comes), and merely tried to heap on the gore by the shovelful. It really began to parody itself, actually. I think this type of horror actually got its own name: splatterpunk. I'm not a fan of this kind of horror, and my losing interest in it through the early to mid-nineties had a lot to do with this.

But then horror writers began to make classic scare stories again in the late nineties up to now. The Sixth Sense is a good example. Bwind says this is not horror, but it is. It is a ghost story, after all. And it did more for the ghost story using suspense, suggestion, and mere glimpses of horror than the previous two dozen ghost films before it. The Blair Witch Project and The Ring both are great films, too. I know that many people here hate Blair Witch (people moving rocks around ... "ooo, scary"). But, the thing that made that film great was the fact that all of the scares were in the mind of the viewer ... not shown on the film. And I've said before (and will say it again) that what the viewer can imagine is often (if not always) scarier than what can be shown on film.

I think that with terrorism being the threat it is, and the state of paranoia that most of the civilized world is living in, that horror writers will be able to use this to start creating true scary films again. The Japanese are really doing a great job reinventing the old ideas (The Ring and The Eye -- and possibly the original Aswang (which I have not seen)) are some good examples. And when I left the remake of Dawn of the Dead, I turned to my wife and said: "I'm glad horror writers are beginning to take their craft seriously again."