Quote:
Originally Posted by Roderick Usher
When I want to see them , I put on the original. I probably watch HALLOWEEN (JC's not RZ's) at least once a month.
But Freddy, Jason, Micheal, etc. are far from the foundations of horror. They aren't even the founding fathers of horror film - that's for Nosferatu, Frankenstein's, Der Golem etc.
Horror goes back to the cave dwellers. Fear is the most primal emotion. Horror tales are as old as written language. The Ballad of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, The Odyssey - all packed with monsters and murderers.
Horror goes back a little further than 1980. I understand liking these guys, but man has more things to fear than these four or five boogeymen and I'd like to hear some new stories.
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Definitely true. I appreciated the new Halloween because of my weariness with 80s horror canon icons. New stories definitely need to be told, although Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers have worked because they do hit on something primal. Jason and Michael Myers are embodiments of death that cannot be rationalized or comprehended. They are the Black Annis,the Breathstealer, the Wendigo. That being said, it grows tiresome because they must be rationalized. There is no potential terminus, no potential solution and no real movement but towards rationalizing, explaining, uncovering and negating something that thrives on mystery. New slasher franchises like the Saw films (in spite of being torture porn/ slasher hybrids with no supernatural elements) aren't really the solution but a repetition of the same issues. A new approach is needed or else we'll be stuck with the tired slasher icons of yesteryear. Why? Because you can't kill or rationalize your way out of the Michael Myers/ Jason cultural dialogue any more than we can bribe AIDS or scare infant mortality away. More nuance is necessary. What is ACTUALLY scary? Digging deeper is necessary. Faceless death is not the be-all and end-all of fear, in fact its primal to the point of being simplistic. I'm not standing behind the new horror writers who write stories about a guy whose lamp is broken or whose girlfriend might be cheating and calling it horror, I'm just saying that some things are really deep down shit-your-pants horrifying about life nowadays and they ain't the Wendigo, the Manticore or the frumious Bandersnatch, nor are they retarded people with farm tools. I agree that if a child is handicapped and the victim of abuse they should not be given farm tools to play with and have their homes torn apart by reckless teenagers. Child abuse is bad, farm tools are sharp and teenagers can be jerks. I feel sorry for anybody who needs to learn these particular rudiments of life. All in all, horror can be better if we dig deeper and are more honest. The secret to great horror has always been honesty. Look at Pet Semetery. The Wendigo and the Monkey's Paw come together with brutal honesty to make something the hits us where we live. Look at the face of Emil Jannings in Murnau' s Faust. What we once thought of as hoary and Medieval becomes visceral, real and disgusting. This is what we need to be afraid of in ourselves, this is what we give into if we compromise our ethics. Honesty, intimacy and transgression are necessary for the genre to go anywhere. Hockey masks have no place in the equation.