Horror Bored

I don't remember the last time I watched a horror movie that I really loved. That's weird, because for several years, I hardly watched anything but horror movies, and had a long list of more that I needed to see. Most of that list feels long forgotten now, as do the times when I felt certain that almost any horror movie you put in front of me would offer at least a little excitement.

The first horror movie I ever saw was the Japanese version of Ring 2, which I saw in a theater in Osaka on my 21st birthday. In other words, I was a late bloomer to the genre, largely because of a squeamishness about gore. But I loved Ring 2, perhaps all the more because I couldn't really understand much of it through the language barrier and having not seen the first movie. When I got back to America, I started devouring horror movies, though I still shied away from the more disgusting ones.

In 2005, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I ended a horrible relationship, and spent a lot of time feeling miserable and nihilistic. Desperate for any kind of catharsis, I started watching the gore films that I had previously avoided, and eventually found that it gave me a sense of pride, having overcome a fear that I had been carrying since childhood. I came to consider myself something of a gore movie connoisseur, and remember with a sick fondness the time circumstances conspired in such a way that I ended up watching the fake Japanese snuff film Flowers Of Flesh and Blood four times in one week.

As the remake trend of the mid 2000s got into full swing, I retreated deeper into low budget, foreign and retro horror, and that's where my interest started to wane. At the risk of blaspheming, most of that stuff is a lot more interesting to read about than it is to actually watch. I can't count the number of times I would read about a movie in one of the Psychotronic guides, excitedly track it down, then spend most of the run time bored out of my mind. As I got more interested in video games, I drifted farther and farther from horror (and therefore from movies in general). And it should go without saying that Hollywood wasn't doing anything to bring me back.

My growing interest in skepticism didn't help matters either. Even early in my life when I was a Christian, I was pretty apathetic about the existence of things like ghosts, demons, and anything you could call paranormal. But reading books by the likes of James Randi and Richard Dawkins had brought me to the realization that such beliefs are completely untenable. This really hit home for me when I saw The Exorcism Of Emily Rose. A girl in the row behind me spent most of the movie crying and having to be comforted by her friends, while I was fighting to stay awake. If you don't believe in the devil, possession's just not very scary.

That's not to say a well-made horror movie can't still creep me out a bit, even if I don't buy its premise, but well-made horror movies are getting harder and harder to find. Even those with a couple of interesting ideas or good performances always seem to wreck things in the end by explaining too much. If you understand a problem, you can at least try to solve it. Real fear is not knowing what you're up against. Does anyone think that Paranormal Activity wouldn't have been scarier if it had ended with the camera on an empty bed while the young couple screamed their guts out downstairs? Did the girl coming back to (apparently) swallow the camera add anything?


Hopefully one day horror movies will interest me again--I've had some great times with them, and would like to again. But, ironically, they've gotten too cowardly to do anything that's really frightening.