I must now give up keeping up on even my chosen field of endeavor, and freely admit that I just like the old stuff better. Oh, and that you damn kids better get off my lawn.
This realization struck with Friend of Jabootu and T-Fest proprietor Sandy “Call of Cthulhu” Petersen sent me the following e-mail:
“On a website devoted to things Cthulhoid, there is a thread pondering what the best recent horror film is. The current candidates are:
Inside
Frontiers
Cloverfield
The Mist
Let the Right One In
Outpost
The Orphanage
[Rec]
Martyrs
Borderland
The Strangers
The Ruins
The Signal”
Hmm, let me look at that list again:
Inside [Never heard of it]
Frontiers [Never heard of it]
Cloverfield [Saw half of it in theater; friend got sick, we left, I never bothered catching up with it]
The Mist [Never saw it; probably will at some point, might skip the parts arising from King’s perennial dislike of Christians, however]
Let the Right One In [Have heard of it–but only because they’re remaking it–would like to see it]
Outpost [Never heard of it]
The Orphanage [Heard of it; haven’t seen it] [Rec] Hmm, is that the one they recently remade as Quarantine? If so, then I’ve heard of it, at least. If not…no.
Martyrs [Never heard of it]
Borderland [Never heard of it]
The Strangers [Didn’t see it; saw Them, though, the French film it was a remake of, on DVD]
The Ruins [Saw on DVD; it was pretty decent, not great, I thought the ending was lame]
The Signal [Never heard of it]
So…there you have it. I’ve now all but given up on horror movies, or at least modern ones. One reason is that I actually love monster movies most of all, and few of the above have monsters, and of the ones that do, frankly I find them pretty uninteresting–although again I expect The Mist would satisfy in that department. I do like other horror movies, too, but the lack of monsters now makes me sad, especially since the place you’re most likely to find them is in this week’s unwatchable Sci-Fi Channel ‘original’ movie.
But really, I started losing track of the genre when the made for video age started. At that point I realized I’d never be able to keep up with the flood of (generally awful) stuff flooding the market, and certainly not to the extent that one could master the pre-video films. I’m pretty damn conversant with pre-slasher era horror movies, at least the ones available in this country. And although I haven’t seen all of them, DVD is helping to fill in a lot of the ones I’ve missed. I guess I’d just rather watch some obscure piece of junk I never got the chance to see from the ’40s through the ’70s than attempt to systematically wade through the stuff being made now.
This doesn’t mean that I won’t watch horror movies now, and the fact is, because I’m not a kid, I don’t get out to the theater to see movies all that much. When I do, I don’t really have any friends interested in horror movies, so there you go. Plus, spend entire weeks immersing myself in stuff like The Conqueror, which also eats into my viewing time.
Anyway, just a little confession. However, I may go back and start writing about horror films from the periods I really like. We’ll see.
