Surprise: I’m officially an old fart….

Updated on December 10, 2008 By Ken Begg 13 Comments

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.

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  • “The Mist” has monsters galore, Mister Begg. Monsters GALORE. It filled me with glee, it did.

  • Yeah, I know I have to give that one a go. Luckily the library I work at owns it.

  • fish eye no miko

    “Let the Right One In [Have heard of it–but only because they’re remaking it–would like to see it]”

    They’re showing it at the local art theater here in Tucson. I may go see it. ^_^

  • Zach

    Trust me, Let the Right One In and [REC] are easily worth the time. Let the Right One In is just, frankly, amazing and [REC] is one of the best pure horror films I’ve seen in ages.

  • Jay

    The Orphanage is really good, even with the subtitles. My wife & I caught it quite by accident; it provided a number of genuinely good scares.

  • [REC] is the movie remade as Quarantine, and it’s much scarier than the remake. There’s a sequel coming up, too. it’s certainly one of the better “found footage” movies, not least because it give the characters a credible reason for keeping the camera rolling.

    Let The Right One In is fantastic, and if you see one modern vampire movie, that should be it. It’s very character-based with very little gore or violence, so should be your bag.

    The Orphanage is a very good ghost story, again very highly recommended for fans of subtle cinema.

    Martyrs, on the other hand, is a fairly pretentious and very explicit movie of two halves. The second half will either make you turn off in disgust or re-evaluate how you view modern horror, both reactions equally valid IMHO.

    Inside is a siege movie about a heavily pregnant woman being terrorised by a woman who wants her baby. It’s extremely gory, but kind of trashy. I haven’t seen Frontiers, but that’s apparently along similar lines to Ils (aka Them) from a couple of years ago.

    They’re all worth watching. It’s worth noting though that it might be your location/language choices that affect whether you hear of these movies rather than your age. Of the films I mentioned about, [REC] and The Orphanage are Spanish, Let The Right One In is Swedish and the other movies are French, all in their original languages. Not mainstream fare by any means, but well worth watching.

  • Ericb

    Don’t think of it as turning into an old fart but as a focusing of your interests. If you were in academia you would have to limit your expertise to a handful of decades rather then to an entire genre that now spans almost a century.

  • Oh, I missed a couple off:

    Outpost is an average British movie about a group of mercenaries stuck in an old Nazi bunker getting knocked off by undead Nazis.

    I’ve not seen the signal, but it’s apparently got a similar concept to Stephen King’s Cell and is comprised of a few different stories. Cloverfield’s pretty good and worth watching to the end, though it’s not really as good as the fanboys think.

    The Mist is a fantastic monster movie with one of the darkest and morally ambiguous endings from a major studio film since The Thing. Them was an OK film, but nothing too special, so a Hollywood remake didn’t really interest me, and I’ve not gotten round to The Ruins yet.

    Borderland was the only movie I’d never heard of, sounds like it’s worth checking out from the IMDB description though.

  • The Rev. D.D.

    I can’t believe how many of those I haven’t heard of…man, I guess I’m slipping in my keeping up with the genre.

    Of course, if I hadn’t been burned so many times by modern horror movies I’d probably care more…

  • bt

    Another big thumbs up for REC. I didn’t see the remake, but the original was short, tight, and had at least a couple of “holy crap” moments. I can’t speak for everyone, but the last 5 minutes really stuck with me for a few days. It’s not necessarily stuff you haven’t seen before, I just thought it was done especially well, and creeped me out, which is tough to do.

    This Signal was a noble failure to me. It’s one story, broken up into 3 parts with each part directed by someone else. Each part on it’s own is actually pretty good, but they don’t fit together AT ALL, in my opinion. The middle third is essentially black comedy, and pretty good black comedy, but it’s shoehorned into the middle of 2 straight horror bookends. The leads aren’t very compelling either.

  • BeckoningChasm

    I really liked Cloverfield. Rumors about the ending of The Mist kept me from seeing it.

  • Petoht

    The Mist certainly has plenty of anti-religion in it, but one could easily view it as anti-mob-mentality. The instigator is simply praying on the fears of the people in the store, and really could have used any medium to captivate (like, say, Hope and Change, heh… sorry…)

    Still, the ending is… something else. Much like Identity, you either love it and think it makes the film, or you hate it and want nothing more to do with the film.

    For what it’s worth, I liked both the Mist and Identity, and think the twists made good movies even better. Certainly bleaker. The biggest problem with both is, in my opinion, it utterly kills rewatchability.

    Still… certainly worth the watch.

  • Vajarra

    Hi, new around here but love the blog so far :)

    Just a couple of comments. One, RE: Cloverfield — I found the nausea factor much more manageable on a small screen. I too had a hard time with it in the theater. But overall, pretty good.

    The Mist — A lot of people say they hate the ending. Even though I’m a pretty diehard King fan, I think the movie actually has a better ending than the story’s, which is rather ambiguous.

    The Ruins — I’ve read the book, and what I’ve heard of the movie is that they changed a lot of pretty major plot points for no discernible reason. The changes they make not only make no sense, but they undermine the characterizations so… ugh. To be fair I haven’t yet seen it, and I admit the concept is interesting. So if you liked it you might want to give the book a shot.