Horror Movies: Now and Then

As we approach Halloween, the usual stream of movies designed to scare the pants of their respective audiences is beginning. Movies being released range from the sixth installment of the incredibly violent Saw series to the psychological ghost thriller Paranormal Activity. While these two movies have come to epitomize the modern horror industry, they’re a far cry from the what the industry considered “horror” at recent as twenty to thirty years ago.

Rewind back to the late 1800’s and early 1900’s and what we see is unrecognizable compared to a modern horror film. The Devil’s Castle, released in 1896, is widely considered to be the first true horror movie, although it was simply a two minute long vampire flick with none of the violence, gore, or special effects of its modern day counterparts.

Since The Devil’s Castle, the horror industry has taken on a life of its own as its evolved through the decades. What was considered horror in the early 1900’s consisted of lots of campy makeup and more of a focus on conceptual horror, as is evidenced in Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein. Both such movies were simple in context, showed very little in terms of violence, and still managed to scare a considerably less desensitized 1930’s audience compared to modern-day moviegoers.

Fast forward thirty some years to the early 1960’s and we see the evolution of horror movies that manage to scare audiences while showing next to nothing in terms of ghosts, ghouls, and the like. Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) chronicled a mother and her two children living in a supposedly haunted house, although throughout the movie we don’t see a single apparition, with the horror lying solely in the minds of the audience. Similarly, Robert Wise’s The Haunting managed to accomplish the same goal as its predecessor as a successful ghost movie that terrified moviegoers and lived by the idea that less is more.

The 1970’s brought forth a lull of sorts for the genre, but also saw the popularizing of the modern zombie movie made famous by filmmakers such as George Romero. A so-called “modern” zombie movie was revolutionary in the sense that suddenly audiences were seeing the horror itself—the fear brought forth was explicit instead of implicit.

After George Romero came a slew of gory zombie flicks, each more violent than the last, until we get to Sam Rami’s Evil Dead trilogy. Rami satirized the whole genre with campy dialogue, purposely low budget special effects, and some pretty gratuitous violence (i.e. a scene in which the main character attaches a chainsaw to his arm).

Nowadays we see movies such as Hostel and the Saw series that show unprecedented violence and gore designed to send its audience running out of the theater screaming. In the midst of this special effect/red corn syrup-driven gore, low-budget horror that can’t afford to show anything has risen to popularity.

Movies like The Blair Witch Project and the haunted house flick Paranormal Activity are finding new ways to scare audiences without having to watch someone’s eyes get gouged out by a masked psychopath (see Saw). Paranormal Activity, completely shot on a camcorder, had a budget of around $11,000 and made over $7 million in its opening weekend. With no money for special effects, gore, or an animatronic monster, it’s managed to draw rave reviews from critics and the average moviegoer alike.

The horror genre has rapidly evolved over the last century, beginning with a two minute long silent film, and culminating in everything from the timeless horror of the 60’s to the gore-fests of the last three decades. The odds are that if there's something that scares you, it's been made into a successful horror flick--it's really just a question of going out there and making yourself watch it, with one eye closed (just in case).

SNL and the Mainstream Media

A lot has gone on since Barack Obama was sworn into office back in January. America has stared down the barrel of economic disaster, watched the situation in Afghanistan rapidly deteriorate, and seen one of the most polarizing healthcare debates in recent history take place. There's been laughter and there have been tears in the midst of a tumultuous nine months. Naturally, it's all Barack Obama's fault. Or so some people would like to believe.

The popular late night sketch show Saturday Night Live recently ran a sketch issuing a fairly harsh criticism of our president Barack Obama. In the skit, Fred Armisen as Obama was depicted as sitting in the oval office, going over how so far in his presidency, he’s done “nothing, nada.” Going over a checklist of his campaign promises Armisen-Obama went on to claim that he’s done nothing about everything from healthcare to Afghanistan.

This has of course raised a media flurry, and even prompted CNN to fact check a comedy sketch show. Because we live in the viral video generation, this sketch has been circulated pretty much everywhere imaginable. A quick Google search of “Obama SNL” will yield you a shade over 9 million hits. Such a controversial stance on a the president has given the mainstream media the cue to end their honeymoon period with Obama and has caused somewhat of a mini-panic.

Most syndicates are running pieces trying to determine how right SNL was, some of which are proclaiming that the sky is indeed falling and that we’ve been cursed with a “do-nothing” president. Others have gone about it with calmer minds once they realized that Obama’s been in office for less than 10 months. Expecting him to solve all of the nations problems in that amount of time isn’t fair to someone who’s receiving enough heat as it is trying to deliver on his healthcare promise, not to mention the allegations from fringe conservatives that he’s turning America into Nazi Germany.

That said, the most disappointing realization of this whole debacle has been that the only scenario in which the mainstream media will think to audit our president’s accomplishments is when prompted by a comedy sketch show. Sure, SNL’s so-called “allegations” are completely unfair given the sample size of time Obama’s spent in office. But this kind of behavior from the media is what got this country involved in an expensive Middle-East war that has cost thousands of American lives as well as billions of taxpayer dollars. Journalists have wasted enough ink on Saturday Night Live in the last week and not nearly enough on real issues (Afghanistan, military policy on gay soldiers, immigration, etc), which have only come up again since the sketch aired.

The mainstream media was off the mark in terms of what should have been reported during the run-up to the Iraq War and to this day it’s cost this country dearly. Nowadays it’s as though those very same people are asleep at the wheel, only waking up when a show like Saturday Night Live runs a politically themed sketch with a quasi-controversial issue that can be disproved in a two to three sentences.

The jury’s still out on Obama right now, namely because he hasn’t had time to get much done while meeting stubborn resistance at every stop. But it’d be nice to know that if and when something worth reporting comes up, America will see it’s press corps report responsibly and thoroughly. Right now, it doesn’t feel like that in the slightest.