HALLOWEEN COUNTDOWN: The 2000s

There are a lot of horror fans who maintain that the 2000s have been a desperately lousy decade for horror movies, that all we've been offered are derivative sequels and remakes. I'm of the opinion that this "popular opinion" reflects only the most visible, mainstream releases, and that if a true horror fan can't find recent horror films to suit their particular taste... they're just not looking hard enough. To round out a long series of blogs about horror movies that aren't included in my documentary (Nightmares in Red White and Blue), here's a list of some of my favorite horror films of the current decade.

2000
SCREAM 3 and URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT sounded like death throes for the horror genre, but this was also the year of THE GIFT, FINAL DESTINATION and BATTLE ROYALE. Last year around this time, blogger Jim Blanton made a case for 2000's BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2. Axelle Carolyn, in her book on "horror movies of the new millennium", hails THE CONVENT (featuring Adrienne Barbeau as a zombie hunting nun), as well as the Japanese zombie movies VERSUS and WILD ZERO. Personally, I think a case could even be made for HELLRAISER: INFERNO... but that's another post for another day. My own pick for 2000: GINGER SNAPS.

2001
A decent year for monster movies (see BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF and JEEPERS CREEPERS) and a particularly good year for ghost stories. In the summer of 2001, I attended the annual FrightFest in London, England, and was blown away by two of the films I saw there - THE BUNKER (a Lewton-esque British film set on the front lines of WWII) and Guillermo del Toro's THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE. Also noteworthy: Alejandro Amenabar's THE OTHERS, J.T. Petty's SOFT FOR DIGGING, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's KAIRO, and my personal favorite: Brad Anderson's SESSION 9.

2002
This year witnessed the popularization of J-horror with the American remake of THE RING, soon to be followed by English-language remakes of the Hideo Nakata's DARK WATER and the Pang Brothers film THE EYE. Neill Marshall made a noteworthy debut with DOG SOLDIERS. Lucky McKee made an even stronger debut with MAY. Danny Boyle practically reinvented the zombie movie with 28 DAYS LATER. And Eli Roth achieved wunderkind status with CABIN FEVER. (Sure, the film was tonally schizophrenic... but I won't believe anyone who says that Cerina Vincent's leg-shaving scene didn't make a strong impression. Roth knows his audience.) I'm tempted to draw attention to the surprisingly effective THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, as well as the admirable (if often underwhelming) ghost story BELOW, written by Darren Aaronofsky... and I can't, in good conscience, overlook Don Coscarelli's hilarious BUBBA-HO-TOP... but my favorite horror film of the year has to be the Canadian indie MY LITTLE EYE.

2003
This was the year that Platinum Dunes took the horror genre for ransom, by resurrecting Leatherface (and pitting him against Jessica Biel). Also the year of the "70s-style horror movie" comeback, thanks to similar films like Rob Schmidt's WRONG TURN and Rob Zombie's HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES. There were a few subtler efforts - IDENTITY and DEAD END come to mind - but the trend was definitely toward overkill. Alexandre Aja's HIGH TENSION turned plenty of heads, but I prefer Stuart Gordon's KING OF THE ANTS.

2004
Horror reached the apex of its popularity for the decade, thanks to a surprisingly spirited remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD, the brilliant parody SHAUN OF THE DEAD, and James Wan's enormously successful SAW. J-horror was still going strong, with the releases of MAREBITO, INFECTION, and Takashi Shimizu's American remake of THE GRUDGE. For my money, the year's best was the Korean ghost story SHUTTER.

2005
Remakes, sequels and "masters of horror" abounded... but it wasn't all bad. Among the first season episodes of MOH, I particularly liked DANCE OF THE DEAD (Tobe Hooper), JENIFER (Dario Argento), CIGARETTE BURNS (John Carpenter) and HOMECOMING (Joe Dante). WOLF CREEK, THE DEVIL'S REJECTS and HOSTEL gave rise to the catch-phrase "torture porn," but in my memory these films were eclipsed by Neill Marshall's more traditional monster movie THE DESCENT - which gets my vote for best horror film of the entire decade.

2006
Filmmakers delivered the unexpected even in familiar packages with the remake of THE HILLS HAVE EYES and PULSE, and a host of distinctive monster movies: SLITHER, SILENT HILL, THE LAST WINTER, and THE HOST. BUG wasn't a monster movie... and it didn't live up to all the hype that surrounded it as "William Friedkin's first horror film since THE EXORCIST"... but it's still much better than either Paul Schrader or Renny Harlin's earlier attempts at THE EXORCIST 4. The "8 Films to Die For" campaign valiantly brought attention to some independent horror films, though the only one I cared for was THE ABANDONED. As for the best films of the year... I'd have to go with THEM, HARD CANDY, and RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR.

2007
On one hand, you could lament this as the year of Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN remake. On the other hand, you could hail it as the year of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN... which I think worked for many of the same reasons that the original HALLOWEEN worked. Yes, there were a lot of other unnecessary sequels and remakes, but there was also 30 DAYS OF NIGHT, THE ORPHANAGE, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, THEM, [REC], FRONTIERS, INSIDE (easily the most disturbing horror film I've seen in recent memory), and a pair of sadly neglected indies that warmed the cockles of my movie-geek heart: THE SIGNAL and TEETH.

2008
This was the year that I made my documentary and at the time I wished I could have added CLOVERFIELD. Not necessarily because it was the best horror film of the year, but because it was the most talked-about. Two years later, I'd much rather sit down and re-watch THE RUINS, SPLINTER, EDEN LAKE, THE STRANGERS, THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN or even M. Night Shyamalan's hopelessly-panned THE HAPPENING (if only because it reminded me of my fondness for the original DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS). The best film of the year, however, has to be the Swedish vampire film LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

2009
I must admit that I have some catching up to do... I haven't seen a lot of horror films in the last two years. I saw ZOMBIELAND and DRAG ME TO HELL, which got all the press in 2009. I was equally impressed with GRACE, CARRIERS and - despite all of the vitriolic reviews - JENNIFER'S BODY. Honestly, that's the most fun I've had watching a horror movie in a long time. The popularity of the genre may be waning slightly at the moment, but in my mind it's a never-ending cycle... and I'm fully prepared to celebrate Halloween on any night of the year.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

It Lives Again!

In April 2007, I took a crack at summing up the current decade of American horror films in a two-part blog post called “The Culture of Fear.” The post focused on the prevalence and popularity of three main groups of films: J-horror remakes, 1970s-style throwbacks, and so-called “torture porn.” I also provided my own list of favorites from the decade - my response to a growing myth that the horror genre, despite its current commercial popularity, is creatively dead. In my opinion, this is a misconception resulting from the over-saturation of the market. I think that today’s horror fans simply have to be more selective in order to discover new favorites.

With that in mind, I couldn’t possibly be more thrilled about the publication of Axelle Carolyn’s book It Lives Again! Horror Movies in the New Millenium (Telos, 2009) – a super-intelligent, super-dedicated horror fan’s guide to the current decade of darkness. Like me, Carolyn came of age as a horror fan during what is arguably the genre’s least interesting decade and, in her book, she uses the writings of genre theorist Thomas Schatz to explain the 1990s as a “baroque period” – a time when the familiarity of the genre formulas and conventions undermined the genre’s effectiveness with most audiences. (SCREAM, anyone?) She also offers a more likely explanation for the dry spell: a general malaise in Western culture. We simply didn’t have as much to be afraid of in the 1990s, so horror fans who came of age during that period drew their inspiration from the genre’s modern classics – a well-known body of work that has been enshrined by studies like David J. Skal’s The Monster Show. Taking her inspiration from Skal, Carolyn began writing about horror movies in the early 2000s in publications like Fangoria, SFX Magazine, and in a running column on IGN.com. She also married Neil Marshall, the director of the 2005 film THE DESCENT. Long story short: she is more than qualified to write the book on 21st century horror… And, as she says in her introduction, it’s a book that needed to be written to remind fans that the genre is more alive than ever.

In the U.S., 9/11 resurrected the current phase of the genre, which peaked in 2006. It Lives Again! starts even earlier, noting that a horror movie renaissance was already underway in Japan, where recession and terrorism had dramatically transformed the culture in the 1990s. Carolyn not only notes the often-discussed fear of technology in the J-horror cycle, but also perceptively points out a recurring theme about the marginalization of women and children. She goes on to note surges of horror movie interest in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Korea and New Zealand, citing dozens of films that have proven influential – and making it clear that one can no longer talk about "American" horror films without simultaneously delving into a discussion of international horror films.

On the home front, the genre’s popularity slowly escalated, beginning in 2002 with the popularity of subtle ghost stories, continuing in 2003 with a handful of more savage 70s-style horror movies, and shifting into high gear in 2004 when the success of SAW revealed a huge audience that was receptive to hyper-violence. According to Carolyn, the high water mark for this phase of the horror genre appeared in 2006, when Eli Roth’s controversial movie HOSTEL polarized audiences. By 2007, the hyper-violent horror movie was already passe. The author’s presentation of these overarching trends is astute without ever seeming forced or oversimplified (as it is in this review), and her critical analyses of the individual films are enthusiastically expert. Much to my amazement, she manages to highlight the most rewarding aspects of each film while still being judicious enough to point out the shortcomings of even the best. What emerges is a portrait of a decade defined not by a few canon-worthy blockbusters, but by an overwhelming variety of unique perspectives.

Along the way the book also offers a handful of short, illuminating interviews. The author's interview with Mick Garris about RIDING THE BULLET helped me to understand why that film didn’t quite work for me, despite some truly beautiful moments. Likewise, she allows the reader to understand Wes Craven’s disastrous werewolf movie CURSED in light of production problems, rather than simply as a creative failure. She also (naturally) got some great insights out of her husband, who remembers a day when real-life terrorism mixed with the release of his latest horror movie.

All in all, It Lives Again! is a thoroughly entertaining read (I finished it in one late-night sitting), attractively bound and illustrated with hundreds of lush photos. The best thing about it is that it will inevitably leave the reader with a long list of films to see. I was thrilled that it called attention to some of my favorite “discoveries”: THE HOLE, MY LITTLE EYE, DEAD END, THE ORDEAL, MAREBITO, INSIDE, THE SIGNAL… I agree that horror fans should track down these gems. Meanwhile, I’ll be working my way down an even longer list of films that I either hadn’t heard of or hadn’t bothered to prioritize until now: THE CONVENT (Adrienne Barbeau as a demon hunter? How the hell did I miss this?!), THE LOCALS, THE DARK, SATAN’S LITTLE HELPER, THE NUN, THE WOODS, THE GRAVEDANCERS, ABOMINABLE, TEETH… This book will be guiding my Netflix rentals for some time to come, and I can’t recommend it highly enough for other horror fans in search of something new.

Looking Back at THE DESCENT

In a recent poll of The Top 25 Horror Films of the Modern Era, the gold prize went to Neil Marshall’s 2005 film THE DESCENT. I couldn’t agree more. For my money, this is the best all-around horror film of the past decade. It’s everything that a good horror film should be: traditional yet surprising, subtle yet gruesome, intimate yet exhilarating.

It starts out with a historical event that sets up the main character arc. This has become a common approach in contemporary horror movies. In much the way that slasher movies began with a historical event that established the killer’s motives, this opening establishes the heroine’s motives. Sarah (played by Shauna Macdonald) is struggling to bounce back from the loss of her husband and young daughter in a freak accident. Psychologically, she’s already on unstable ground when her girlfriends convince her to go spelunking with them in an uncharted cave in the Appalachian Mountains. No doubt they (and she) are thinking the experience will be a good form of therapy, allowing her to re-engage with the living and rediscover her sense of adventure in life.

Of course we know that horrible things are in store for her, and writer/director Marshall acknowledges our expectations by tipping his hat to the film’s influences. As the characters wander into the woods – attempting to re-capture the magic of their white-water rafting adventure – one is reminded of DELIVERANCE. Juno (played by Natalie Mendoza) is the Burt Reynolds character, challenging nature with masculine bravado. The characters spend their first night in the wilderness in an old rustic cabin that looks like it was ripped straight out of THE EVIL DEAD. For horror fans, this hints that we have more to fear than hillbillies. Ash and his friends in THE EVIL DEAD confronted an ancient, primal evil that eventually took possession of their souls.

Soon after, the characters begin their descent into a seemingly bottomless cave. Before long, it’s hard not to think of this as a journey into the mouth of Hell itself – but the film’s imagery is never explicitly religious. Rather, Marshall draws his inspiration from the film ALIEN. (I also notice some similarities to STEPHEN KING’S GRAVEYARD SHIFT, but I’m going to overlook them because that film wasn’t executed anywhere near as well as ALIEN or THE DESCENT.) In both films, the characters slowly make their way through a series of dark, narrow cavities. There was something strangely organic about the other-worldly catacombs in ALIEN, and one gets that same feeling in THE DESCENT. The moistness of the rocks might make one think that the characters are crawling around inside the body of some giant living creature. (Marshall suggests a more Freudian interpretation in his DVD commentary.) Because the walls are lit only by constantly-moving flashlight beams, the entire cave seems to move and pulsate before our eyes.

The unreliable lighting is perhaps the greatest strength of the film. The filmmaker understands that we are all instinctively afraid of the dark. (In fact, the original shooting title of the film was "The Dark.") ALIEN operated the same way – telling a futuristic sci-fi story as if it were an old ghost story produced by Val Lewton. It builds suspense simply, through darkness and silence. Unlike the Lewton films, however, ALIEN draws back the curtain in the third act, revealing the monster. THE DESCENT is structured the same way. It skillfully manipulates use through the use of darkness and shadow, all the while developing our gothic heroine Sarah and her hyper-masculine counterpart Juno. The choice of location goes a long way to enhancing the believability of the story, and therefore the characters.

While watching THE DESCENT for the first time, I remembered a documentary I’d recently seen called TOUCHING THE VOID – about a pair of hikers who got stranded in the Peruvian Andes in 1985. One of them fell into a giant crevice and broke his leg. His climbing partner, and close friend, had to leave him for dead in order to save himself. There is an absolutely chilling scene in which the fallen character confronts the reality that he’s going to die alone in the darkness, where his body will never be discovered. I remembered that scene when one of the supporting characters in THE DESCENT falls into a crevice and suffers a compound fracture. That’s it, I thought, she’s never going to get out of that cave. After everything the characters have gone through to get where they are at that point, we the viewers have no delusion that they will be able to go back the way they came.

For me, that was the scariest moment in the film. I am not as horrified by the prospect of dying as I am by the prospect of dying slowly, alone, unprepared, in the darkness where no one will ever find you or know what happened to you. For me, that cave is hell. It cuts the characters off from civilization, from everything familiar, isolates them one by one, threatens them with the prospects of eternal darkness, suffocation, dehydration, starvation, drowning… and more. (We haven’t even gotten to the monsters yet… but it’s tough for them to compete with these imagined horrors.) When I saw that poor girl’s bone sticking out of her leg, I cringed… and not just because of the thought of excruciating pain. For most of us, our bodies are sufficiently linked to our sense of identity for us to have an overwhelming fear of mutilation, dismemberment, being eaten alive. The greater fear comes not from the pain but from the prospect of having our life – or humanity – taken away from us. Knowing that you’re going to die soon, and that you’re probably going to die in an unimaginably horrific way, brings out a normally-hidden aspect of our humanity. We become animals who want to survive at all costs, because we cannot cope with the alternative possibility. Primal instincts overtake everything else. This is what happens in the third act of THE DESCENT.

The cave-dwelling “crawlers” that attack in the third act remind me a bit of the rage-infected zombies in 28 DAYS LATER and even more of the mutant vampires in BLADE 2, but I tend to think of them more as uncivilized humans. In my mind, they are what humans might have evolved into if our evolution had been confined to an underground cave with no sunlight and (because vegetarians would have a tough time in a world without sunlight) very little food. Faced with the certainty of being hunted, killed and eaten, Sarah and Juno quickly revert to primal survival instincts. Juno, however, was already in touch with those instincts and has had time to integrate them into her civilized mentality. Sarah, who has been teetering on the edge of the void since the beginning of the film (the first time she lost the people who meant the world to her) becomes a savage.

The character of Sarah is an interesting variation on the slasher movie’s “final girl.” She starts off as the stereotypical gothic heroine – not exactly virginal, but with the hyper-awareness that one associates with the virgin in slasher movies. Because she is so sensitive to her surroundings, Sarah is the first to sense the presence of the crawlers in the cave. But she also has a heightened mothering instinct, because of what happened to her daughter at the beginning of the film. When the crawlers attack, she tries to help her friends – in contrast to Juno, who leaves her friends for dead in an attempt to save herself. It is the loss of those she’s trying to protect, and the betrayal of Juno, that transforms Sarah into something like a monster herself.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead!)

This sets up an ending that’s clearly inspired by the modern-day classics of American horror. In fact, there are two endings. The original UK ending proposes that Sarah never physically escapes the cave. She dreams a scenario in which she crawls out into the light and drives away like a madwoman, but then wakes up in the cave again. Neil Marshall calls this “THE THING ending,” noting the similarity to the end of John Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece. The character is alive, but with no hope for the future. The US theatrical version of THE DESCENT ends sooner, when Sarah is driving away and the bloody-eyed ghost of Juno appears next to her. Sarah screams, credits roll. Marshall calls this his “TEXAS CHAINSAW ending,” noting similarities to Tobe Hooper’s 1974 masterpiece. In that film, Marilyn Burns escapes the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface but, as we watch her laughing maniacally in the back of an escaping truck, we understand that she has gone insane. (Hooper himself has said that he originally wanted to make a sequel that starts with the character in a morgue, where her attendants convince her that she is already dead… I’m sort of hoping that this is the jumping-off point for the upcoming THE DESCENT 2.) In the “TEXAS CHAINSAW” ending of THE DESCENT, Sarah physically escapes the cave, but when Juno's ghost appears next to her, we realize that she never psychologically escapes. Her worst fear is realized: she has lost her humanity.

Marshall has said that he prefers the former ending; I prefer the latter, because it is the true “savage cinema” ending. Modern American horror classics like THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and THE HILLS HAVE EYES present us with the grimmest truth that a horror film can offer: We are the monster. THE THING ending is blindly nihilistic; the TEXAS CHAINSAW ending is purposefully nihilistic. It poses the question: What would you be if everything you knew and loved was taken away? Great horror films, like THE DESCENT, carry a message:

When you enter the darkness, the darkness can enter you.

Some Thoughts on the Contemporary Horror Film

Some time ago, a friend pointed me to an academic article on “the rhetoric of crisis” in recent horror film criticism. The writer, Stephen Hantke, starts with a very simple observation: Although business is booming, fans and critics agree that “the American horror film is in a [creative] slump.” Hantke goes on to quote the final chapters of several studies of horror films (including mine) to prove his point. All of these studies, he notes, focus on a well-established canon of classics rather than examining the films of the most recent two decades. Hantke interprets this as proof that the genre is in trouble and suggests that, if people want to see something other than sequels and remakes to the well-established classics, we have to explain why the recent sequels and remakes aren’t working for us as well as the originals did. Seems simple enough, right?

It’s got me thinking about my reaction to Rob Zombie’s redux of “Halloween.” I simply couldn’t help comparing it to the original, and for me the remake didn’t live up. Why? I just never got emotionally involved with the characters. I didn’t feel that the victims were sympathetic enough, or that the killer was mysterious enough.

Not long after I saw the remake of “Halloween,” I went to see the Coen Brothers movie “No Country for Old Men” and I got to thinking that Anton Chigurh is a more interesting variation on Michael Myers. Not just because he uses a murder weapon that makes Myers look boring by comparison… but because he’s a human being without a conscience – a “faceless” menace who believes that life and death are as random and meaningless as the outcome of a single coin toss.

My opinion: Zombie’s remake of “Halloween” should have featured an Anton Chigurh.

Chigurh is as relentless as the Michael Myers of Zombie’s film, but actually has more in common with Carpenter’s original concept of Michael Myers as the boogeyman. Chigurh is an abstraction – he represents different things to different characters. The Vietnam generation characters (Josh Brolin and Woody Harrelson) regard him as a stumbling block that they have to personally overcome. The World War II-generation character (played by Tommy Lee Jones) regards him rather as a monster that can’t ever be entirely destroyed. At the end of the film, I couldn’t help thinking that the apathetic Chigurh represents the Iraq War generation – he is as hardened to the reality (necessity?) of violence as Zombie’s Michael Myers. The genius of “No Country for Old Men” lies in its perspective on him. It is through Jones’s character that Chigurh becomes the mythical monster of a horror film – not simply an agent of physical death, but a generator of the less tangible fears that lie at the core of the horror genre.

The suspense in Carpenter’s original film comes from our understanding that the monster is death, death is inevitable and unknowable, and the randomness of death is sometimes unendurable. Zombie’s “Halloween” does work on one level – as a slice of life narrative with a clear beginning, middle and end. But Carpenter’s “Halloween” is a myth. (Carpenter himself understands myths only too well, being a dedicated fan of America’s greatest mythological art form – the western.) Like “No Country for Old Men,” the original “Halloween” reveals the unknown through its honest inability to offer a reassuring explanation for the things we fear the most.

I think perhaps that’s where so many recent horror sequels and remakes have fallen short of their predecessors – they lack a sense of magic and mystery, the supernatural and THE UNKNOWN. For more thoughts on this topic, check out my review of “Pulse” on classic-horror.com, a great little website devoted to the horror film “canon.”

The Culture of Fear, Part 2: Horror Films in the 2000s

The horror genre’s first big box office breakthrough of the decade was Gore Verbinski’s remake The Ring (2002). That film’s success awakened mainstream American audiences to J-horror, a new wave of Japanese films about vengeful ghosts. The Ring has been followed by a slew of similar American remakes of Japanese ghost stories: The Grudge (2004), Dark Water (2005), The Ring 2 (2005), The Grudge 2 (2006), and Pulse (2006).

Writing on his blog in early 2005, John Kenneth Muir observed similarities between The Ring and The Grudge. In both films, he says, innocent people are victimized for being in the wrong place at the wrong time: the films “seem to suggest that ‘being there’ – the act of watching – is enough [to warrant punishment]. We don’t have to commit the atrocities we see on the tube ourselves to be held responsible for them.” His observation is that the films display no clear sense of karmic justice (as, for example, in the slasher films of the 1980s, where “sex + drugs = death”); the violence is haphazard and arbitrary. At most, the victims are guilty by association.

The notion of karmic justice was also absent from the “savage cinema” of the 1970s – films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), in which anyone could die at anytime for no reason at all. The universe in those films is ruled by chance and chaos, and the only way that the characters can survive is to ignore their civilized reason and resort to primitive instinct. I was certainly not the first person to write about these films as a reflection of Vietnam-era anxieties in America, and I am not the first person to point out the seeming significance of the fact that these films have recently been remade for a new generation as it faces a war with disturbing similarities to Vietnam.

Michael Bay’s big-budget remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre made a killing at the box office in 2003, the same year that several other stylistic throwbacks cashed in. Witness Rob Zombie’s carnival-esque House of 1,000 Corpses (Roger Corman meets David Lynch), the Romero-revival 28 Days Later, Eli Roth’s Raimi-esque debut Cabin Fever, and would-B-movie Wrong Turn – a halfhearted mash-up of The Hills Have Eyes and Deliverance. Since then, Michael Bay has produced the stomach-churning The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), as well as remakes of The Amityville Horror (original 1979, remake 2005) and The Hitcher (original 1986, remake 2007). He is currently working on a remake of Friday the 13th (1980). Rob Zombie made The Devil’s Rejects (2006), and recently shot a remake of Halloween (1979). Universal has distributed a high-profile remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (original 1978, remake 2005), plus Romero’s own Land of the Dead (2005) – not to mention an excellent spoof: Shaun of the Dead. In addition, we have the usual lot of franchise sequels, hardly worth listing here.

Horror’s newest mega-franchise was born in 2004. Saw, a gritty independent film about a sadistic contest for survival, is arguably the most distinct horror film of the decade. The villain of the film is the Jigsaw Killer, a puppet master who appears to take delight in the psychological anguish of ordinary people in excruciating circumstances. He doesn’t want to kill; he wants to watch. In fact, what distinguishes this killer more than anything is the fact that he never gets his hands dirty… he’s more like a “civilized” government leader, who gets foot soldiers to do his dirty work. Early in the film, Dr. Larry Gordon remarks – with a twinkle in his eye, suggesting that he slightly admires his captor – that Jigsaw is not “technically” a serial killer, because he never physically kills anyone.

Like Larry, we can’t help admiring the Jigsaw Killer’s ingenuity; and like him, we are genuinely curious to see what these characters are truly capable of. Will a man who recently attempted to kill himself be willing to force his way through a maze of barbed wire… in order to save his life? Will a scam artist cause himself to get burned alive, thereby suffering poetic revenge for “burning so many people”? Will a drug addict be willing to kill a fellow addict, then search through his intestines for a key that will prevent her head from exploding? Finally, will Dr. Larry Gordon – a surgeon who has taken the Hippocratic oath – be willing to kill a seemingly innocent young man, in order to rescue his own family? We can’t tear our eyes away from the screen… because we can’t help thinking about how we would react in the same situation.

Perhaps for that reason, some critics remarked that sitting through the film was comparable to being tortured. American audiences, however, were more than willing to play the role of voyeur – to the tune of 55 million dollars. Why? Maybe we’re testing ourselves. At the end of the film, we don’t want the Jigsaw Killer to get caught, anymore than we wanted Hannibal Lector to get caught for eating Ray Liota’s brain. Why? Jigsaw reminds us not to take what we have for granted; he makes us grateful to be alive and safe – watching this “game” from the comfort of our own homes. In the words of Amanda, the murderous drug addict who reappears in Saw 2: “He helped me.” This begs a tantalizing follow-up question: But at what cost?

Saw has already spawned two sequels, with the promise of another one on the way. It has also inspired a widespread passion for like-minded films – most notably Alexandre Aja’s High Tension (2003, released in the U.S. in 2005), Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek (2005), and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2006). Most recently, Alexandre Aja’s remake of The Hills Have Eyes and its 2007 sequel, have claimed the throne. The goal of each of these films, it seems, is to push the onscreen violence a little bit further, testing the limitations of the characters as well as the audience: How much can we take? In the process, some of these films lose sight of the need for pathos, and become little more than a gore-filled endurance test. But this is par for the course. There have always been horror filmmakers with lesser imaginations, eager to follow the popular trends without fully understanding them. I submit that horror films on the whole are not getting becoming more “degenerate,” only wearing out a trend that is still timely for war-weary audiences.

To those who think that horror films of the 2000s are less intelligent than horror films of the past, I refer to seven years worth of comparatively traditional horror films: Ginger Snaps (Canada, 2000), The Gift (2000), The Bunker (England, 2001), The Others (2001), The Devil’s Backbone (Spain, 2001), Dark Water (Japan, 2001), May (2002), My Little Eye (England, 2002), The Mothman Prophecies (2002), 28 Days Later (England, 2003), Dead End (2003), Identity (2003), Marebito (Japan, 2004), Shutter (Korea, 2004), Land of the Dead (2005), Dark Water (2005), The Descent (England, 2006)… I’m sure there are many more that I’m neglecting to mention.

The last example, The Descent, gets right to the heart of this discussion about the subtext of recent horror films. I won’t give away the plot, but suffice it to say that the survivors are not only fighting to save themselves physically, but to save their human decency. Ultimately, that is the only thing that makes them different from the cave-dwelling creatures that are will kill them and eat them. How much are the characters willing to sacrifice in order to survive? That is the same dilemma faced by the would-be victims in The Hills Have Eyes (both versions), and by Dr. Gordon and Amanda in the Saw films… Like soldiers who must act without conscience in order to keep breathing, they choose to live. They are willing to go as far as they have to.

Afterwards, they face a new question of survival: After everything we’ve lost, can we ever go back?

The Culture of Fear, Part 1: The Cinema of Torture

In light of the fact that I wrote a book about the relationship between horror films and American pop culture, someone recently asked me what I think about the current spate of horror films that celebrate torture. I didn’t have the kind of ready-made answer that I could offer if they had asked me about previous decades in cinema history, because: (1) I have not written about horror films since I finished my book in 2003, and so my thoughts about recent horror films are relatively unfocused, and (2) It is not easy to get a grasp on pop culture without the advantage of hindsight. It only occurred to me (belatedly) in the last year or so that the “cinema of torture” is the defining trend in American horror films of the current decade. I believe it’s fair to conjecture that this has something to do with America’s current political climate, which can be summed up in one word: frustrated.

For Americans, the current war began on 9/11 – a wake-up call so surreal that, at the time, most of us could only compare it to a movie. I was one of the many people who watched the events unfold on television, and remained dumbstruck for days afterward. Soon after, shock turned to mourning, mourning turned to anger. The Bush administration answered the people’s call for action by invading Iraq in the spring of 2003. At the time, the nation had a clear goal: to eradicate the pervasive threat of terrorism at its most accessible source – a country that supported known terrorists. This was the beginning of “the war on terror,” a worldwide effort to root out the Evil of terrorism before it could spread.

Flash forward four years. The war on terror has become a desperate effort to maintain order in a foreign country, where acts of terrorism are more common than ever. The U.S. government now practically stands alone in this once-heroic effort. The American people are conflicted about what to do: stay the course or admit defeat? We do not like to admit defeat.

Perhaps this explains our cinema’s obsession with torture – our entertainment is not just reminding us of specific atrocities of war, like the events at Abu Ghraib… it is also reminding us that torture is the last resort of a person, or a country, that is willing to sacrifice human rights to achieve their goal. By any means necessary.

A few years ago, I read a very good book on America’s foreign policy during the Vietnam War. The author, a professor at a well-known university, wrote the book after one of his students expressed the belief that we only lost the Vietnam War because the American government wasn’t completely committed to the cause. The United States, he figured, couldn’t possibly have lost a war against a tiny third-world country, unless it simply didn’t try hard enough. After further discussion, the professor realized that his student’s knowledge of the Vietnam War was based largely on the film Rambo: First Blood, Part II, in which Sylvester Stallone single-handedly wins the Vietnam War through sheer rage. (It is worth noting that, in the months after 9/11, Stallone announced that he was working on a script for a new Rambo sequel.) Nowadays, we might simply send Jack Bauer to sort things out behind closed doors.

Which brings me to my big question: How many Americans are desperate to win the current war at any cost? How many of us are willing to dispense with any and all measures of restraint? The terrorists are merciless, we say, and so we must be equally merciless. Our administration calls the terrorists Evil – the implication being that they are beyond reason, and can only be dealt with in one way. This is the end result of the “culture of fear”: from shock to mourning to anger to inhumanity.

We still have not recovered from the blow that started us down this path. The “war on terror” is still linked, in the popular consciousness, with 9/11. We are still afraid of what happened that day. Those of us who were not in New York are afraid to think of what it would have been like if we ourselves had been there, experiencing the horror first-hand instead of watching it on TV. We are afraid that it could have been us, afraid that it could be us next time.

When we look beyond our pain and our anger, we understand that if we are willing to torture anyone, anyplace, anytime in order to achieve our goals, then we MUST be psychologically prepared for the possibility that we could be subjected to the same merciless treatment ourselves. Any place, any time. It is not an easy thing to cope with that kind of fear… much easier to see it played out on the big screen, in a movie that we know will end in roughly 90 minutes.