The Vault of Horror: The Ring

Showing posts with label The Ring. Show all posts

Thursday, December 17, 2009

21st Century Terrors, Part 3: 2002

If the early part of the current decade suffered a bit from the aftereffect of the '90s malaise, then 2002 was the year that things really began to shape up. Most would agree that this decade has been a good time to be a horror movie lover, and 2002 is where it all kicked into gear. This was when the decade started coming into its own.

This was the year so many things began clicking all at once, giving fans lots of options, and rebuilding the face of the genre in the process.

For example, 2002 gave us what very well may be the decade most well-crafted and impressively made horror film, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. Not only was it a tense, fascinating and brilliant re-evaluation of the zombie genre, it's the kind of horror film that literally defines an era. In other words, looking back on the 2000s, we could very well call it the decade of 28 Days Later.

And speaking of zombies, it can safely be said that the 2000s was the decade those undead buggers really came into the mainstream after many years of existing underground and being somewhat out of fashion. And 2002 was the year it started. 28 Days Later was one major part of that, although "purists" will argue it's not really a zombie film since the attackers depicted are technically infected living people.

But this is an exercise in futile semantics. Technical details aside, the plot devices are those of the zombie movie, the setting, the structure, the methods of evoking fear--purism aside, 28 Days Later helped usher in a golden age of zombie films, with its depiction of manic, rabid, and--controversy of controversies--fast-moving "zombies".

But if a more old-school approach was more your cup of tea, then the other half of 2002's one-two punch of zombie goodness delivered what you were looking for--to a degree. Based on a successful video game, Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil is the other film that usually gets pointed to as kicking off the zombie renaissance.

While not as good a horror film as 28 Days Later, it was just as popular, if not more so, owing largely to the vast popularity of the game. And while it gave us traditional, slow-moving zombies, it mixed things up a bit with an assortment of other bizarre mutated monsters from the game.

And most importantly, it reached a mainstream audience to a degree almost unheard of for a zombie movie, due largely to its lack of gore. While this didn't sit well with hardcore horror fans, it did expose middle-of-the-road America to the zombie phenomenon, and so may deserve even more credit than 28 Days for spawning the wave of ghoul cinema that continues to this day.

The trend of Asian horror cinema and its effect on the American genre gained greater steam than ever, with the most high profile U.S. remake of them all, The Ring. Taken from 1998's Ringu, this amped-up ghost story was a major hit, with some even preferring it to the Japanese original. Unlike what mostly had been happening, with paltry, inferior remakes of Asian horror, The Ring captured the attention of a lot of horror fans. And although most still prefer the original, it is a quality film.

For many casual horror fans, The Ring would become the benchmark of scary for the decade's fright films. The American version was able to assert a completely separate identity, which was a large part of why it became one of the decade's most memorable horror films. But meanwhile, overseas in Asia, more excellent horror was being created. Both Ju-On from Japan and Jian Gui from China would have a strong impact, and later be remade in America as The Grudge and The Eye, respectively.

Genre directors would make their mark in a big way in 2002. M. Night Shyamalan, who had debuted with the Oscar-nominated The Sixth Sense three years earlier, gave us Signs, a moody sci-fi/horror flick about hostile alien invaders. Although it ends with one of the director's increasingly tiresome twisty climaxes, along the way it delivered some solid scares.

And another young director, Eli Roth, crashed on to the scene with Cabin Fever, a wicked little horror comedy that instantly got him the attention of fright fans. There's no question that film divides horror fandom, but I fall amongst those who found it to be a delightfully sick little laugh riot. A ballsy film that put Roth on the map, leading to the continued impact he would have on the genre as the decade moved along.

Horror movies in general got more interesting in 2002 than they had been in a long time. Within the same 12-month span, we got the ingenious and truly original werewolf picture Dog Soldiers, as well as the boldly imaginative comedy Bubba Ho-Tep, which added one more shining gem to the crown of horror's reigning king, Bruce Campbell. Just one of those films in any given year in recent memory would be impressive--to have both come out within months of each other is testament to the blockbuster horror years that was 2002.

But OK, if you'd like me to balance things out a bit, I can point out that 2002 also gave us the abysmal Anne Rice adaptation Queen of the Damned, which made the previous decade's Interview with the Vampire look like Nosferatu; the famously atrocious FeardotCom; and perhaps the saddest entry in the adventures of Michael Myers, Halloween: Resurrection, in which Mikey tangles with Busta and Tyra...

Nevertheless, 2002 was indeed the year the decade came into its own. And there would only be more good stuff to come--including lots and LOTS of zombies.

Also from 2002:

Blade 2
Eight-Legged Freaks
Ghost Ship
The Mothman Prophecies

Part 1: 2000
Part 2: 2001

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

What Goes Bump In the Night…….? Chapter II

(We join our regularly scheduled blog post, already in progress.)

While still young, I did succumb to more than one “devil movie.” The two most famous were of course The Exorcist and The Omen. While The Exorcist was one thing all to itself, The Omen was rather the flagship to a genre of ‘70s devil movies. While The Omen was creepy, mostly because of that chubby little kid, there was one titled Devil Dog, Hound of Hell. Now this sounds stupid, like a Drake’s cake gone wrong. But to the ten year old me who decided to watch it on either the “Five Star Movie” or “Drive in Movie” on channel 5 one Saturday afternoon, it was a little more than that.

Now that lousy movie “Devil Dog…” was one of those poorly shot, poorly produced, poorly scripted ‘70s horror endeavors where the film is so bad that it is dark during the day time. And I think it was this poor film quality coupled with a fairly decent devil story. Now, why were devil stories so effective? I think it can be summed up in that a) the devil (or Devil), is all consuming evil, way more evil than just a zombie or slasher, and b) the devil always came in the package you were least expecting: a little girl, a little boy, or, in this case, a little puppy. It is the destruction and the perversion of the innocent into something diabolical that really makes devil movies, and their related genre scary. The same effect can be applied to other stories of a similar vein, like Children of the Corn, and for its part, Pet Semetary’s Gage.

I won’t say much about The Exorcist, as it is like a 5 tool player in baseball (it scares for average, scares for power, etc…), except that a) some of the really scary parts are when you just see the shadows of the demons, and b) when Regan bends over backwards to scuttle down the stairs – whoa, that’s a bad 3 seconds of film. Why? Because it is friggin’ weird, and weird is scary.

A few weeks back B-Sol was good enough to do a post on Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and in particular, the Hell portion of the triptych. The thing is, while the Hell portion is obviously terrifying, the other two panels, one of Eden, and the other of Earth, are both so weird (and ahead of their time, for purposes of fantasy and science fiction), that they border on the scary. Scary in the sense of making no sense, the horror of a topsy-turvey world. In the Eden Panel, there are the naked Adam and Eve with a clothed Jesus (ok, nothing weird yet), but the surroundings are filled with never-before-seen animals, and a really strange castle in the center. The middle portion of Earth is even worse, with a multitude of nude figures with an enormous amount of oversized birds, fruit, strange vehicles, and in the far background, even stranger creatures and weirder architecture. And the Hell portion is, well, Hell. What is all the fuss? Well, what I am saying is that the weird can be scary, and this triptych is friggin’ weird.

A recent example as to the frightening nature of the weird is the video from The Ring. There really isn’t anything scary about it. But it is shot in that off-color, with strange set pieces (ladder against a wall, centipede running through a living room, the silhouette of the tree), weird sounds, and doesn’t make much sense. But there is a malevolence running through it that is expressed via its strangeness, which fills one with unease. Unease is the first level of fear.

Mr. Hungus cited David Lynch’s Lost Highway as an example of unnerving cinema. I agree, and put forth that another Lynch classic, Blue Velvet, while also not a horror movie by any stretch, is also disturbing as the characters are nearly alien in their various versions of madness. It has always turned my insides how the characters seem to choose to follow the wrong path at every turn, how it almost doesn’t make sense.

Weird first scared me when I saw the Beatle’s Yellow Submarine. While the Beatles are about the least scary rock band in history, Yellow Submarine, with the Blue Meanies, can scare any little kid. Why? In part because the story is really weird, with really strange creatures, and makes little sense, and also because the Blue Meanies are really weird as well, and in addition, they are cruel for cruelty’s sake. Now, I don’t think Yellow Submarine is scary as an adult, it does bring me to my next observation – cruelty is scary.

Cruelty has a tremendous effect on me. That otherwise normal human beings are capable of the most inhuman acts is the terrifying part of being human. Not to wax political, but we in America are often given to the illusion that all we have wrought is good because we are good, and only the bad people have done awful things. Things that the Communists did in Russia, China, or Cambodia. Things that the Nazis did in Germany, Austria, or Poland. Or the Japanese did in the Pacific.

What is lost in this worldview is that the awful occurrences did not happen outside the purview of good people, but rather despite them, or with their assistance. Horrible human acts by otherwise normal people are not impossible. Cruelty has, more often than not, been the norm. And it percolates just below the surface of all of us. All it might take is one act, or one person, one event to bring it all up, and terrible deeds will come to pass.

Torture porn, a genre of which I am not a great fan, attempts to use cruelty for this sake, to get at us under our skins. Like in Hostel, where there is systematic kidnapping/torture/murder, the scary thing isn’t the torture itself, but that people want to torture, to maim, to kill, and even videotape it, like in Vacancy. It is scary because we are all, in the right time and place, capable of some very awful things.

For instance, the most horrible scene of cruelty in the classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre comes not when Leatherface is chasing anyone with his saw, but when he suddenly appears from a corridor, smashes a fellow human on the head with a mallet, and then, while the body is violently twitching, drags it inside, and then slams the door closed. It is the casual nature of the act which reinforces the cruelty. On the other hand, over time, other slashers, like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, are rendered less scary in that they only do what they do but for no other reason than that’s what they do. They do not do it out of any cruelty – they are essentially knife/axe/machete wielding zombie automatons.

Sometimes annihilation comes from large groups. Being faced with the overwhelming force of a community bent on my own destruction, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is a form of group cruelty, in that it seeks the end of my person, if not my torture. The scary aspect isn’t that they are alien plants, but that it is everyone but me. Body Snatchers is about being the last free thinking man amongst the Nazis, the Bolsheviks, or the Khmer Rouge.

The Shining is a similar dynamic, but instead of human cruelty, or reeducation via seedpod, the overwhelming forces arrayed against the Torrance family is that of ghosts through the transmitter of a sentient building, the Overlook Hotel. But that malevolence is something more seething than apparent, and only is truly manifested in the third act of the film. But it is its cruel nature, wanting sacrifices of blood, that makes the Overlook such a scary hotel.

In that vein, I think we begin to return to the unseen. I wrote my first post about The Thing by John Carpenter, and state unequivocally that it was the scariest horror movie of all time. I think that the horror from this movie is that, like Body Snatchers, the monster lurks within, with other factors elevating the terror. This is no longer an anti Communist, anti-intellectual screed (as was its titular predecessor, as well as Body Snatchers). Rather, the fright is of the psychological nature, when the civilization of the men involved breaks down (fear of madness), when they realize they no longer know each other, or truly know themselves. What could be more frightening than not knowing if you continued to be you? Couple this with the thought that if in fact you are you, at best one of your colleagues is harboring a very slimy and malevolent monster under his skin. The isolation of each character, from himself, from his friends, and from the rest of the world, is total. Personally, I think I would have flipped my lid like the character Windows, and beat a hasty trail right to the arsenal (I often think how the shotgun would vitiate most horror movies plots, but probably not The Thing).

Well, that’s about it for now, gentle reader. As Mr. Hungus asked: What scares you?

Friday, March 21, 2008

Gore Goes Mainstream: A History of Horror Movies, Part 7

It's ironic that the horror genre would be so quiet at the turn of the 21st century. Ironic, because in the years that followed--the final years of this seven-part history of horror--we have seen scary movies hold mainstream America fascinated to a degree greater than anything witnessed before, or at the very least since the heyday of Universal 75 years ago.

Whereas in the past, horror was treated as the forgotten stepchild of the movie biz, the sordid secret kept hidden away and relegated to midnight showings and niche subcultures, these days it's all around us, accepted like never before by a culture which has perhaps become too cynical and overexposed to real-life horrors to truly be shocked any longer. More on that later.

In recent years, the last true example of cinematic dread we've seen has been the surge of unnerving films that have come out of the Far East. In the Western world, the trend became to remake these films for American audiences, starting with The Ring in 2002. By far the most effective of the bunch, it was followed by the likes of The Grudge (2004), and more recently Shutter and The Eye.

Much of what became hip for the genre this decade has had to with a nostalgia for the films of a generation past. In part, this can be pointed to for the dramatic resurgence of the zombie subgenre--it can also be attributed to the success of videogames like Resident Evil. It was that game that kicked off the undead renaissance with a film adaptation in 2002. That same year saw the release of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, which introduced us to the concept of "fast-moving zombies."

It might not be an exaggeration to say that the past half-decade has seen more flesh-eater flicks than at any point previous. George Romero's Dawn of the Dead got a surprisingly high quality 2004 remake; Romero himself finally got to continue his saga with 2005's Land of the Dead; and Edgar Wright brought us the ingenious Shaun of the Dead (2004), the finest horror comedy this side of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.

The other face of this nostalgia was a throwback to the gritty, over-the-top exploitation horror of the 1970s. After more than a decade of restraining itself, Hollywood was starting to let its hair down again. The result is epitomized by the work of rocker-turned-director Rob Zombie, whose House of 1,000 Corpses (2003) and The Devil's Rejects (2005) exemplify a return to the early work of Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven.

But the logical extension of this would turn out to be a development that has been troubling to some old-school fans, yet exhilirating to a whole new generation just now embracing the genre. It should be said that the major difference between the exploitation flicks of then and now is that now they enjoy the mainstream spotlight. Filmmakers who grew up on this form of entertainment have helped bring it to the fore like never before. And as a result, a natural evolutionary step has occurred.

In direct contrast to the previous decade, in which some of the most bloodless horror films of the modern era were released, the past few years have born witness to an almost unprecedented amount of gore. And this time, it's not hidden away in a rundown grindhouse theater, playing to an isolated subculture of aficionados, or relegated to a few racks in the back of your local video store. This time it's front and center, and right in everybody's face.

Although the first Saw film, released in 2004, was actually quite psychological and contained little graphic violence, it has become the most recognizable touchstone of what is now usually referred to as torture porn, a subgenre of horror that focuses on depicting bodily trauma in unflinching detail. In the later Saw pictures, and even moreso in a movie much more typical of the category, Eli Roth's Hostel (2005), some might even argue that the depiction of torture takes precedence over character and plot.

Never before have movies containing such images played to such a wide audience. They are a part of our pop culture in a way that their predecessors were not, at least in their own time. The reasons for this have been debated endlessly by social commentators both professional and amateur. Are we desensitized as a society? Or worse, have we grown to enjoy such macabre displays, like Romans at a gladiatorial event? Some have argued these points, while others simply say that horror filmmakers are only looking for new ways to disturb us, for new ground to cover.

If it is just all about exploring new territory, that's at least more admirable than the latest trend that has all but taken over the production of horror movies as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century: remakes.

Too timid to try anything original, the majority of those willing to back horror flicks these days are looking to cash in on bankable properties; proven titles that are almost guaranteed to bring in a buck, if only on name recognition alone. The 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre kicked it off for all intents and purposes, and it has only grown more commonplace in the past five years. We've seen Zombie redo Halloween (2007), plus slavish rehashes of classics like House of Wax (2005), The Amityville Horror (2005), The Omen (2006), The Wicker Man (2006), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), When a Stranger Calls (2006), The Hitcher (2007) and many others, with decidedly mixed results.

In the year 2008, horror fans have a veritable legion of upcoming horror redo's to look forward to: Prom Night, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Rosemary's Baby, Hellraiser, Sleepaway Camp, etc., etc. Perhaps it's a commentary on the state of the genre that it seems to be torn between groping to depict more and more horrifying images, and endlessly trying to recreate that which worked in the past.

So where do we go from here? Maybe overseas, where films like the excellent [REC] threaten to steal away America's dominance of the genre. Or maybe the upcoming Wolf Man and the rebirth of Hammer Films signify a return of the classic monsters. Then again, it's most likely a heretofore unseen new development as unimaginable as the likes of Psycho or Night of the Living Dead would've been to pre-1960s audiences.

If it survives this latest cannibalistic phase, the horror film genre can survive anything, and it will almost certainly continue to thrive. From Count Orlock and Erik the Phantom, to Dracula and Frankenstein, to the Gill-Man and Norman Bates, to Leatherface and Jason, to Jigsaw and Captain Spaulding, the cinema of fear has firmly held our imagination in its icy clutches for a hundred years. Ironically, for as long as there exists real horror in this world, we'll always seek the escape of its morbid, yet safely unreal on-screen counterpart.

Other major releases: