The nauseating mediocrity of horror from the 2000s to today
The horror genre is a f'ing joke these days. For the past ten to fifteen years or so, horror directors have been copying and repeating each other to the point of nausea. I took the liberty of jotting down some quick points and the patterns I've noticed that have been irritating me. I believe these items are what's contributing to the continued marginalization of the genre and why I have lost interest in horror:
• Ignoring the importance of writing, of interesting and amusing dialogue; total lack of theme, of intellectual curiosity, of using horror to posit philosophical or metaphysical questions (the horror is always external and our characters only in external mortal danger, not internally conflicted); overly literal or formulaic storytelling; bereft of content that captures, inspires, or challenges the imagination; hollow, vapid characters that resemble stereotypes and not actual people; smothering anything that could be open to interpretation, thereby making these films as linear and dull as they are pointless and plentiful
• Trying to make us care about the fate of characters and their motives when, as mentioned, the characters are not believable to begin with
• Employing gore for gore's sake, cheapening and diminishing the potential of what horror can be down to just cringe-worthy exploitation that grosses people out instead of being fun or meaningful
• Abusing music, relying heavily on "stock" music sounds to build generic, predictable suspense and to, ostensibly, walk an audience through the movie, scene after scene, scare after scare—this is condescending
• Recycling creature and "scare design"; no creativity; showing too much of the horror that the audience cannot imagine things themselves
• Casting plain actors/actresses with no discernible character; women are far from exotic, men are effeminate, emasculated, and overly vulnerable (muscles, chiseled jaws, deep voices are absent; heroes on-screen are not exaggerated or extraordinary but regular and forgettable)
• Lack of art direction: too dark and desaturated in color to be visually engaging or memorable; interesting details are lost to the dark; darkness, like music, is used as a crutch to instill fear
• Nothing that makes the movie special: story, actors, music, creatures, etc. are all generic. Everything has been arranged in such a manner to blend in with other films of the genre and to "look" like them. This is the recipe for mediocrity.
I'm not saying that slashers from the 80s didn't have their set of flaws but they weren't nearly as glaring, predictable and repetitious as what I've seen the past fifteen years in horror. Does anyone else recognize what I've outlined, or are bothered by the above filmmaking?
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Behold, bastard son
I am the evil one