Oh, the huge manatee!

Ahem, roight!

Apparently, I was supposedly too quick to dismiss modern horror movies as piles of gore mixed up with some titties and shotguns.

Indeed, I was pointed to a movie called Grave Encounters, which was regarded by one of my cousins as a shining example of the kind of movie that'll have you shitting your pants inside two hours. Enticing, but I've never been one to fall for hype, oh no siree!

First impressions are good, because the movie is set in an old asylum, and in spite of that particular horse being flattened enough in the preceding years, for a good horror movie an abandoned asylum is fucking awesome. It has a history of madness, mania, dementia, cruelty, barbarism and just a hint of good old fashioned evil.

It gets a gold star as the movie gets going by actually pacing itself. Sure, some might see it as being too slow, but I'd argue that a horror movie must build up suspense, rather than just showing you a bunch of cum shots gory deaths within the first five minutes. The movie goes from not being scary at all, through being a little creepy to full-blown, balls to the wall scares.

The latter bit rips away the gold star, though. Sure, it's never really explained what the fuck happens, which is good, but in the crescendo of the movie appears an actual, fairly corporeal, ghost, the face of which you get to see. It's rather scary, but it kills the mood abit, by showing us what it is we're afraid of. See, this cannot be stressed enough; the shit our brain can come up with to scare us will ALWAYS, without exception, be scarier than what the moviemaker can show us.

Oh, and adding a bit about that all this shit went bananas because the head evil physician was worshipping the devil? Come fucking on! Did you decide to just invalidate all of the scares that came before? "Hey, what's this mysterious presence in the asylum? -Oh, it's just some guy who worshipped satan!"

Of course, all this is shot in the kneecaps completely by one big flaw; you don't give a shit about the characters. They aren't sympathetic worth a damn, and you sure as hell won't be identifying with them. They go from being a bunch of twats to being a bunch of scared twats. There's no character development, and there is also no reason to particularly want them to survive. This is what I'd refer to as "Friday the 13th"-syndrome.

All in all, it was a pretty frightening movie with really creepy visuals, but it fell short of being really pants-shittingly terrifying because of crappy characters and a simple explanation at the end of what had been going on, and also a complete and utter lack of any twist ending.

It'll scare you, but it won't leave you sleepless for a week.

Horror, or what passes for it...

What the fuck happened to horror?! When exactly did horror movie makers decide "Fuck it, I've had enough, let's never make another psychological horror experience ever again!"?

Don't believe me? Name one horror movie made in the last decade that's actually been scary. Other than Dead Silence, that is, which is creepy as all fuck.

The remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street? Oh come on, those are all just action movies where people you don't give a fuck about are killed in exceedingly gory ways

That's not horror. Horror doesn't squick you out, it terrifies you, it makes you afraid to go to sleep, in other words it doesn't simply make that bacon sandwich you're eating seem slightly less apetizing.

The latest example I've been watching is The Final Destination. It's essentially the same as all the other movies in the series; a guy has a vision of his and his friend's deaths, so they get out of there and then death hunts them down in extremely gory and contrived ways.

Now, that series has always been shit in the "Horror" department, and not even once has it actually tried to get under your skin. What does it do? Show you gore and incredibly weird coincidences that lead up to someone biting the dust. Of course, gore doesn't have to be a bad thing, but when you make a series of movies where it is the one and only point of the movies, then it totally is.

I can't help but draw a parallell to porn in how it's presented, and it's not a coincident that there is such a concept as "Gore-nography". See, there's always the same buildup of tension before the person dies, and it ends with an orgasmic crescendo where the moron gets stabbed through the head or whatever. And it's even more like porn in that other movies generally stick to softcore gore, Final Destination goes all in and throws hardcore at you. Most movies cut away when someone is actually crushed by a falling pane of industrial strength glass or shot ten times with a nailgun through the head, but these movies seem to relish in it. It's like the movie makers actually got a jolly out of the whole thing. Instead of showing the money shot, most movies leave the boning implied, but Final Destination has no such consideration.

It's shit, that's what it is!