On a rainy and cold afternoon in September, while my baby was nursing and sleeping, I decided to watch “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”, an adaptation of the beloved book of scary folk tales and urban legends for kids that was popular when I was a child. In approaching the scary part of a spooky tale, one wonders at the jump scares, and for those with curious minds, the motives of the creatures or angry spirits featured as the arbiters of suffering on the poor victims whom we voyeuristically journey with through their often painful, torturous deaths, or transformations, as in the homunculus in “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” or Lena Headey’s character in “The Cave”.
As the film reached its conclusion, I noticed that not once in the film, for a story set around the Vietnam era, were there any references to people being religious—after all, church attendance was higher in the 1960s than it is today. Amidst all the running around and the monsters, there was not a single instance of a person exclaiming “God/Lord help me!”
It was difficult to recall an instance in any of the horror films I had seen over the years of someone imploring God to rescue them in their dark hour, and it being successful. The woman imploring God to help her in “30 Day of Night” is taunted by her vampire attackers, then subsequently, gruesomely dismembered as the group toys with their food.
Modern American culture appears preoccupied with ever-more sensational, gory horror, working to test the envelope. The more wicked and attention grabbing, the bigger the box office returns through word-of-mouth. Film these days, particularly horror, relies on spectacle, rather than good storytelling that intrigues and gnaws at the back of your mind. For some, spectacle, titillation, sensation, and jump scares are what make a film, but it would appear its based more on the enjoyment of the adrenaline rather than real appreciation for well-done storytelling.
Youtube critics, including the Critical Drinker, Honest Trailers, or even Cinema Sins and their film breakdowns, have noted a decrease in good storytelling for crude tactics or ideological pandering, lecturing, and moralizing, to the irritation and wallets of their audiences. Ideological pandering has started to seep into horror, though the “theater kids” phenomenon ( see here and here for some entertaining commentary on it) hasn’t cracked into horror as much yet. In older horror, there is an element of camp that pokes fun at cultural norms and tropes as much as it attempts to scare the bejeezus out of its viewers. That theater kids haven’t managed to ruin horror yet, and it is only a matter of time—though one could argue “Don’t Worry Darling” was the epitome of that movement—is a small blessing on its own.
There is a fine line in storytelling that modern horror films either do well or do badly—there is no middle. It is of making a subtle point through deft handling of the material, subjects, themes, and/or creating spectacle for the sake of sensationalism.
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