🎬 #94 Horror Is A Theme Park Ride.

Getting people out to the cinema to actually see a film how it was supposed to be seen is harder these days - it’s understandable, you can watch films on your big tv, cinema tickets can be expensive. But there is one genre that continues to punch way above it’s weight in terms of grabbing an audience and getting them out into dark cinemas. Horror. The genre that John Carpenter deemed, not a genre but a reaction.

Why is that? Why can they time and time again deliver huge box office returns on modest budgets? You just need to look at a few of the biggest hitters of the last quarter century to really see how impressive those returns are;

The Blair Witch Project - Worldwide box office: $245 million, budget: $60,000

Paranormal Activity - Worldwide box office: $193 million, budget: $15,000

The answer lies in Carpenter’s description - it’s not a genre, but a reaction. It’s the one type of film that illicits a very strong, primal, emotional response in the viewer. Other films do this too, but few can make people jump out of their seats, hide behind their eyes, scream and throw their popcorn into the air. This is cinema as a ride, an experience to be felt, sweaty palms, faster heart rate - once you go in to that dark room, you’ve strapped yourself in for the duration. And we can’t get enough of it, because once the ride stops, we’ve really felt something, and we can leave the cinema safe and well.

Happy choosing, happy viewing

Bry

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FILM ONE: IT FOLLOWS

2014 Dir David Robert Mitchell
[1hr 40 mins]

Great horror films have a strong, unique central premise and Mitchell’s is no different. Imagine if instead of an STD, you got an unknown supernatural force from someone you had sex with. One that literally follows you around. The only way you can be free is to pass it on to someone else.

The film sets up the premise and then for the rest of the action - explores what that means in a series of haunting and startling set-pieces. These work almost at odds with how other moments in horror work. There’s no surprise that this unknown force is following the protagonist, we know that - what’s startling is how it does it. They’re in no rush, they just lurk, one foot after the other, after the victim. They will not stop. The protagonist is cursed with them forever.

Harking back to 80’s heritage horror, Mitchell and his team evoke an oddly unknown time frame - a place preserved in its own cannon of horror references. The blend of sex and horror, two primal forces that drive us all - if we reframe them as fear and desire, are things we all understand and identify with. This is a startling, warm and strangely comforting film - that clearly shows us that real horror is inevitability, but that ultimately, we can make peace with that.

TL;DR A super smart premise and gorgeous score leave this horror film feeling fresh while honouring the places it comes from.

*Available for a small rental fee on Amazon, Apple, Google and YouTube in the US as well as the UK.

Fact: The score by Disasterpiece was written in less than three weeks.

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FILM TWO: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE

1974 Dir Tobe Hooper
[1hr 23mins]

You could easily argue that this is potentially the most influential horror film ever made, so many things we now take for granted were established here in full form. And now, almost 50 years on, the film still holds a certain kind of mythic status - something forbidden. As if the horrors of it were gathered up inside, printed onto the film itself somehow and released when watched.

The idea that groups of people are taken out one by one by a seemingly almost supernatural killer is interesting, but for me what makes this one awful, amazing ride is his family. The scene with the almost waking-dead grandfather is still hard to watch to this day, kept alive apparently only by drinking human blood. The most disturbing thing about it all for me is how in the great wide open expanses in a normal world, there is room for these kinds of horror to breed and unfold, undiscovered, until you’re unlucky enough to happen upon them yourself.

What takes this horror above a lot of the rest in the genre is the opening title sequence. Amazing roaring close-ups of sun flares and solar activity. An unknowably powerful force, who we’re all at the mercy of. This sets up the idea that there are somethings we just can’t control, we are under the influence of unknowns much larger than us. In this way, Leatherface and his family are as monstrous as an uncaring, unblinking sun. A tiny speck in an indifferent universe, spinning round and round, forever. That is horror, and this film continues to be one hell of a ride.

TL;DR The grandaddy of the genre, this continues to wreak its unique brand of horror on the world.

*Available for a small rental fee on Amazon, Apple, Google and YouTube in the US as well as the UK.

Fact: There is surprisingly little blood on screen. Hooper had wanted to imply much of the brutality off screen but that ended up backfiring - it became too effective so the film was rated X, then R, after some edits.