Ah, the Christmas holidays. A time of joy and good will to men. A time for food, family and festivities. A time to focus on those things that are most important to us. It’s also a good time to consider recent trends in American horror films.
What? Don’t tell you’ve never thought about this very topic on many a Christmas Eve as you listened to your favorite carols in front of a crackling fire. Really? Just me? You are all strange people.
You look at horror movies these days and American cinema is severely lacking in originality. We lean on our “heroes of horror” (Freddy, Jason and the like), we ruin remake any foreign film that made a decent amount of money and we copy redo our own movies of old. I can’t remember a recent American horror movie that wasn’t either a remake or just copying elements of other horror films.
I’m not entirely sure if this is a purely American phenomenon but we just can’t seem to help making countless sequels featuring Freddy Krueger (8), Michael Myers (9), Jason Voorhees (12). All of which have recently made or are planning to make “reboots”. One could make the arguement that the dozens of Godzilla movies shows that Americans are not the only practitioners of this horor sequel frenzy. However, Godzilla has become more of a benevolent protector of Japan rather than the destroyer of civilization that he was in the first few. We just can’t get enough of our beloved serial murderers.
Attention film makers of the world! Make a decently profitable horror movie in a language other than English and you too could have your work absolutely wrecked by American cinema in less than 5 years! Seriously though, this is getting nuts. We had the J-horror remake craze a few years ago where we laid our grubby hands on every single Japanese horror film that we could find and this trend continues to this day. The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water, Pulse, The Eye, and One Missed Call have all been given the Hollywood treatment. We’ve gotten a much better turn around rate in recent years. The Spanish horror film REC was released in November 2007 and the remake Quarantine was released less than a year later in October 2008. The recent Swedish hit, Let The Right One In, had a remake being planned even before its release.
Not only do we remake everyone else’s movies, we are constantly remaking our own movies. As I mentioned before, we have had recent remakes of Friday the 13th and Halloween. In recent years we’ve also had remakes of Black Christmas, House on Haunted Hill, The Hills Have Eyes, Prom Night, When a Stranger Calls, House of Wax, The Fog, The Amityville Horror, the list goes on and on. You know what all these remakes have in common? They were all HORRIBLE!
Is there no end to this madness? Will we ever be able to recognize a good horror film even if the actors don’t speak English? Will we ever be able to come up with original ideas again? Will our horror icons lay down their weapons before they make it to movie #20?
What do you think about our seemingly endless remakes and sequels? Is there hope for American horror cinema or are we just whipping a horse that died back in the 80s?