Horror Roundtable - Week Fifty-Eight
Name a period of time when your interest in horror diminished, and what brought you back.
Brainbug - The Celluloid Cesspool
I’ll let you know if that ever happens. Sure, I’ve had periods where I’ve watched less and read less because I had other stuff going on in my life, but the interest has never really gone away. I’ve been a horror fan ever since I watched The Hilarious House of Frightenstein as a kid, and I don’t seen any end in sight.
Billy
A peroid of time when my interest in horror movies diminished would be right now, and for a couple reasons. I just don’t have the time to watch alot of movies. And I think the quality of horror movie is going down. There is too much emphasis on special effects and not enough on actually making it scary. I’m not huge into the gore movies, I like movies that are scary and I think there is a real lack of directors out there that realise lights turning off by themselves are a hundred times scarier than seeing a monster in full detail eating some hapless victim.
Sean T. Collins - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat
After I got married and moved in with my lovely wife, I had a lot less “me time” in terms of being able to watch horrendously violent movies. (She’s not into ‘em.) So it’s not that my interest diminished per se, just the frequency with which I watched and therefore thought about horror. At a certain point this fact dawned on me, and the result was Where the Monsters Go, the big horrorblogging marathon I did in October of 2003. That brought me back and kept me back. I realized that as a busy adult, you can’t just count on being able to do fun stuff with no forethought, and that’s fine. It’s just a matter of making a conscious effort to carve out time for something I know I get a lot of pleasure and fulfillment out of.
Jeff O’Brien
I can’t put an exact era to it but I’d have to say it’s those summers when H’wood floods us with big budget action spectacle posing as horror. The remake of The Haunting, Event Horizon… the Resident Evil movies… does any real horror fan actually find that stuff frightening as opposed to cool looking eye candy?
That’s an interesting question. Before I can answer it, I need to specify that I can’t really call myself interested in “horror” per se. I say this because horror is so broad a category, encompassing so many very different genres, forms and media, that it’s impossible to take in all of horror as a gestalt. To say that one has an interest in horror is similar to saying that one has an interest in music: you need to be more specific in order to convey any useful information.
That said, my interest in the overarching field of horror waxes and wanes with my interest in, and access to, the various subcategories that constitute it. I seek out the horror that I feel will best give me what I need at any given time, whether that be entertainment and distraction or something more meaningful. An example: I went through some fairly heavy periods of depression in high school and college. When the weight of the world seemed too much to bear, I wanted to escape into a different universe. I found satisfaction in horror movies and fiction that came supported by their own mythoi, where the creators had generated enough background that the realities behind the stories were self-supporting. The works of H.P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker, in particular, were great comforts.
More broadly, sometimes I feel short of attention span, and am disinclined to sit through entire two-hour movies, so I seek out anthology films, and that will constitute most of my horror diet until I watch every one that I can access. When I run out, I move on to something else.
Also, naturally, I do have interests and fandoms outside of horror, and sometimes they take priority. Next month, Season 2 of The Muppet Show hits DVD, and I doubt I’ll be watching much of anything until I’ve finished devouring that. (For what it’s worth, though, any horror fan worth his or her salt should watch the episodes guest-starring Vincent Price and Alice Cooper. They’re beautiful.)
I apologize for the long-windedness, but it’s all by way of saying that my interest in horror never genuinely diminishes, even when I seem less involved in the field. Inevitably, something new to me is waiting in the wings, ready to sink its claws in my throat and drag me back. I always go willingly.
I have to admit thatlately I haven’t been to “up in the clouds” about the horror genre. I’ve been worrying that the genre - especially in its moviemaking - has been increasingly derivative and truly doesn’t try hard enough. I take part of the blame on myself as much as anyone I could point to in that I have rented discs or seen movies that I really wasn’t to keen on.
What I should has done was take my money elsewhere but I have been going with the flow.
I’m not out of the genre by any means, I just think that in many ways, we are seeing the genre move to other media than movies. I just got back from the San Diego Comic Con, and saw many cool things coming on the horizon - new comics, toys, video games, and of course, movies.
[I urge everyone to pick up the upcoming The Complete History of the Skywald Horror Mood by Alan Hewetson]
I am especially bullish on Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train coming out in awhile (not sure of the release date). The trailer looked fantastic and I’m going to stick it out there and say this is going be faithful to what Barker intended - especially since his name is on it. This has always been one of my favorite of Barker’s Books of Blood.
I would say, around the beginning of the 1990s. For a few years, there was nothing too good out there that kept me interested in either film, or music. Thankfully, by the mid-nineties, I started my new career in the home video industry and things started to be interesting again. Too bad that music, too, of that period (1990 - ), until now, pretty much has still lost my interest.
Dave - Rue Morgue’s The Abbatoir
Through my teens I drifted away from horror, mainly because I didn’t know anyone that was into it to introduce me to a lot of the really cool stuff I couldn’t watch as a kid. Then I took a film class in my early 20s, where I met a good friend who turned me on to all kinds of cool fright flicks.
In college and grad school, academics and other collegey stuff took precedence, but I never truly lost my love of horror. What reinspired it, I think, was erotic-horror anime like WICKED CITY and UROTSUKIDOJI. In my search for more sexy horror stuff, I found the book IMMORAL TALES, which introduced me to the kind of European horror that’s been most influential in shaping my tastes.
In the late 80s-early 90s horror films hit a really rough spot. So much crap was being released and directors were battling studios to get films made and shown uncut. It was ugly. I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever lost interest in horror films but I was disappointed with the genre as a whole for awhile. Thankfully rare gems did get made during that time which gave me hope that things would change sooner or later. Sadly I’m sort of feeling the same way about modern horror at the moment but I never lose interest.
“May Cropsy pass over your campsite in favor of the naked teens!!” - David Z. As you read this I will be swinging in my hammock surrounded by woods and enjoying a pulpy novel or three. Thanks to all the contributors for this week’s confessional. Has Horror ever worn out its welcome with you? Let us know in the comments below, dig?
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:38 am
I’m in agreement with Billy, above. I’ve found the horror films of the last few years to be exceptionally disappointing, with only a few rare exceptions. So, to combat that, I’ve been going ‘back to the classics’… rereading Lovecraft, Poe, Campbell, etc.; watching older horror films from the 40’s through the 80’s or so. Really, just trying to remind myself of why I got into it in the first place.
Couple posts about this stuff on my own blog, if anyone is interested:
http://zomben.blogspot.com/2007/03/on-subject-of-horror.html
http://zomben.blogspot.com/2007/03/again-horror.html
August 3rd, 2007 at 2:58 pm
I’ve found myself disillusioned with the genre for a couple of months. It seems to happen from time to time. I think I just got bored of watching a lot of mediocre films.
I am looking forward to seeing 30 Days of Night. I’m hoping that it will bring me out of my horror funk.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:22 am
For me, I hit the doldrums in the late ’80s. It was tough to keep the passion up in the age of Jason Takes Manhattan, Shocker, Deep Star Six, and so on. I didn’t even like the big hits of the time like Pet Semetery. The stuff that I liked was either real marginalized and hard to find - like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or Santa Sangre - or else was categorized as “not really horror”, like Dead Ringers. So I felt that horror was on the wane.
Growing up as a kid in the ‘70s, I always saw horror as being a big draw with movies like The Exorcist, Jaws, The Omen, Halloween, and Alien – all these movies where it wasn’t just the horror crowd turning out for them, it was everyone – so to see horror so devalued by the late ‘80s was a drag. I mean, most people wouldn’t have be caught dead at most of the horror movies in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. It was just the real diehards hoping to glean a little pleasure out of, you know, Graveyard Shift.
What brought me back to really loving horror and feeling that it wasn’t going to go the way of the musical or the western was The Silence of the Lambs. It really revived my love of the genre. And it validated my feelings that in the right hands, the horror genre would always shoulder greatness.
Since then, my affection for the genre hasn’t really faltered. With a wife and kid I get a little out of the loop at times but I catch what I can. This year has been a real test of patience with way too many horrible movies but the ones that I have liked – like Zodiac, Vacancy, and 1408 – were all pretty strong, in my book.
August 4th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Hmmm …
Interesting question. While ,obviously, my interest has waxed & waned a bit here & there over the years depending on what was going on in my life or what films & books were being released, shown on television etc., I honestly can’t think of a period of time when I actually lost interest and/or had to be “brought back into the fold”. I’ve loved genre films from my very earliest memories ( the first film that I can remember watching in it’s entirity is Bava’s BLACK SUNDAY when I was five! ) to now at 45. I feel like it’s just “hardwired” into my system. I just can’t imagine NOT loving horror/monster movies.
Even back when I was 17 - 18 years old & got involved in going to a born again Christian Church’s youth group with some friends for about a year & I had a shit load of people telling me that my love of horror was “satanic” & unhealthy, I never considered giving up watching genre films/TV or reading genre fiction. Not for a minute.
August 4th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Jim, that’s funny, a friend and I were just talking about this today–I always knew that Christians, in general, had an aversion to horror movies, and I figured it was just what you’re talking about there, the idea that depictions of evil are necessarily evil themselves.
As I’ve come to know more and more cool, non-fundie Christians who don’t shun pop culture, I’ve found that, although they’re not contemptuous of the genre or of me for getting so much enjoyment out of it, they would no more go see a horror movie than I would go see “License to Wed.”
With quite a bit of effort, I talked a religious girlfriend into going to see one with me once, and it kinda screwed her up for a couple of days. Then I realized: Oh, right–Christians not only accept the existence of the supernatural, they accept it actively, so this genre is not a safe space for them the way it is for atheists or for people who don’t necessarily disbelieve but don’t give metaphysics a whole lotta thought.
I’m sure this insight’s way less trenchant than I think it is, but it makes sense on its face. Hell, if I found “The Ring” plausible, I’d never sleep.
August 7th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Oh yeah, back then I had all sorts of folks trying to “minister to me” & “witness to me” the error of my ways. And, when I was resistant to them, some of them ( mostly some of my friend’s from the youth group’s parents & grandparents at this Pentecostal church ) actually chalked it up to me being “demon possessed. I kid you not!
And it wasn’t as if I were some sort of early “Goth”-type who dressed all in blackk or wore my own homemade precursors to Rotten Cotton-type t-shirts or some such thing. I was just an average teen that just happened to enjoy horror films & fiction during this period of 1979 - ‘80. But, my bringing along a copy of Robert McCammon’s novel BETHANY’S SIN to kill the time before the youth group meeting started got me “rebuked” by some of church “elders”.
In retrospect, all these years later it’s funny, but back then it was sort of a pain to deal with & drove me away from that particular group of friends. Especially when word got out that I actually owned a few issues of PLAYBOY & GALLERY magazine ( both of which I actually DID buy for the articles & the stories featured in them, including fiction by Stephen King & Richard Laymon, not that I didn’t also enjoy the photos of attractive naked women as well … ). Because, if there’s one thing that shocks & appalls Christians a hell of a lot more than horror does it’s SEX!