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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 42 |
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HALLOWEEN |
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of The 21st Century THE MOST FRIGHTENING FILMS OF THE NEW CENTURY SO FAR
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Has America lost the touch
for making horror films?
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
As we near the end
of the first decade of the 21st century, it's interesting to
speculate on what movie horrors scare us the most these days.
I'm going to take an educated guess and say the trend seems quite
obviously to be bone-chillers from
abroad.
Take, for example, Gore Verbinski's "The Ring," a 2003 American version of the Japanese horror film "Ringu." We shuddered violently as Australian actress Naomi Watts played a reporter looking into the mysterious videotape that seems to mean death to anyone who watches it.
Though the Japanese had been making movies about the supernatural for generations--the classic 1964 "Kwaidan" comes to mind--only their "giant monster" movies like "Godzilla" and "Rodan" had been mainstream successes in the U.S., usually after being heavily "Americanized" for our moviegoers.
But in the 21st century, some of the most popular horror movies here have been American remakes of Japanese chillers, such as "The Ring" (2003), Walter Salles' "Dark Water" (2005) and Takashi Shimzu's "The Grudge" (2004). Perhaps even more importanly, the latter two films were "Americanized" by foreign directors--Salles from Brazil, Shimzu from Japan. And when "The Ring Two" (2005) was filmed in America, the film company brought in the original director of the Japanese "Ringu," Hideo Nakata, to do the sequel.
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None of these films was about conventional American "monsters," like the razor-slasher types of the "Halloween," "Friday the 13th" or "A Nightmare on Elm Street" series, but were instead about ghostly curses or malicious spirits. These filmmakers have turned away from the American models and reverted instead to what we might call the "basics" of horror--unseen menaces of the sort we used to see in British and American films like "The Innocents," "The Haunting" and "The Uninvited."
Best of the lot: "The Others" (2001), written and directed by Spaniard Alejandro Amenabar, starring Nicole Kidman as a mother determined to protect her "light-sensitive" children from the spirits in a strange old house. The film was produced by actor Tom Cruise, who that same year had starred in "Vanilla Sky" (2001), an American version of Amenabar's 1998 "Open Your Eyes," another bizarre film of nightmarish psychology.
Here's another major example of this trend: The films of East Indian filmmaker M. Night Shyamalin, whose blockbuster "The Sixth Sense" (1999) was about a little boy who "sees dead people" and communicates with them. Though the box office appeal of his more recent films have not been as mighty, his "Signs" (2002) and "The Village" (2004) have effectively stuck to the notion that it's better to imagine the horror than to have it keep jumping out of the shadows at you. Shyamalin's ability to build genuinely creepy atmosphere in his films while often tackling larger, more cerebral issues, seems to me definitely a positive trend for the genre.
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Mel Gibson, Abigail Breslin, Joaquin Phoenix in M. Night Shyamalin's "Signs." |
Another leader of the foreign horror pack is producer-director Guillermo Del Toro, a Mexican raised on American horror films, who has come to the U.S. and revolutionized the genre, leading a Latino charge from chilis to chillers. In the old days, Mexican horror was represented by those awful movies that pitted masked wrestlers against Aztec mummies. Del Toro's American horror films have included the terrifying "Mimic" (1997), the vampire/martial arts film"Blade II" (2002) and the amusing "Hellboy" (2004), but Del Toro's masterpiece is the much honored "Pan's Labyrinth" (2006), which won three Oscars while taking us into the troubled mind of a little Spanish girl seeking mental escape from the nightmare real-life world of Nazis and World War II.
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"Pan's Labyrinth" took us inside the tortured mind of a little girl, trying to escape the grim realities of her real life. |
Del Toro also produced one of my favorite horror movies to date in the 21st century, J.A. Bayona's "The Orphanage." This film, like so many of his others, takes the American model for the horror film and opens it up to the influence of cultures from outside the U.S.
There are too many examples of these "imported" horror films making their mark in the U.S. to be just a blip on the radar screen of film history. This is a major trend--and they're coming from all over the world.
Another example: The French "Brotherhood of the Wolf" (2001) by Christophe Gans, for example, a wholly different sort of horror film, rich with legendary trappings and occultism. If the opening sequence in this film doesn't rattle your spine, nothing will.
Yet another: The Russian "Night Watch" (2006) by director Timor Bekmambetov, which has spanned sequels and a cult following in the U.S. Again, it's a film rooted in Russian legend, this time about the eternal war between the light and dark forces.
Though some of the imported chillers are freshly original, it's also interesting to see how Hollywood is now turning to foreign creative teams to overhaul some of the brand name American monsters. Prime example: New Zealander Peter Jackson's complete and total resurrection of our giant ape monster of the 1930s, "King Kong," with his critically-acclaimed, blockbuster 2006 remake.
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 "Brotherhood of the Wolf.' Above, a nightmare vision from the poster for the Russian "Night Watch." |
It now appears obvious that this trend is a natural one. The English language horror films of the 20th century, most of them American or British in origin, have spread around the world, creating a global appetite for this sort of entertainment. Foreign filmmakers grew up watching the American examples and they're now taking what they learned from those films and adding their own sensibilities, creating a new layer of significance to their visions of horror.
I believe this trend really began in the Italy of the 1960s with the many Italian filmmakers who began to make horror movies for the global marketplace, often with English language stars like Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee in the leading roles. (Karloff's last four films were Mexican-made.) Those names still meant something to moviegoers over here.
The first Italian directors to have name recognition in the American marketplace were Mario Bava ("Black Sunday," 1961; "Twitch of the Death Nerve," 1971) and Dario Argento ("Suspiria," 1977; "Trauma," 1993), whose films trended to extreme violence and are widely believed to have influenced the gore-aplenty "slasher" trend of the 1980s in American horror films.
All of this is a curious throwback to the origins of the horror genre on U.S. screens. Almost all the memorable horror movies of the first half of the 20th century were either foreign-made, mostly German ("Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "The Golem," "Nosferatu") or adapted from European source novels or legends ("Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," "Hunchback of Notre Dame," "Phantom of the Opera," "Dracula," "Frankenstein," "The Invisible Man," etc.). It wasn't until the post-nuclear age that America began producing a steady stream of original horror concepts, mostly involving alien invaders ("The Thing From Another World," "The Man From Planet X") or science running amok ("Tarantula!," "Dr. Cyclops").
In those early days, America took the European monsters and Americanized them, which is exactly what we're doing today, only from a much wider group of foreign sources. For that reason, I don't think it's a negative trend, but rather a positive one.
If Japan's Akira Kurosawa could take the pace and excitement of American western movies and apply them to his county's samurai legends to create the masterpiece "Seven Samurai" and all the Samurai films that followed, we should remember that America returned the favor by turning "Seven Samurai" into a western again and calling it "The Magnificent Seven," which led to several sequels and a TV series.
I believe the operating phrase is, "What goes around, comes around." I think that's what's going on with the horror genre right now.
©2008 by Ron Miller. This column first posted Oct. 27, 2008.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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