2008 Woodie Awards
Fright Flicks Are Horror-ible
Corey Kempf
Issue date: 11/6/03 Section: Arts & Entertainment
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It doesn't take a movie guru to realize the one truth in filmmaking; it only takes a couple nights off of work and a couple trips to Blockbuster. This truth is the horror movie genre is as tired and dragged out as some of its own movies.
Case in point-- Rob Zombie's "House of 1000 Corpses." Even though it defined horror as best as I've ever seen in a movie, this movie pales in comparison to other, older horror/slasher flicks. It was more of a compilation of every scary movie you've ever seen rolled into one, kind of like the Scary Movie series without the entertainment value and satire.
Want more? OK, I could do this all day. The similarities of "The Ring" and "Fear Dot Com" were just too much for me to handle. It's a video, no wait, it's a website now... whichever one, don't watch either of them.
More examples are the new "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the re-release of "Alien." These are prime examples of the movie industry scraping the bottom of the barrel. Do you see a pattern with my examples? It seems like the movie industry is just making money using ideas from other movies.
Enough of my opinion for a moment, let's add some other people's insight. I went to the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) to do some research, and I fell upon a spot on the site where users get to rank the best movies of all time. I clicked on the "Top 50 Horror Movies" and wasn't surprised. Out of the list, five of those movies were made within the last ten years, the best of those five being 1999's "The Sixth Sense," at number six, which I'll admit scared the expletive out of me at times. The "tent scene" of the movie was even listed as one of the top ten scariest scenes of all time in a list added to Sunday's Sheboygan Press.
Now let's look at the best movies on that list. The top five on said list are, in order, "Psycho," "The Silence of the Lambs," "Alien," "Jaws," and "A Clockwork Orange." I was a little disappointed to see the horror masterpiece "The Shining" left off the top five, but it only slipped down to number seven. The most recent of those movies is "The Silence of the Lambs," made in 1991.
The only thing the new horror movies are doing is scaring people away from the theaters! I think it's time the movie industry either stop making horror movies, get some imaginative writers, or just make them blatantly hilarious like the "Evil Dead" series.
Case in point-- Rob Zombie's "House of 1000 Corpses." Even though it defined horror as best as I've ever seen in a movie, this movie pales in comparison to other, older horror/slasher flicks. It was more of a compilation of every scary movie you've ever seen rolled into one, kind of like the Scary Movie series without the entertainment value and satire.
Want more? OK, I could do this all day. The similarities of "The Ring" and "Fear Dot Com" were just too much for me to handle. It's a video, no wait, it's a website now... whichever one, don't watch either of them.
More examples are the new "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the re-release of "Alien." These are prime examples of the movie industry scraping the bottom of the barrel. Do you see a pattern with my examples? It seems like the movie industry is just making money using ideas from other movies.
Enough of my opinion for a moment, let's add some other people's insight. I went to the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) to do some research, and I fell upon a spot on the site where users get to rank the best movies of all time. I clicked on the "Top 50 Horror Movies" and wasn't surprised. Out of the list, five of those movies were made within the last ten years, the best of those five being 1999's "The Sixth Sense," at number six, which I'll admit scared the expletive out of me at times. The "tent scene" of the movie was even listed as one of the top ten scariest scenes of all time in a list added to Sunday's Sheboygan Press.
Now let's look at the best movies on that list. The top five on said list are, in order, "Psycho," "The Silence of the Lambs," "Alien," "Jaws," and "A Clockwork Orange." I was a little disappointed to see the horror masterpiece "The Shining" left off the top five, but it only slipped down to number seven. The most recent of those movies is "The Silence of the Lambs," made in 1991.
The only thing the new horror movies are doing is scaring people away from the theaters! I think it's time the movie industry either stop making horror movies, get some imaginative writers, or just make them blatantly hilarious like the "Evil Dead" series.