I know several people who refuse to watch horror films. Some say the movies are too violent, moronic, or poorly made. There’s a great deal of truth to that criticism since many horror movies are incredibly dumb and difficult to watch unless you’re comatose.
However, the lines between horror, art-house, and thriller genres have been blurred since the late 20th century. Even the staunchest opponents of scary movies have probably viewed an award-winning film like The Silence of the Lambs.
How did Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins persuade people to watch a story about a serial killer who appreciates rare moths, tucks his manhood between his legs, and rips the skin off his victims so he can sew together a nifty skin suit to show off to other degenerates?
How does a mainstream movie get away with including a scene where a prisoner throws his semen in the face of an FBI agent in training?
The answer to both questions is talent. The Silence of the Lambs is a sick, disturbing movie, but it’s well done. No, Meggs’ DNA slinging sequence could not have been accepted by the MPAA unless it was produced with the utmost precision.
The actors rehearsed the scene for several weeks before the eighteen-hour shooting began. They worked with a biology professor, dermatologist, and adult film star to get a feel for the scene.
Method acting took on a disturbing new meaning to the troubled cast, and Jodie Foster spent a fortune on therapy after the shooting wrapped.
The nonsense I just wrote was only to prove a point that many scenes require days of preparation and hard work to accomplish for a few minutes or seconds of edited footage. Many horror movies (and movies in general) skip the preparation, and it’s often evident in the results.
Slasher films or monster movies are what most non-horror lovers associate with horror. They seem linear and uncreative on the surface.
Drunken teenagers who repeatedly ignore common sense and allow themselves to be massacred in inventive ways is a stereotypical plot that reached its peak in the 1980s.
Unlike many critics, I like slasher movies like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. They may not be considered cinematic masterpieces, but they sometimes scared and entertained me as a kid. Now, those films make me laugh, but they’re still entertaining.
Slasher films made a killing at the box office in the 80s, but most critics hated them and believed they were exploitative garbage. The late film critic, Gene Siskel, despised Friday the 13th (1980) and went to great lengths to show his displeasure.
He contacted Paramount and lectured them about their immoral filmmaking, and he wrote a letter to Betsy Palmer, the actress who played Jason’s mother (the real killer), to express his disappointment that she lowered herself to accept a role in such a horrible movie.
His efforts were in vain, and the fans won out. Until 2018, the Friday the 13t h series was the most successful horror franchise in history. The first film made over 59 million dollars in 1980, and it spawned sequels, a remake, tv-series and video games.
It launched the career of the untalented goofball Kevin Bacon and solidified Sean Cunningham as a horror director. I think it’s exploitative (which I didn’t mind too much when I was ten years old) and not as well acted or produced as Silence of the Lambs.
However, if you compare the plots of the two films, Friday seems tamer and less demented. If you take away the graphic violence, nudity, and bad acting (what the critics complained about), the movie has a lot of charm and a great soundtrack.
It makes you want to go to a summer camp, armed with a flame thrower and wood chipper, to relax by the lake. Why didn’t they ever try killing Jason (in the sequels) with a wood chipper? That should have worked.
I like some of the lousy slasher films, and I enjoy a few of the Oscar-winning thrillers, but trying to categorize horror films into several different groups seems pointless.
It’s more marketable to call a prestige film a thriller than a horror movie, and I understand why, but it still bothers me.
Is Blue Velvet Art House Horror?
In 1986, my parents went to see Blue Velvet.
Since they didn’t want me to be alone in the house unsupervised (I enjoyed pyrotechnics and fire in general as a child—no one was ever hurt or burned. I swear.), they took me along but wisely prohibited me from seeing the movie.
They bought me a ticket for The Golden Child and told me to have fun. As an eleven-year-old who had never viewed a movie without my friends or family sitting next to me, I wasn’t thrilled to sit next to odd-smelling strangers.
The theater filled up fast, and I wound up enjoying the movie with an exceptionally rowdy biker gang. They had matching leather jackets and mullets. Yes, the women’s mullets resembled the men’s.
They were joking around and making a lot of noise during the previews, but when Eddie Murphy’s comic masterwork came on the screen, they were silent—until the first joke cracked them up.
I respected that, and soon I wasn’t scared that they would torment me for not wearing a leather jacket.
At that point in my life, I was probably wearing a Member’s Only jacket. The bikers looked tough, but deep down in their souls, they were more like the Grease bikers than the Hells Angels-type bikers.
I had a good time, but I wondered what kind of depravity I was missing in Blue Velvet. As it turns out, I was missing a goldmine of depravity.
Even though his films have humorous moments and inventive cinematography, David Lynch is not for most tastes.
Compared to mainstream horror films, Blue Velvet is scarier, bloodier, and more demented. It was marketed as a shocking thriller, but you never hear the term “horror film” associated with the movie.
For a high-brow audience, I guess you can’t associate it with Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, or Mia Farrow.
It’s a strange film that’s difficult to handle in some scenes. I liked it, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone with anxiety problems.
It’s entertainment that induces anxiety rather than curbs it, and while that isn’t good for all people (or most people), it’s interesting that some movies can alter your breathing, heart rate, and comfort level.
I don’t think Blue Velvet would’ve turned me into a raving lunatic as a child, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have slept for a month or listened to Roy Orbison for the rest of my life.
Watching a lip-sticked Dennis Hopper terrorize poor Kyle Maclachlan while he quotes In Dreams is not good publicity for Roy Orbison, but strangely enough, it did revive sales of the song and his greatest hits.
The opening lines are pretty creepy for a hit song.
In Dreams
By Roy (weirdo) Orbison
A candy-colored clown they call the Sandman
Tiptoes to my room every night
Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper
Go to sleep; everything is alright
Besides the horror of seeing Dennis Hopper huffing gas and speaking like a baby while he sodomizes Isabella Rossellini, you have Kyle MacLachlan doing the chicken dance, a severed ear, a love of Heineken beer in 1986, a graphic close-up headshot in slow-motion, a corpse with his brain hanging out that remains standing, and a horse-faced prostitute dancing in a pink mini skirt.
Now, that’s horror. So, if you hate horror movies, you can avoid the ones that aren’t marketed as something else, but you might accidentally stumble into one. Have you ever seen Howard the Duck?
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