Don’t you hate when writers or columnists will, like, take advantage of a conveniently placed holiday or celebration in order to get an easy column written? Like, say, if a film columnist were to write about scary movies close to Halloween? Isn’t that the worst?
Anyways, scary movies. They honestly aren’t, on the whole, the best movies ever made. In fact, by and large they suck. Especially since the dawn of the slasher film, they’ve become increasingly predictable, formulaic and generally dull to watch.
So, rather than dealing with them (they’re not all bad, but probably 90 percent of them are), I’d much rather partake in movies that are technically horror films but spend as much time dissecting and destroying the conventions and clichés of the genre as they do their supporting characters.
Some of the earliest and greatest horror films of all time were the Universal Monsters Movies; you know, “The Wolfman,” “Dracula,” “Frankenstein.” These were affectionately parodied/paid tribute to in “An American Werewolf in London,” which managed to openly mock the traditional themes and tropes of the films while still emulating and, eventually, becoming a modern take on them. From the very predictable love interest to the tragic hero, it was essentially an update on the classic formula of the early monster movie genre, albeit with far more graphic violence and a good amount of black humor thrown in.
Of course, as it’s frequently an affectionate parody, a lot of the humor in “American Werewolf” is aimed at the movies that inspired it. Take the disturbingly hilarious scene in which the victims of the tragic werewolf hero are cheerfully suggesting ways that he could commit suicide, when David asks if he has to use a silver bullet and his (dead) friend Jack flippantly replies with, “Oh, be serious, David.”
This all takes place in a porno theater in Piccadilly Circus, by the way. So, yeah, it’s a very dark comedy, but also a reverent parody that admires the classics as it mocks them.
Less reverent is the Joss Whedon-written and produced film “Cabin in the Woods.” It too mocks a sub-genre of horror films, specifically slasher movies; however, where “American Werewolf” was a loving spoof on its predecessors, “Cabin in the Woods” pretty viciously mocks the “paint-by-numbers”-style films it’s rallying against.
The movie attempts to criticize slasher films for being formulaic and predictable to the point of being ritualistic, and it does this by, well, offering the idea that literally every other slasher movie has been part of an actual ritual sacrifice to appease the audience, which is represented by giant, ancient, bloodthirsty gods trapped beneath the earth. And it just gets crazier from there.
It lays out and then systematically slaughters every stereotype and standard of the slasher genre. It builds all the typical character types into the ritual: the jock, the fool/stoner, the whore, the scholar and, of course, the virgin.
Granted, it then subverts this trope, brilliantly and hilariously, but it first calls every example of this type of film out for following what are at this point ancient conventions and traditions.
Not only this, but the monsters themselves are shown as instruments of an organization overseeing the whole thing, reducing these films to a procedure and a formula. I’m fighting really hard to not give too much away, but it’s just such a perfect deconstruction of bad teen horror movies; you all should go see it now. It involves a killer unicorn if you needed more incentive.
Of course, “Cabin in the Woods” got it’s clichéd, overdone premise of “teenagers in a cabin in the woods find something in the basement that activates some evil force or another that then tries to kill them” directly from the king/president/prime minister/supreme leader of all deconstructionist horror films, the most over the top awesome and silliest of all the over-the-top, silly parodies: “The Evil Dead” trilogy. It sits head and shoulders above anything else I could mention in the same vein.
The first entry in the trilogy was a pretty straight-ahead, ridiculously low-budget horror film that took itself fairly seriously. However, in response to a mostly lukewarm reaction to the original film, “The Evil Dead 2” and the third film, “Army of Darkness,” took everything about awful B-horror movies and cranked it up past 11.
First of all, they added buckets and geysers of blood to the point that they tried changing it to every color they could think of, and yet the MPAA still wouldn’t give them less than an NC-17 rating. So, they just released it unrated.
Then they threw in an absolutely ridiculous protagonist in Ash Williams. Apparently the first film shattered his sanity to the point that he became convinced/aware that he was the main character in a B-horror film, and he turns into a William Shatner-level ham onscreen, shooting off painful one-liners left and right throughout the second and third films.
He also becomes ridiculously genre-savvy, knowing to chop up the zombie he just killed and bury its parts separately rather than leave it lying in his basement, and he frequently exploits the laws of scary movies to his benefit.
At one point, Ash loses his hand and, naturally, replaces it with a chainsaw. But not before his hand becomes reanimated and attacks him, forcing him to trap it under a bucket using a stack of books. Atop the stack? “A Farewell to Arms.” And of course there’s the legendary line about the “boomstick.” They’re some of the most entertaining movies ever. And they got turned into a musical.
So what have we learned? Horror movies now suck to the point that the only way to make a good one is to be self-aware, mocking and ironic, much like writing about horror movies on Halloween sucks to the point that… well yeah. Happy Halloween, and please don’t throw up on me this weekend.
Ask Austin where he’ll be this weekend so you can target your Poltergeist-themed projectile vomit at him. Email him at awellens@wisc.edu.
