They Don't Make Scary Movies Anymore, Do They?

Well hello film fans and welcome to my corner of the web this morning!
I take keyboard in hand this morning to fill you in on something I have found disturbing the past.....ten or twenty years or so.

They quit making scary movies.

Allow me to place this into context. When I was in high school a very good friend and I saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time. I remember in my childhood after 10 P.M. the tv trailers of this scared me to pieces!!! I never had the courage to actually watch it in fact!

So one day after running the paper route with my friend we decided to rent it at a local quick shop and watch it. It had such an effect on me that I haven't watched it since! It was raw, brutal, it was one of the most disturbing movies I've ever seen. It had very little blood in it but the images were horrific and stuck with me!

Now fast forward to today's movies, in my case most recently Hide and Seek and Boogeyman. You can actually replace any contemporary horror film title in here, it really doesn't matter. They are a mix and match of cliches now. Take one person, add a messed up event in this person's life, add a goofy legend, twist, tradition, or idea hook mix, rinse, repeat until the body count is high enough.

Hide and Seek was just stupid, as I posted earlier. The person who cut that trailer should get a bonus for making that film the number one film of the week because that is what did it! Boogeyman? Well it was about as bad. I was impressed that there was only one foul word used in the past TWO (Hide and Seek and Boogeyman) movies. And that was in Hide and Seek, as I earlier posted, the "F" word was used by DeNiro. Again not that I'm against such language at all, I just know that a strong movie doesn't depend on language, gore, or CGI effects. If they would understand tension and how to create it they could have raised these movies to a much higher level instead of using cheap, stupid scares to get an audience to jump.

Somewhere someone decided to get away from creating true tension in a film and substitute sudden, jolting noises with fast movement on screen....or the "Cat in the Closet" scare. Where somehow the cat got into the dark scary closet and when the door is opened the cat jumps out in a cheap scare to get the audience to jump. Well it has been done too much and now the things that they think are truly scary on screen....fall flat.

To illustrate this point. I nearly predicted what would happen in almost every step with probably 75% accuracy to a friend who genuinely gets scared at these movies. I tried to calm her by telling her about the cliches that they use and when to see when they are going to be used. By the end of the movie she started to see that it was kind of funny and they were cheesy!
Honestly I don't think she will have a problem seeing most of today's scary movies now. I wouldn't recommend the original TCM, Jaws, or Alien but just about anything else done in the past 15 years is no problem and can be funny when you can see things coming!!!