Horror movies are by far one of the most successful segments of film at the moment, generating almost $800 million last year. Despite this insane amount of popularity, the horror industry has been in steady decline for the past ten years. The reason for this is centered around the intense fascination with horror trends, a lingering plague on creativity in movies.
CGI is a fantastic innovation in film, one that has revolutionized how multiple genres are made. The redundancy issue lies in the fact that the horror genre has become completely dependent on it. Rather than favoring the grotesquely unique practical effects seen in movies such as “The Thing” or “The Fly,” the genre has moved towards CGI as their prime method of horror.
The initial integration of CGI into these movies was a positive change. Movies like “Final Destination 2” and “Evil Dead Rise” proved that CGI can have its perks without sacrificing the betterment of the film. But when it goes from being a tool to aid the story into the story itself, that is when both the audience and producers quite literally lose the plot. The recent trend in blowing money on CGI for horror instead of visual effects comes with a steep toll, one that no greedy millionaire is going to pay.
One of the most confusing trends in recent horror though is the sudden use of the elderly for integral scares. Despite the fact that older people in shocking situations aren’t scary on their own, recent films like “The Visit” and “X” have prioritized this strange genre where the elderly are villainized and the young are prioritized.
Relying on the negative aspects of a marginalized group is an idiotic way to bring forth feelings of fear. The movies that use this recent trend to carry the plot along often suffer from a poorly written plot and scares that rely on jumps and half-hearted gore, a lazy attempt to pass off the recently trending device for anything more than the sham that it is.
Carrying the concept of poorly constructed plots along, the uptake in horror movies that are both long and pretentious is staggering. While I’ve always preferred the fast-paced slasher type of horror, it doesn’t distract from the fact keeping up with recent additions has been a slog. Movies like “The Deliverance” at an unjustifiable 111 minute runtime cement the fact that recent directors have wrongly begun to view the longer as better.
Movies that are already struggling with pulling themselves together are now forcing themselves into a two hour time frame, taking that already stretched-thin plot and transforming it into an unwatchable snoozefest. Even promising concepts buckle under the weight of time, seen in movies like “Bones and All” and “Last Night in Soho.”
The pretentious aspect comes with that kind of length. When a movie sees itself as so overwhelmingly important that it should take up two hours of someone’s life, the title is a package deal. That’s not to say longer horror movies can’t have their perks, the problem is the directors seeing the trend and using it as an excuse to put audiences to sleep.
Individual trends themselves almost never bring forth promising results, but the overwhelming popularity of legacy sequels and reboots wraps every trend into one raging dumpster fire. The recent movie “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is a prime example of a project that buckles under the weight of its predecessor and is forced to turn to the previously mentioned trends. Not only is it difficult to adapt cult classics into the modern age, the movies themselves are often completely unneeded as well.
Horror will forever remain my favorite genre, and a prominent one at that, but the reliance on trends is tearing it apart from the inside. As a subsection of movies grows it’s only natural for these trends to come and go, the problem stems from the ever growing lack of creativity. Losing the fun in horror movies is by far scarier than anything I’ve seen in theaters this year.
