Filmmakers and studios bank on the fear factor
LOS ANGELES -- The upcoming sci-fi horror flick "Alien vs. Predator" would seem like it's out to push every boundary it can lay a tentacle on.
It's a joint sequel of two bloody, much-loved franchises, both R-rated. The Motion Picture Association of America warns against its "violence, language, horror images, slime, and gore." It's based on an ultraviolent video game. And glimpses of the movie, which wasn't screened for the press, hint that this fusion will offer a more extreme version of its predecessors, promising endless weaponry, hoards of drooling monsters, and, presumably, more slicing, dicing, and goo spewing.
And yet the movie, made by 20th Century Fox, is being released as PG-13, the last frontier of movies younger viewers can see on their own.
While there's been considerable "ratings slip" -- a recent Harvard University study revealed that many of today's PG-13 films would have received an R a decade ago -- the process of crafting a film to hit a particular box-office sweet spot is a complex business. It reveals a lot about the ambitions of studios and filmmakers alike, and how the audience for extreme fare has both broadened and fragmented.
Recent R-rated horror hits, including Danny Boyle's indie zombie thriller "28 Days Later," have made it clear that the multiplex is safe for more extreme material. Within the last year we've seen lucrative remakes of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Dawn of the Dead," with production values ratcheted up for a generation reared on video games. Even a deeply felt religious movie, "The Passion of the Christ," featured the grisliest slew of carnage to hit movie screens since the gore heyday of the 1970s, when bloodbaths like "I Spit on Your Grave" drew the ire of moral watchdogs.
"The fact that theatergoers are going to see these kinds of films has given us an outlet," says Peter Block, president of acquisitions and coproductions for Lions Gate Films, an independent distributor that found success last year with Newton native Eli Roth's flesh-eating bacteria gross-out comedy "Cabin Fever." "Studios are just starting to recognize that there is repeat business for these movies," says Block. "It's a dedicated core audience."
Lions Gate will release a string of upcoming low-budget horror titles in coming months -- including "Undead," "SAW," and "Haute Tension" -- plucked from film festivals in the hope of duplicating the success of "Cabin Fever." Produced for $1.5 million, the movie grossed $21 million at the US box office, debuted in the number four slot as a DVD, and has since pulled in nearly $32 million in rentals.
Roth, 32, has formed a production company with director Boaz Yakin and writer Scott Spiegel ("Evil Dead 2") called Raw Nerve, specializing in low-budget horror movies in the vein of "Cabin Fever."
"The lower your budget, the more you can get away with," Roth explained by e-mail. "You can slip by the ratings board a little easier because you don't have a studio executive whose job is on the line breathing down your neck [to tone things down]."
As for the studio executives, they take an entirely different approach, fusing old franchises such as "Friday the 13th" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" with more sophisticated special effects and video-game-like action. While the effect isn't quite as shocking as seeing a half-naked teenager ravaged by a flesh-eating virus, the R-rated "Freddy vs. Jason," which cost $25 million to make, managed to scare up $82 million in box office receipts last summer. But there's a question of how far this kind of recycling can be taken. The slasher movie, cutting-edge in the late 1980s, was undercut by cheap remakes, only to be followed by baroque horror parody franchises such as "Scream" and "Scary Movie." Now the characters from once-separate franchises meet on new battlegrounds -- "Freddy vs. Alien," anyone? -- and the cycle continues. This parallels the trickle-down fate of old Universal horror classics like Frankenstein, which eventually shared screen time with bumbling comedians Abbott and Costello, to dwindling effect.
"It's not as simple anymore as Jason slitting the throats of teenagers -- that worked then, but it doesn't work now," explains Alec Gillis, whose Oscar-winning special effects house Amalgamated Dynamics designed the creatures in the big-budget "Alien vs. Predator." "The average studio film costs $80 million. When people are plunking down that kind of money, [studio executives] want to know they're doing every possible thing to get [people] in the theater."
"The studio mentality is that they'll put more money into a PG-13 film because they feel it attracts the broadest audience," says Block. "There's always going to be an unrated version [on DVD] that has all the things that kept it from being a PG-13, and they'll make a lot more money on those over time than they will on the theatrical version."
For many moviegoers, however, there's often no substitute for low-budget, R-rated thrills.
"The studios have gotten the message loud and clear that audiences want R-rated horror movies," says Roth. He cites "House of 1000 Corpses," directed by rocker Rob Zombie and also from Lions Gate, as the film that helped turn the tide in favor of bloodier, more daring material.
"To make an R-rated film that doesn't deliver the goods is silly," adds Block. "If you're going to make an R, you push the envelope that much further."
Focus Features, whose parent corporation Universal Pictures released Zack Snyder's "Dawn of the Dead" remake earlier this year, hopes to find the best of both worlds this fall when it releases "Shaun of the Dead," described as "zombie romantic comedy."
While funny and even sweet in parts, the low-budget "Shaun" is also gleefully gory, paying gruesome homage to the zombie classics of George Romero and Italian director Lucio Fulci. Early accolades from festivalgoers and UK audiences have hinted that this second feature from Edgar Wright could prove even more successful than "28 Days Later," which cost just $8 million and made $43 million in the US alone.
Simple excess can spell disaster, of course. Filmmakers can heap on all the blood, guts, and gimmickry they want, but without sufficient thrills, audiences will stay away. With the lingering presence of the Internet and cable television, serving up real-life violence, and video games that offer increasingly realistic simulations of violence, filmmakers are forced to find new and creative ways to shock and disturb jaded audiences.
"Open Water," an R-rated film from Lions Gate that opened Friday, has as simple a concept as they come. Two tourists go out for a scuba dive and are left behind by their boat. Swept out to sea, they soon realize they have a lot of sharks to keep them company. Shot in digital video without shark cages, the movie has a reality-TV edge that makes its crude thrills all the more terrifying.
"We worried that releasing an R-rated movie would keep away a certain part of the audience," says Block. "But to cut the movie to make it a PG-13 would change the characters and how you perceive them. In the end we probably sacrificed a lot of box office dollars in order to maintain the integrity of the film."
"What people have to remember is that the thrill is not the moment of the effect, the thrill is what comes before it, and what puts everything into context," says Gillis. "Otherwise these are merely images -- they are video games. M. Night Shyamalan has a complete handle on this, and Hitchcock had it. Sometimes you have to pare back the effects and give us less, because less is more."
On the heels of "Open Water," Lions Gate has high hopes for the Japanese horror phenomenon "Ju-On: The Grudge," which will open in September at art houses, including Kendall Square. And in production now is a PG-13 Hollywood remake of the film, to be called simply "The Grudge," starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.
"What's interesting about these movies is they remind people that you can tell a scary, tension-filled story without heavy reliance on special effects or dialogue," says Block. "What makes a horror movie scary is not so much the gore, but the sound design. `Ju-On' really advances that theory." Take, for example, "The Village," a film whose gimmicky twist ending has infuriated some audiences. But the PG-13 hit also contains one of the most visceral scenes in any movie this year, an act of hushed violence that's more affecting than millions of dollars' worth of biomechanoid space goo. Very little blood is spilled, yet it's shocking to behold. Compared to the cartoon gore on display in "Alien vs. Predator" and its bloodthirsty brethren, Shyamalan's devastating silent scream might just pack the more powerful wallop.
Andy Bailey can be reached at andy@ecstatic.com.
