The genre that wouldn't die!
With the remake of 'Friday the 13th,' we consider how far slasher films have come - or fallen
The remake of "Friday the 13th" is opening next Friday, which means more nubile counselors at Crystal Lake are going to bite the dust. Unusually, the film will screen for critics; slasher movies almost never do. Why bother, when you know the reviews are going to be savage and your target audience doesn't read them anyway? (A deeper cynic than I would say the horror audience doesn't read, period.)
This suits me fine, though, because I hate the nasty little things. Allow me a confession:
I've seen "Scream" (1996) and I've seen "Saw" (2004), and I know they're the same old eek-eek-eek gussied up with one good idea (self-aware parody and claustrophobic threat, respectively) that is then beaten into market complacency by sequel after sausage-like sequel. I can find no excuse for the career of Eli Roth.
It's true that every reviewer has his or her blind spots - one woman I know is so attuned to perceived anti-feminism in the films she covers that she was unable to give "Fight Club" a fair shake - and that it's up to each writer to be aware of those blind spots. And it's not like the critical community has ever been kind to the gore genre. Reviewers generally look on film as a form of art or entertainment. Slasher movies, by contrast are pure function: They exist to bypass reason and pump adrenaline by any and all means necessary. They also allow socially acceptable date-clutching; no small thing. (Oh, and another reason there are so many of them: They're extremely cheap to make and thus profitable.)
All accepted, and anyway, a professional reviewer covering mainstream film has to be a generalist - that's the reality of the game. We're paid to comment knowledgably on every kind of movie, which means we have to see, and have the critical tools to appreciate, every kind of movie. We consciously set aside preconceptions when the lights go down, and we let the film work up (or down) to the limits of its kind. That doesn't mean all movies are equal but, for better and for worse, all movies have an audience they're trying to appeal to, and that audience deserves to know whether the movie in question works.
Yet when watching a film like last year's "Mirrors," in which actress Amy Smart slowly rips her jaw off her face in loving and bloody close-up, I have to ask: Who is the audience for this? And what are they getting out of it? I personally know more than a few gorehounds; they love movies and can be perfectly articulate about why, but when I press them on how watching a character being put through physical agony can be categorized as entertainment, their arguments invariably boil down to "I like it."
In response, my argument boils down to "I don't." I don't find it enjoyable on any level to see a human being, even a fictional stupid one, writhe solely for my viewing pleasure. I find the equation of sex and death that's a founding pillar of slashers - the slut-gets-killed/virgin-gets-away trope - to be reactionary and boneheaded. (There are those who say this reflects adolescent sexual anxieties; I say it fuses pleasure and pain in profoundly confusing ways.) I think the genre exists primarily as a market-approved forum for torturing women and girls.
None of this is new, obviously, despite the handwringing of cultural commentators and other pantywaists (guilty as charged). Human beings have treated dismemberment as sport for millennia, from the Colosseum entertainments through public executions and up to the "Faces of Death" videos. Despite civilized protests to the contrary, we're a species that adores violence, especially when it happens to other people. We're wired for it, but I have yet to hear a reasonable defense for it. Perhaps it's that our bloodlust pre-dates speech. Maybe watching people die just makes us feel alive, however briefly.
And maybe I'm being a hypocrite here, since there are some pretty disgusting movies I find worthwhile, even entertaining. The difference, I suppose, is that there has to be an idea or a sensibility somewhere in there for me to make the leap. "Re-Animator," Stuart Gordon's 1985 grand guignol gorefest, pushes the envelope of the genre with astounding high spirits and subversive kink; Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead II" (1987) fuses zombie mayhem with unexpected slapstick; both are the work of smart, witty moviemakers. "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" (1990), for all its grisly violence, works because its observant coldness is the opposite of exploitation.
Tarantino? Again, his sense of humor and his craft give him a pass for me, although I still think the ear-cutting scene in "Reservoir Dogs" (1992) unalloyed prurience. I'll give you England's "The Descent" (2005) - just barely - on the strength of its suspense and decently-realized characters and Japan's "Audition" (1999) on the strength of director Takashi Miike's pure weirdness.
That I find so little worthwhile in American horror movies of the last 20 years, though, indicates A) that I'm probably getting too old for this, and/or B) that the genre as purveyed by US filmmakers has become locked into a feedback loop in which the clichés remain the same but the bloodletting, by commercial and psychological necessity, only heads upward. Audiences go to "Saw IV" (2007) or "Turistas" (2006) to feel scared - to feel anything, really - but as the pop-culture scar tissue builds up from three decades of post-"Halloween" slashers, each movie needs to cut deeper to strike a nerve.
That's why hipster Hollywood filmmakers have lately been remaking Japanese horror movies ("The Ring," "One Missed Call," et al), and that's why they're remaking the slashers of the first generation: They hope to get under our skin faster. A new "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" came out in 2003, "When a Stranger Calls" and "The Hills Have Eyes" in 2006, "Halloween" in 2007, "Prom Night" last year, "My Bloody Valentine" last month, now "Friday the 13th" - not a sequel and not even a remake but a reboot. Admittedly, these are almost always better-made movies than the originals; the 1980 "Friday" looks like a late-'70s porn film precisely because that's what director Sean S. Cunningham was making before he tried his hand at horror.
The DVD commentary track for the first "Friday the 13th" is worth a listen, though, if only to hear Cunningham and screenwriter Victor Miller talk with touching bluntness about their motives. "The most important thing you can do in your film career is make money," says the director, while Miller admits he personally abhors violence and simply screened and copied "Halloween" when writing his script. (Lesson No. 1: "You have sex, you die.") It's a healthy reminder that the majority of slasher movies exist for one reason and one reason only: To shake the change out of a young and bored audience's pockets.
It may be that my own mistake is expecting movies to be more.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@boston.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movies 