Why I avoid horror movies
World-renowned movie critic Kenneth Turan explains why he would like to ignore the whole horror genre.
Like characters in an old blues song, horror and I met at a crossroads decades ago. I went one way, horror another, and lately, I’ve been trying to figure out why. It’s not just the deaths of two of modern horror’s founding fathers, George Romero of Night of the Living Dead and Tobe Hooper of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, that got me thinking. Though that played a part.
Equally crucial is the way horror finds itself positioned at this moment as the genre of choice for audiences as well as critics, the sensibility that is front and centre in keeping the movie business afloat.
Just to cite the most recent statistics, Stephen King’s It crushed a September record with a phenomenal opening-week take of more than US$123 million ($180m) and has made more than US$604 million worldwide after five weeks in cinemas, while Annabelle: Creation, the latest film in The Conjuring franchise, put the combined worldwide gross for the cycle at more than US$1 billion.
As far as the critical establishment is concerned, a surprising number of reviewers are more likely to be over the moon about a new horror movie than to applaud mainstream Oscar-type heavyweights.
As critic Nick Pinkerton wrote in British journal Sight & Sound, ‘‘The genre film isn’t just competing with the prestige film for accolades now, but is actually becoming the prestige film.’’
Despite all this, horror is a genre I never review and scrupulously avoid even watching. You could count on the fingers of baseball legend Mordecai ‘‘Three Finger’’ Brown how many horror or similarly scary films I’ve taken in over the past years.
Even Tomas Alfredson’s fine Swedish vampire picture Let the Right One In, which purists would say is too tame to even count, was almost too much for me.
I was not always this way. I admire early horror masters like Lon Chaney, whose unmasking in the original Phantom of the Opera is one of the great moments in silent cinema, and I spent considerable time interviewing David F. Friedman, the genial impresario who produced two early films by splatter pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis, the aptly named Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!
And as Romero’s death reminded me, I was actually an early partisan of Night of the Living Dead. In fact, while Variety called it ‘‘an unrelieved orgy of sadism’’, I reviewed the movie positively for the Washington Post when it opened in the nation’s capital. I have vivid memories of watching that film alone at a screening in the District’s cavernous Circle Theatre on a warm afternoon and being ‘‘so completely in its grip’’, as I wrote in my review, ‘‘that it’s shocking to walk out of the theatre and discover people walking around as if nothing special had happened’’.
‘‘You get what you pay for in Night of the Living Dead,’’ I concluded, ‘‘a horror film that has the power to literally horrify. How sweet it is.’’
But rather than become part of the vanguard of America’s love affair with horror, I went resolutely in the opposite direction. Did I change, or did horror change? The answer, I think, is both.
For one thing, starting perhaps with The Texas Chain Saw
As the son of a father whose entire family died in the Holocaust, I've always felt that the world itself was both frightened and frightening enough for me.