The 2005
Halloween Horror Movie Challenge
The 2006
Halloween Horror Movie Challenge
The 2007
Halloween Horror Movie Challenge
The 2008
Halloween Horror Movie Challenge
The 2009
Halloween Horror Movie Challenge
The 2010 Halloween Horror Movie Challenge
The 2011 Halloween Horror Movie Challenge
The 2012 Halloween Horror Movie Challenge
When I uploaded the first file for this website in 1997, the introduction
to the horror reviews section read as follows:
I used to watch horror movies by the dozens. Of course,
the form is in decline now, so we are lucky to get even one good one--let
alone a great one--in any given year. Horror movies are my first love
and it saddens me to see them in decline. Anymore, I see them as a
faded Southern Belle in a Tennessee Williams play--once beautiful,
but now tawdry.
It wasn't always like this. Every so often, something
sparks an interest in the horror genre and a new cycle of films and
filmmakers appear to vie with the classics in the field. Right now,
that renaissance is overdue. The great horror filmmakers of the past
are now either gone or have simply descended into irrelevance. The
less said about the late careers of John Carpenter, George Romero,
Dario Argento, and Tobe Hooper, the better. Only David Cronenberg
seems to plug along, year after year, pursuing his own imp of the
perverse in increasingly daring and challenging films, but even he
seems to have been co-opted by the art houses.
Fortunately, there are rumblings on the horizon. The
last revolution in the genre took place on the fringes and that is
where the next one will appear. The end of the Twentieth Century saw
genres collapsing and exploding all at once. Something will emerge
from the wreckage. Nightmares are immortal and timeless.
Well...that was then and this is now. In the intervening
years, the horror genre has enjoyed something of a renaissance.
The period since 1998 (as of this writing) has been one of
the genre's periodic boom times. Exciting things have happened in the
genre, though, as I note in the last paragraph above, most of it has
happened on the fringes. If you gauged the health of the genre solely
from the marquee at the multiplex, the last decade has been particularly
lean. But even in the face of a stagnant mainstream, horror has flourished
in all sectors of moviemaking: independent productions like Frailty and The Blair Witch Project; foreign productions from Asia and
Europe (the progeny of The Ring are legion); and
even some of the big studio product from Hollywood (The Sixth Sense, Sleepy Hollow). The genre has diversified, too. It is no longer
held hostage by the slasher movie, even in the wake of Scream and its imitators. Horror films of all types are being made now, not
just cheap rip-offs designed to cash in on a first-weekend audience
of teen-aged boys (though even THOSE films are still legion).
Part of it is the times we live in. When people are
scared, horror films flourish.
Of course, it can't last. We are already seeing a market
glutted with garbage, especially at the multiplexes. But this boom time
has already lasted longer than I expected. I suspect that twenty or
thirty years from now, the next generation of horror fans will look
back on this period fondly and say that this was one of the golden ages.
As a final note, beware: I admit movies into the canon
of horror movies that you might not think of as horror movies. This
is deliberate. After all, "horror" isn't really a genre at all--it's
an emotion. |