The Business of Horror

The Times has a very interesting story about the current resurgance of horror movies, and why they are one of the only genres making money at the moment.

What most distinguishes these two films, and a crop of others such as Saw and Wolf Creek, is their astonishing goriness and unrepentant sadism, the degree of which has not been seen on screen since the British Board of Film Classification banned so-called “video nasties” such as The Driller Killer and I Spit on Your Grave in the mid-1980s. The characters in these films use and abuse saws, drills, gouges and any other device they happen upon, inflicting literally eye-popping, bone-cutting, artery-squirting, toe-crunching violence on those to whom they have taken a dislike. The difference these days, though, is that the kind of horror films that were once sold under the counter in Soho are now mainstream cinematic fare, often distributed by divisions of the major Hollywood studios...

"I think there is something about the American dream," says Craven, who started his working life as a literature professor, "the sort of Disneyesque dream, if you will — of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white picket fence, mom and dad and their happy children, God-fearing and doing good whenever they can — and the flip side of it, the kind of anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that’s not the truth of the matter, that gives American horror films, in some ways, kind of an additional rage."

Good reading for horror movie buffs.

Also, anyone up for catching Slither?