Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Today's soundtrack: The Misfits "Scream" ::
Scary movies, yeah I’ve been known to watch them from time to time. The problem with them, as with any film genre, really, is that they have become riddled with clichés. I have gone over before the ways in which a character could easily avoid becoming lunch meat ion a horror movie before, because people seem to fall victim to the psychotic killer in the same fashion over and over again. Similarly, we the viewers have fallen victim to the same sort of scares over and over.
The very first recycled scary even which comes to mind is that someone will die within the first ten minutes of the movie, and you know what? It’s usually the best and most interesting death scene in the entire film. In Nightmare on Elm Street, the teenagers have a sleep over, two of ‘em get in on in one room, and then when the girl falls asleep, she is harassed, chased, and subsequently murdered by Freddy Krueger in her dream. Now, I was pretty young when that movie came out, but who here hasn’t been tortured by that shot of Freddy with the inexplicably long arms and his knives for fingers hunting that girl down that road? There was also the flip side to that; what her death looked like in the waking world, her body rolling around the room, up the walls, onto the ceiling, cuts just appearing out of nowhere until she died. Good stuff. Far better than Johnny Depp’s sucked-into-bed-and-gigantic-blood-geyser death later on. What was the deal with that crap? Also, no one will forget Drew Barrymore’s death scene in Scream, strung up on the swing all eviscerated and such. How often these days do you find yourself watching a horror film and the second the lights in the theater dim you’ve started that mental countdown from 10 minutes for the first spectacular victim? No matter how good the death is, we’ve become desensitized to it. That first kill is no longer scary because it has become so cliché in the genre that we expect it.
Another overdone scare is what I’m going to dub “the chair turn around.” You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you? The name pretty much says it all. I do believe the very first Chair Turn Around was in Psycho. Every one is looking for Mrs. Bates, and there she is in the basement sitting in a chair, until we turn the chair around and see that she is a long dead festering corpse!! Eeeeeeee! Scary! Well, not so much any more. We all know by now that if we are watching a scary movie and we need to turn a chair around, that the person in said chair is going to be dead, dead, dead. Possibly without eyes, or even their whole face, but horribly, gruesomely dead.
Probably the most overused clichéd scare of them all is the old bathroom mirror bit. We all know that if you are watching a scary movie and someone in that movie opens the medicine cabinet that when they close it there will be something frightening appearing in the reflection behind them. This also goes for fogged up mirrors. If a character has just taken a steamy hot shower and they take the time to wipe off the mirror, they will see something shocking behind them. That’s just how it is. I wonder what is supposed to be going on in these homicidal maniacs’ minds during these scenes. “Hey, I’ve got the perfect opportunity to sneak up behind this kid completely undetected and murder her! No wait! If I hold off for a second until she closes the medicine chest, she’ll catch a glimpse of me behind her and be terrified for a full ten seconds before I rip her intestines out! Oh, that’s classic, I have GOT to do that!” I mean, seriously, they’re always just standing there! It’s not as though the get caught mid approach or anything! Why squander precious seconds in the murder schedule and give them the opportunity to see you and therefore increase the chance of them fighting back? Truly, it has gotten to the point of silliness.
One of the good things about all these clichés is that they do allow for creative film makers to take that tired old cliché and use it in a new direction. Unfortunately, to some extent even this idea itself has gotten clichéd! The most overdone turn around of a horror film clichéd scare is the “fake out.” This is where they take one of the has been ways of scaring the audience, something where we are all expecting a murder or something, and turn it into something else. Quite often it will be a girl’s boyfriend playing a mean spirited joke involving a mask and her saying “you’re not funny” or the like. Sometimes it’s the heroine looking for an intruder and the music builds, but when she goes into the next room or opens the closet it’s just the cat having knocked over some milk. It happens all the time now, especially in the scary movies trying to appeal to younger audiences. Is that a really bad sign for the genre when even retooling a cliché has become cliché?
Maybe I expect too much from new horror films. But I don’t know, is it really too much to ask that I get scared in new and different ways? I’m not just talking about great new murderin’ scenes either. For me, the deaths aren’t scary. I could watch people being drawn and quartered, decapitated and eviscerated and there wouldn’t be anything scary about that at all (sometimes they are indeed awesome to behold, but still not scary). It’s the tension, the anticipation, and suspense of certain scenes which make them frightening. Well, to me leastways. I just think they need to start rethinking the scares in scary movies so that they are, you know, scary.
William the Bloody (in suspense)
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