Even when Nancy defeated Freddie Krueger at the climax of Nightmare on Elm Street, he somehow found a way to avoid destruction in spite of the “rules” of the film. Although not explicitly supernatural in his earliest appearances, Myers was unstoppable and capable of enduring beyond what the human body could conceivably withstand. Michael Myers might have been just a kid with a butcher knife, but he never acted as though he were. What was most remarkable about classic horror movie villains was their refusal to follow the rules that were set out. Some vampires were afraid of crucifixes, some were not some could fly, some could not some hated garlic, some were okay with it. However, there was always a certain flexibility to these concepts. Freddie Krueger can (probably) only get you if you fall asleep. Zombies must be killed by destroying the brain. Werewolves transform in the light of the full moon and can be killed by silver. To be fair, monster movies always had rules. If you haven’t seen them yet, consider yourself warned. Note: This post includes spoilers for It Follows and Lights Out. Perhaps an extension of the same postmodern irony thread threaded through late nineties films like Scream and then evolving into the blurred fiction of found footage, modern horror films seem increasingly fixated on the idea of the “rules.” more and more, it seems like horror films insist upon their monsters conforming to an internal logic that the protagonists and audience can deduce (and exploit) through observation and experimentation. However, there is something else interesting happening in the background. Still, recent years have seen modern horror become increasingly nostalgic and old-fashioned, a trend best demonstrated by the horrors produced by James Wan like The Conjuring. Recent horror movies have seen a bit of a shift away from those kinds of themes and stories, although there are still traces to be found The Shallows is very much an “American tourist in hostile territory” film while The Girl With All the Gifts looks to be a clever twist on the zombie genre that is still going strong following a millennial resurgence. The renewed emphasis on foreign countries as inherently hostile in horrors like Hostel, The Ruins and Touristas. The emphasis on torture in franchises like Saw and Hostel reflects contemporary political debates about how best to face the future. The found footage style recalls the images of 9/11 captured by citizen journalists and imprinted upon the public consciousness. Indeed, it is quite easy to draw parallels between the War on Terror and the horror movies of the early twenty-first century. This dependence on found footage seemed to represent a logical extension of the ironic postmodernism of the nineties, a fear that the real world and the world of the horror were overlapping. Found footage offered a more grounded and realistic depiction of terror, reflecting the footage of real-life horrors captured on camcorders and mobile telephones for broadcast on the evening news. In the nineties, knowing irony seemed to take over.Įven in the first couple of years of the twenty-first century, the genre came to be dominated by supernatural monsters and found footage. The late eighties gave way to body horror as the AIDS virus became an international crisis. The haunted house became a fixture of horror in the seventies owing to economic uncertainty, while the zombie became a reflection of unchecked mindless consumerism. The b-movie horrors of the fifties fixated on atomic horrors as an expression of anxiety of the development of the nuclear bomb and fears about science gone mad. There are any number of obvious examples. As with all cinema, horror movies tend to reflect the era in which they were created.
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