To Sleep or Not to Sleep.

I watched a so-called horror film tonight called House at the End of the Street. The blurb said it would render me ‘afraid to sleep for weeks.’ Sorry, but I nearly fell asleep in the middle of it. I abandoned it at that stage, and only returned because I had nothing better to do and I’m well in the doldrums again today. So, this is what I don’t understand:

The mainstream American film industry knows perfectly well how to do subtle, and it knows perfectly well how to generate atmosphere. At least, it used to. So why has every American horror film I’ve seen that was made in the last thirty years been about as subtle as Mike Tyson with flatulence, and had as much atmosphere as a McDonald’s restaurant on a Tuesday afternoon in January? No subtlety, no atmosphere, no horror. Simple.

Furthermore, add in a bunch of wooden actors, a formulaic script that’s been recycled over and over again, a load of fancy but predictable and unnecessarily intrusive camera work, and the infamous ‘shock break’ in which the bad guy, who must be dead or at least severely disabled because he’s been shot three times, grabs the heroine’s hand just when she thinks she’s free to go home and listen to The Carpenters in peace, and what do you have? A film that should carry a government health warning: ‘Caution: this movie is likely to send you to sleep for three weeks.’

Do they not care? The Japanese do; they make brilliant horror films. Why is Hollywood serving cronuts when it could be serving crepe suzette?

I’m a fan of the Scary Movie series, because that’s when Hollywood holds its hand up and says ‘We’re crap at making horror films, so we thought we’d have a go at sending them up instead.’ At least it’s honest. And quite funny.