Its October, and for many of us that means that the season of Horror film marathons has officially commenced. While many may be renting the Saw films or gathering together all the Paranormal Activity films, or chronicling some slasher franchise, I’ll be continuing my tradition of watching classics like Dracula, The Wolfman, and Frankenstein. This may seem odd, I far prefer the black and white, empty, and seemingly tame horror films of old to the gore fest, jump scare infested, modern slasher.
Perhaps this is something that comes off as strange to many people, but there is many a reason for why I feel this way. Horror is genre that has long held relevance within the film industry, with much of the genre helping to form many of modern film’s conventions, and many of film’s greatest superstars finding their origins within the horror genre. But for all of the achievements of the genre that have helped define the art of film, it can be argued that most horror movies, whether they be good or bad, legendary classics or legendary flops, fail to succeed in one manner: Most aren’t very scary.
Oh, don’t get me wrong: there are some scary movies out there, and even movies that aren’t strictly horror have moments that can chill you to the bone. But very few movies have spine tingling chills that stay with you forever, very few are able to stay consistently scary throughout time. In other words, there is only one Excorcist. One of the unfortunate things about most films is that what was once scary is no longer very scary in the future, and that time tends to break down whatever quality they might have had if the films weren’t very good in the first place. There is a reason that we still talk about Hitchcock’s Psycho over 50 years later and almost nobody talks about the remake of the film that came out only 15 years ago.
Its not only modern horror that suffers from this honestly. Movies like Dracula, Phantom of the Opera, and any given Frankenstein film, though quite arguably still very high in quality, are almost impossible to call frightening in this day and age. If that’s true then, why is it I prefer movies like these to the modern gore fests of today’s cinema? Well, at the end of the day, it all comes down to atmosphere.
Imagine a dark house, the room a hollow silence. You walk quietly as you observe the empty ruins of the ancient gothic architecture, shadows covering the area. As you walk, you have the sinking feeling that one of the shadows is following you, but quickly dismiss it as delusion. As you keep walking, the sense of stalking grows stronger and fiercer, you becoming more and more at unease. Suddenly, the shadow that had been trailing you begins to take the form of a man. In terror, you begin to walk away from the shadow, but it continues to trail behind. You go faster and faster, panic and fear rising, until you are stopped by a wall. Suddenly, the shadow is gone. The figure of the man dissipated. Though you’d think to be at ease, your sense of terror has only risen.
That is the kind of scene that would haunt the imaginations of viewers of classic horror. Older films, because of their lack of effects, were forced to compensate delivery with lots of buildup. By showing the horror of the characters build greater and greater as time passes, the filmmakers created an atmosphere of terror that despite the actual scares no longer holding up, still maintains in high quality. Classic horror draws in the audience like no other kind of film is capable of, picking carefully and powerfully at the nerves, looking inspire the minds of the audience to think about what may within the darkness, with what may lay within the silence. The monochrome tone and almost complete lack of music that many of these classics had have the power to draw people in a whole other world, a world of the macabre and the disturbing, and create that world with the power of a camera, and very little else.
Much of the thanks to that atmosphere also have to be given to the actors in the films. Stars like Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Sr. and Jr., Boris Karloff, and Vincent Price have defined the archetypes of horror characters, using facial expressions, voice, and stage presence in ways that no actors had used them before. Actors did not just play a role, they transformed themselves into the icons, became the monsters that they were casted as. There are reasons that Lugosi’s Dracula is the most imitated version of the character, reasons that Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster remains the icon when it’s not even similar to the book’s version, and that Vincent Price’s maniacal laughter is the most used evil laugh of all time. These actors pushed horror to a point of no return, showing how to a take a role seriously, even when it was just some silly fantasy. The work they put into their roles helped to create what their films became famous for, the dark atmosphere that enriched the original beasts of the horror genre.
When you compare the glories of the classic age to the works of today, there really isn’t much of a comparison. Today’s horror films (with a few exceptions) are bloated, over compensating, and so intent on the delivery of a scare that they forget that build up is the far more important aspect frightening people. They get rid of the idea of trying to create a truly creepy atmosphere is favor of a distorting one, which while disturbing, loses the sense of foreboding and strangeness that classic horror had been able to produce. Cameras are rarely used to create the atmosphere of a creepy setting, they’re used more to capture some sadistic action that is barely developed and thought to be scary for its virtue of being disturbing. Because of their lacking limits and ability to make a film as violent as possible, horror films lost their presence of fear through effort, and have thus ceased to seem like scary movies.
Though there are definitely exceptions, as classic horror films could often be terrible and some modern horror films are very good, in general, my preferences fall upon the realm of a the gray, silent mysteries of classic film. This Halloween, I recommend you check one of these out, as they are capable of changing everything you thought you knew about the genre.
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