Fear Factors - Are We Just Running Scared ?

 Is the war on terror not scary enough for you? A smart and artful slate of cutting-edge horror films is mirroring the dread of Iraq and other Gen Y anxieties in its celluloid nightmares. The film critic of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reveals all for Netribution.

The most gruesomely vivid, elegantly made horror movie in recent memory opened with little fanfare on Dec. 25, 2005 in approximately 1,500 theaters nationwide. Titled Wolf Creek, it's a low-budget shocker from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre old school, about three carefree twentysomethings whose hiking trip goes terribly awry after they are kidnapped by a maniacal serial killer in the Aussie outback.

As is often the case with horror pictures, it was greeted by many critics like a Christmas present wrapped in soiled tissue paper. (Sample review, from Roger Ebert: "There is a role for violence in film, but what the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty?")

The fact that the movie announced the arrival of an immensely gifted new director named Greg McLean -- whose patience, control and ability to play the audience like a very cheap fiddle would have done Alfred Hitchcock proud -- seemed lost on most adult moviegoers.

An isolated case of a terrific B movie falling under the radar? Not exactly. Because the very same thing happened a few weeks later with Eli Roth's Hostel -- a viciously entertaining exploitation thriller, about American college students who find themselves trapped in an Eastern European slaughterhouse where rich businessmen pay to torture hapless victims.

The movie creepily captured the experience of being a clueless American in a foreign country that pays you very little heed. (It also showed us what it might look like to have your eyeball slowly pulled out of its socket with pliers.)

Once again, the reviewers turned up their noses. ("[Hostel] willfully takes us someplace cruel -- and deeply unfunny," wrote The Denver Post.)

And again and again . . . with Final Destination 3, the technically dazzling third installment in the teenagers-who-can't-outrun-Death franchise, and with Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes, the unrelentingly menacing and bloody remake of the Wes Craven cult classic. Needless to say, neither of these films (both of which are currently still in theaters) will be in the Best Picture Oscar.

Except there's another story here: namely, that these movies aren't slipping under the radar and disappearing straight to video. Instead, the largely teenage and college-age audiences who flood the multiplexes on Friday nights have turned them all into modest hits. In the case of Hostel, which opened to $19.6 million and went on to gross $47.3 million, it might just end up being the most profitable movie of 2006. (That film arrives on DVD April 18, a week after Wolf Creek.)

"In the box-office slump of the last year, these movies are the only movies that audiences are responding to," says Hostel director Roth. "Both Saw II and Hostel were made for $4 million, and they're beating movies that cost $200 million dollars."

Are the critics simply out of touch?

Well, yes. Because if you can't recognize the often-astonishing level of craft on display in these films, then you're watching them with your eyes closed.

But the teenagers are getting it -- and embracing perhaps the only movies around that dare to speak to larger social concerns and anxieties, especially about the often-faceless, unfathomably evil villains we must contend with in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

Hostel, Final Destination 3, Wolf Creek and The Hills Have Eyes are hardly uplifting, redemptive horror stories, where the hero wages battle with a bad guy and emerges a better, stronger man.

Nor do these movies offer any of the self-reflexive irony-soaked fun of films like Scream from the 1990s or the spook-house pleasures of the Asian-influenced horror movies like The Ring from earlier in this decade.

What has emerged, instead, is a modern strain of horror that takes us straight back to the politically conscious, deeply despairing 1970s classics like The Last House on the Left, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the original Hills Have Eyes.

The often hopeless message of these movies is, "Your life may seem perfect right now, but the is about to drop, at which point there will be no one around to save you." And it's a message that seems scarily appropriate for a generation of teens and twentysomethings who were mostly raised in privilege but whose lives have had a pall cast over them -- first by the omnipresent threat of terrorist attacks and now by an ongoing war in Iraq.

The Roots of Fear

"In retrospect, it's usually pretty easy to look at horror movies and see the influences of the time," says Wes Craven, the director of Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street, who also produced The Hills Have Eyes remake.)

"And I think right now, with the post-9-11 world and Iraq, creative people are almost being goaded to look at things in the strongest way possible. If you look at the Academy Awards [movies], those are films about real issues. I think everybody is saying, 'We have to talk about the nitty-gritty stuff here.' It's not the time for confections."

Craven speaks directly to the main characteristic of this recent spate of horror films, which could also be expanded to include Open Water, Saw, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects: They're not always much fun to watch.

The Hills Have Eyes, Hostel and Wolf Creek, for instance, all spend their opening 30 minutes carefully establishing their settings -- desolate, unforgiving landscapes from which there is no easy escape.

We meet a group of innocent characters (in all three movies, they're middle-class white folks on vacation), and we wait for the inevitable menace to strike. Despair sets in very fast, and our terror comes as much from watching unspeakable violence as it does from our sense of helplessness. There's no shouting at these characters, "Get out of the house!" because they're already trapped far inside -- and we're trapped right there with them.

But it's precisely that helplessness that feels very much of the moment, especially for a generation growing increasingly disillusioned with its political leadership and facing the prospect of having to fight a war against an ever-changing enemy in a hostile and alien country.

These are the same themes that horror movies explored in the 1970s. The original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, directed by Tobe Hooper, offered up a Vietnam-era metaphor of college-age kids traveling through a rural "jungle" where they encounter one deadly enemy after another, while Craven's 1977 The Hills Have Eyes gave us a paranoid, post-Watergate vision of an American government that has covered up its most deadly secrets. (The villains in Hills, both the original and the remake, were victims of American nuclear testing in the 1950s.)

It's little wonder that both of these movies should be remade for a similarly anxious and uncertain era -- or that films like Wolf Creek and The Devil's Rejects should owe them a very considerable debt.

What does distinguish these new films from their predecessors, however, is the often jaw-dropping extent of the gore on display: endless cuttings, sawings, dismemberments and disembowelments. (And that's not even mentioning what happens to the poor German Shepard in The Hills Have Eyes.)

Indeed, there's an exacting solemnity to the bloodshed in something like The Hills Have Eyes that's a far cry from the cheerful splatterific fantasies of Brian De Palma (Carrie, Body Double), or even the lusciously aestheticized violence proffered by Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill or Robert Rodriguez's Sin City.

When a woman's spine is cracked in half during the most horrifying moment of Wolf Creek, the camera stays so close to the victim's face, and the sound effect sounds so chillingly real, that the only possible reaction is stunned silence. And that very gruesomeness -- says Craven -- is another of the ways these movies are speaking to young audiences and reflecting their real-world worries.

"The war in Iraq is a very violent, scary war, and it's a war not being fought by an army on one side," he says. "I'm sure the average kid who watches these kinds of movies has seen on the Internet someone getting his head sawed off with a kitchen knife by the enemy."

Of Teens and Screams.

So why is it that teenagers "get" these movies, while adults seem so clueless to their originality and complexity?

For research, I took two high school seniors and one college freshman to see Final Destination 3 at a local multiplex on a Friday night in February.

The Final Destination movies all feature a group of teenagers who escape one horrific death (an airplane crash, a highway traffic smash-up), only to find themselves being plucked off one by one through a series of bizarre accidents and mishaps.

There's considerable fun to be had watching these insanely elaborate death sequences play out. 's also a strange, Goth-influenced undercurrent here. The Final Destination franchise speaks of a youth culture that believes it has no real control over the future; and of  teenagers who think that the only fates that await them are very gloomy and inevitably doomy.

The young people I brought to the film didn't necessarily agree with me on the latter point-- they all said they felt optimistic about their futures. But they also acknowledged that what makes Final Destination movies so compelling is that they give credence to American teenagers' most paranoid existential dread: that a perfectly banal, everyday experience -- merging into traffic on the highway, or stepping onto a roller coaster at an amusement park -- might end in tragedy.

And what struck me the most about watching Final Destination 3 was how quietly my fellow moviegoers were behaving. In fact, the loudest giggles came from me -- a thirtysomething weaned on the "If you have sex or do drugs, you will be slaughtered" slasher cycle of the 1980s.

That silence seems to speak volumes. Watching movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, you were more likely to root for Freddy or Jason than for their victims. But today's teenage and college-age moviegoers don't see themselves as standing above the characters on the screen but right alongside them. Whether consciously or subconsciously, they're experiencing these movies empathetically.

"I think in the 1980s people went to horror films wanting to laugh at people undergoing all kinds of stress," says Jim Farrelly, professor of English and film studies at the University of Dayton.

"But I don't think this audience is approaching that way. Maybe it's partly the influence of video games, also. But they're trying to figure out ways that maybe they can defend themselves against the evil."

An Unhappy Ending

The final 30 minutes of Wolf Creek (which is purportedly based on a true story) are an exhausting descent into hell. One of the heroines escapes the clutches of the serial killer, only to be tracked down again and tortured further. At the very moment the second heroine is on the brink of survival, her head gets blown to smithereens.

The one character who does manage to survive finds himself being tried for the murders, because police can find no evidence of any serial killer. (The endings of Hostel and The Hills Have Eyes are a tad happier, provided you're the type of person capable of carrying on after your family has been slaughtered and your fingers have been sliced off.)

Are these movies, as so many critics have asserted, merely stewing in their own cynicism about the inhumanity of man and the omnipresence of evil? Do they exult so completely in the torture and victimization of their female characters that they risk crossing the line into misogyny?

Well, yes -- and it's a criticism that these filmmakers readily cop to. As Craven notes, "Sometimes those who are more sensitive and less able to defend themselves end up getting crushed by the cruelty and the insanity of a masculine world. That's what happened [with the two female victims] in Wolf Creek. But you can't take it away from that filmmaker. He has the right to say that."

But the larger point here is that we're witnessing a tidal shift away from the classic studio models of horror -- away from redemptive and transcendent experiences of something like The Silence of the Lambs -- and more toward films that feel deeply, excruciatingly lived-in. And if critics aren't willing to roll with those punches, they're closing themselves off to some of the most interesting movies being produced today.

Says Craven, "You don't come out of these movies smiling. But you see that the average American kid -- or the average American family -- has what it takes to survive. That's a powerful message -- and a very necessary one right now."

"People don't enjoy violence in real life, but they love it in their movies," adds Eli Roth. "And I think a lot of studio horror movies don't want to offend anybody. If there's anything that's too far out there, they test it and if it offends people, they take it out. But Open Water, Wolf Creek, The Devil's Rejects -- these are movies made outside of the studio system, that don't have a happy ending. [The studios and critics] forget that that's what people are paying for -- to be terrified and disturbed."

These Classic '70s Thrillers Still Keep us Spellbound

If the retro-style horror of Hostel or The Devil's Rejects has piqued your interest in the classics -- and if you've already given the original versions of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes a few dozen spins on your DVD player -- consider these four titles, which are among the most influential works of the 1970s. Not all of them qualify as horror movies, per se, but they all speak to the despair and paranoia of the Watergate era. That, and -- 30-plus years later -- they all hold up as gripping thrill rides. (Each is available on DVD.)

Straw Dogs (1971) Arguably Sam Peckinpah's greatest thriller, this study of a meek man (Dustin Hoffman) who must defend himself against a gang of ruffians intent on invading his home and raping his wife (Susan George) remains as provocative and unsettling as ever. The politics are defiantly right-wing -- Peckinpah's camera virtually sneers at Hoffman, whose character represents the failure of the 1960s liberal intelligentsia to stand-up against hostile enemies -- but the larger anxieties explored in the film seem as trenchant as ever. In Peckinpah's hopeless universe, it's either kill or be killed.

The Last House on the Left (1972) Based loosely on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (though some have also suggested it plays like a remake of Straw Dogs), this Wes Craven-directed horror movie watches what happens when a seemingly mild-mannered married couple find themselves playing host to the thugs who raped and murdered their daughter. The thrills are a little cheap, and the filmmaking is decidedly rough around the edges. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a more brutal and deeply pessimistic portrait of ordinary American lives that have gone rotten to the core.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) The great John Carpenter (Halloween, The Fog) made his debut with this low-budget action thriller set in a contemporary urban wasteland where you're likely to be shot dead just for eating an ice cream cone. Carpenter seems to be pouring every social issue of the era -- gang violence, white flight from the cities, widespread political corruption -- into an unassuming, tightly wound package. (It was remade last year, in a version starring Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburne that packed none of the political punch of the original.)

I Spit on Your Grave (1978) Much like Hostel, this unrepentantly nasty cult classic spends the first half torturing its main character and the second half allowing her to exult in revenge. The movie isn't quite as shocking as its reputation would suggest. But no tour of exploitation cinema is complete without a look at this one.

Scared Stiff?

Thirty-three years after seeing The Exorcist, we still get the shakes at the sight of pea soup. Do classic celluloid frightfests still give you the chills? And how do the new horror hits stack up against the greats? Put your worst nightmare in the comments box below.

© Christopher Kelly Star-Telegraph 2006