Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Hipster Horror is Here to Stay


I grew up on the classic slasher's of the 70's and 80's. You know them: Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Or perhaps you know them by these names: Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, Leatherface.

All of these films followed a familiar outline, one established by John Carpenter in 1978. Some teens would behave somewhat badly (they would drink, smoke cigarettes, have sex) and then a masked killer would hunt them down one by one until the final girl would emerge victorious carrying some bumps bruises and emotional scars.

Wes Craven subverted the genre with Wes Craven's New Nightmare in 1994, a movie that became a meta commentary on his own creation of Freddy Krueger and then two years later launching the Scream franchise which continued a trend of self aware teen slashers, but these were still horror movies. Sure they winked at the audience, but the intent was still to make you jump.

Throughout the oughts horror reverted more toward the PG-13 thriller. Movies like The Ring and The Grudge had modest returns at the box office, but by the end of the decade we landed on microbudget found footage films like Paranormal Activity that were shot for approximately $24 dollars...give or take a few thousand.

Now to be clear, hipster horror and found footage aren't the fault of any one franchise. Most of it can trace its roots back to The Blair Witch Project all the way back in 1999. But the gimmick that younger people may not remember is that like the Orson Welles Radio Drama War of the Worlds from 1938; a large swath of America also found The Blair Witch Project to be real. This was pre-internetish...people had the internet but it was usually for A/S/L and maybe some basic sports scores. Reminder, most high school kids didn't know WWF was staged in the 90's. Before the internet we were all stupid.

Cut to 2014; a curious indie movie called It Follows, lights the festival circuit on fire. Critics rave about this cheap ($2m) flick that may or may not be an allegory about safe sex. Sure, it had a few of the tropes from Carpenter's Halloween (teens behaving badly) but it lacked most of the grusome death scenes and proposterous jump scares.

In fact in It Follows the set up of the movie is that a demon very slowly walks after you and if it catches you, you die. The way to get rid of this demon? Pass it onto someone else, via sex. It was certainly an interesting film, but as far as scary? Meh. Maybe a couple scenes were unsettling. It was certainly marketed as a horror movie and it was rewarded by earning back 10x it's 2 million dollar budget. But what I find particularly interesting is the disparity between critics and viewers.

Critics gave this movie a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, near universal acclaim. However, audiences, people like you and me, gave it a 65%. That's still a decent score, but it's also quite the variance.

Another film that came out that year was The Babadook, a film that discusses the real life horrors of a widowed woman raising a son...oh and also a pop-up book character comes to life. Again, the Babadook received universal critical acclaim of 98% or RT with an audience score of 72; decent but by no means great.

Last year, an even more egregious critics/audience split on one of these slow burn 'horror movies that isn't scary.' The Witch offered a puritanical tale about a family and their possessed goat. Calling it a slow burn would be generous, and calling it boring might be more accurate, yet again critics adored this movie...all the way to 91% Audiences? They weren't having any of that shit. 56% our first Rotten score. That is a -35 disparity, the largest to date.

That said, A24 probably doesn't mind because on a budget of 3 million The Witch turned in a nifty 20 million dollar return for the studio.

Today I saw a movie called It Comes at Night and I can almost guarantee everyone is going to hate it. To be fair it is an interesting movie that talks about concepts such as family, trust and friendship. Also I suppose a couple things come at night, but it's not what we've been trained to expect. There is no masked killer, there is no alien, monster or various other otherworldly spirits. This was another film that did well on the festival circuit, in fact it was one of the most anticipated films of the summer for me personally.

It Comes at Night scored an 86% with critics and a pathetic 43% with audiences. Any way you cut it, that's bad. A -43 disparity, a score only HALF what critics thought? Why the giant disparity in this genre? Why are critics and audiences at such odds on these films.

I have a few theories.

1. The honesty of the marketing.
It Comes at Night had a very simple premise that hit you over the head in all of the trailers. There is a big red door and something is going to fucking come through it at night. It's going to be terrifying. The film delivered something more akin to a meditation on the human condition. Maybe this is a film that plays more to the sensibilities of the type of person that goes into movie criticism. And perhaps the people that shell out $20 to see a scary movie and are not in turned scared feel lied to.

2. Perhaps audiences are harsher than critics?
Going along with what I said previously, then it now costs in excess of $100 to take a family to the movie theater, perhaps audiences just have much higher expectations than critics who are typically screening the films for free. But this theory is shot down when I see that more traditional horror film like The Conjuring has a fairly even split of 86 critics, 82 audience. Which leads me to my conclusion.

3. Demographic disparity
These hipster horror movies are in effect more appealing to...hipsters. The time of people that grow up to be film critics have always been more sympathetic to the independent art house movies, and that's exactly what these are...tiny indies dressed up like horror movies. The classic horror crowd was younger, more diverse and less educated. Turning on a horror movie meant you would get to turn your brain off for a couple hours and get some adrenaline pumping with some cheap scares. Now with review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic making it very easy for traditional horror fans to seek out well reviewed movies in the genre, traditional horror fans are finding themselves at the Landmark watching something that violates that traditional horror contract and they aren't quite sure what to make of it.

These movies aren't going anywhere though, at least not for the moment because they are cheap as shit to make and a studio can make an almost guaranteed modest return on them. See: everything Blumhouse of the past 10 years.

It Comes at Night had exactly two locations. The house and the woods outside the house. I imagine they shot it in three weeks. And guess what? It's already made its budget back in three days. It will probably quietly accumulate another 10 million dollars in the following weeks, then another handful of cash on VOD and finally one last check when it inevitably streams on Netflix.

One may not enjoy this trend of scaled down, thought-provoking "thrillers" but as long as they can be made for the same price as a duplex in Mar Vista, they aren't going anywhere. Conversely, the 20 million dollar teen slashers from my youth? Well that movie just doesn't get made anymore. For better or for worse.

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