Laughing to Death: The Decline of the American Horror Film -- An Introduction

by Andrew Jupin

There was once a time when telling someone you held an interest in horror films didn’t mean feeling the need to cringe while you awaited their reaction. Academically speaking, it was for many years considered a lower genre; one not quite worthy of important analysis or debate. In the earlier parts of the twentieth century it was commonplace that people from all walks of life could gather together on Saturday afternoons and watch double-headers of Universal horror features and no one said anything. Horror as a genre has fallen an awful long way since then.

Today it is much harder for people to get serious about horror. When thinking about the latest remake of a Japanese haunted house film, it is hard to imagine sparking any sort of serious debate. It’s not that people aren’t interested in horror films anymore The Ring (2002) earned $128,579,698 at the American box office alone but the genre lacks that substance and originality found in horror films over twenty-five years ago. It is safe to say that the horror genre is not dead (no pun intended) but that it is in some sort of a holding period, or having some down time. Although some would argue that more than a quarter of a century is quite enough down time. But genres do not expire completely, that is for sure. Clint Eastwood proved that the Western had the potential to become popular again with 1992’s Unforgiven. Most recently, in 2001, Baz Luhrmann reintroduced audiences to the musical with Moulin Rouge. So it is safe to say that horror may be somewhat gone, but is certainly not forgotten. Just so long as the films within the genre can speak to cultural myth.

Myth has an important role in the horror film. The monsters in these films are indeed creatures that play up to the idea of myth. They are something in this world that exists among normal people, yet we can sometimes give no explanation for why they are they way they are. They are the unknowns, the Others, that pose serious threats to our way of life and must be exterminated at all costs. The faster the mythical creature is disposed of, the faster humanity can move on, for now. The fact that these monsters often possess many abilities that normal humans do not -- increased strength, shape shifting, flight, possession, hypnotism, etc. -- also adds to their own story, their own legend. These powers and abilities are one of the things that attract audiences to films in the first place. If these films can at least keep offering up this idea of the mythical monster and find ways to make it appealing to audiences, than the cycle of the genre will continue to turn.

For every genre of film, there is a life cycle, a timeline in which one can track the progress, regress, and innovation that a genre produces over the years. Within this cycle, there are a few shining years and quite a few mediocre ones; often times several years of boredom, unoriginality and sheer awfulness fill these gaps. The shining years are usually considered to be the ones that see the films in these genres pulling in the most money; the most revenue is collected then because this is the time when the public has the most interest in going to see these films.

Going by box office business, one could say then that for the horror genre, the most successful years were between 1978 and 1995. In 1978, John Carpenter’s Halloween was released; this would be the first film in an incredibly successful franchise. In the years to come, two more franchises would take off in the horror genre, starting in 1980 with Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13^th and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984. Between 1978 and 1995, the three franchises produced a total of twenty-two films with an approximate gross of $777,257,847 in America alone. But one cannot measure the quality of a film on box office residuals alone.

A genre is at its most successful when it is producing new and groundbreaking films. These films often stand out as the ones who breakdown barriers and destroy the common repetition that audiences have come to know and have adjusted themselves to. With horror in particular, a closer analysis is easiest when the genre’s life cycle is divided into five separate stages: classical horror, atomic horror, family horror (this will be referred to as the Golden Age), slasher horror, and finally post-slasher or contemporary horror. It is during the family horror stage that the genre really came into its own as a groundbreaking force within the medium.

A brief overview of these five periods is critical for the overall analysis of the Golden Age of the genre. Classical horror is the period one thinks of when talking about the horror films produced by Universal pictures starting in the early 1930’s -- in 1931, Universal released both Dracula and Frankenstein, directed by Tod Browning and James Whale respectively. Atomic horror is what followed the cycle of classical Hollywood horror. Horror took a turn more toward science fiction during these years. When we think of these films, we are often reminded of the b-movie plots consisting of enlarged, radioactive monsters like the giant ants in Them (1954) or the woman in 1958’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. These films are not directly relevant to my discussion; however it is important to note that the films produced during this time were almost always references to the atomic tension being produced by the Cold War. Most, if not all, the plots consist of monsters being created by science, discovered by the common people, unstoppable in the eyes of science, and in the end, destroyed by man.

Slasher horror is what succeeds the Golden Age. Becoming mainstream around 1980, the slasher film consists of multiple murders committed by one man/monster. Each murder is usually preceded by gratuitous sex or nudity and the act of killing is always over-the-top and unnecessarily brutal. In the end, the killer is detained just long enough for the survivors, usually one teenage girl or ‘Final Girl’ or sometimes girl and a guy, to get away. Ultimately the killer is alive in the last few frames, ready to star in the sequel due out the following year. The mainstream popularity of these films dwindled in the later eighties into the early nineties due to the loss of public interest. The mythological creatures once made popular by the horror franchises were no longer a draw. Audiences had more or less become used to these monsters in their homes. It is not easy to still be scared by the monster and his actions when Freddy Kruger becomes an everyday, household name (or stars in a hip hop video with the Fat Boys).

Post-slasher horror is the age in which we currently find ourselves. The majority of the films to come out in this era have been either two-hour in-jokes to horror fans or remakes of horror films that were popular in the seventies (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [2003], and The Amityville Horror [2005] are some recent examples). These films always depict more gore and violence than their predecessors, as well as increased amounts of gratuitous nudity and sexuality. It is almost as if the filmmakers feel that increasing both of these things will make the film better overall.

The period between 1968 and 1980 is what I refer to as the period of ‘family horror’ and from here on out will refer to as the ‘Golden Age’ of the contemporary American horror film. For filmic reference points, let us say the period extends from Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead, to Cunningham’s pre-franchise film Friday the 13^th (1980). This is not to say that there have not been decent horror films made outside of this timeline; however it was during these years that America produced some of its most groundbreaking work. It was groundbreaking because of new subject matter being handled, and this progress led to the entire structure of the horror film itself to be changed. It was at this time that several of the titles produced began to address certain social taboos, especially ones dealing with the modern form of the American family, and exploited them using the genre of horror as a template.

But as in all movements in cinema, the achievements of these films were destroyed at the start of the 1980’s with the birth of the slasher film or ‘hyper-horror’. Gone were the broken taboos and ‘horrific’ families and in their place came a wave of dead teenagers, endless sequels and countless scenes of self-referencing parody. Throughout the 1980’s it was possible that people were not coming to see horror films to be shocked, terrified or even made the slightest bit uncomfortable. No, instead they may have simply been coming to see which way Jason Voorhees or Freddy Kruger were going to kill their latest victims. The films became all about elaborate deaths and less about story. No one cares to hear a boring back-story about the origins of Freddy Kruger in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors (1987) when instead they can watch his skeleton dance around a junkyard killing people in a comedic reference to Jason and the Argonauts (1963). The holiday slashers such as Mother’s DayApril Fool’s Day (1986) are prime examples of a fad in the 1980’s that saw multiple films attempting to garner the same holiday-horror success that Halloween saw just years before. They became so formulaic and repetitive that the only way filmmakers could keep people coming to these films would be to promise that with each repeating of a plot, they would guarantee more elaborate deaths and theatrical killing. The anticipation of these gruesome deaths eventually turns into excitement and soon audiences will begin to cheer and shout whenever a helpless victim is disposed of on screen. This cheering and applause turns to laughter as audiences find themselves more and more comfortable with the subject matter and eventually, the films themselves begin including more and more comedic elements.

In between the dragging years of nuclear horror and the bloody years of the slasher film, comes the Golden Age of the American horror film. During this period of filmmaking, audiences bared witness to situations and thematic elements that they had never before seen on a movie screen. Developing the model created by Alfred Hitchcock’s highly influential Psycho (1960), the first film to start this break out movement was George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968).

We have since seen a decrease in the pop culture significance of these films; the horror films being produced today can be broken into three categories. In the case of some, the films are acknowledgements of the past. Horror films based entirely on self-reflexivity were seen as far back as 1994 with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. In these films, characters acknowledge the existence of horror films. Their characters have seen these kinds of films before and know how to handle themselves. Wes Craven used the idea from New Nightmare and made it into his biggest success, the self-parody Scream (1996). The film was a huge success and what was amazing was that the film was made up of dozens of in-jokes from the horror genre. Craven went on to have the last laugh however, when he turned Scream into its own franchise with Scream 2 in 1997 and the less-successful Scream 3 in 2000. While the kids in the Scream films poke fun at how things used to be in horror, some actually yearn for the way things used to be in a more direct way.

The repetition of slasher films slowly broke down the progress that the Golden Age of horror made, not unlike how the repetition of the Universal sequels eventually brought an end to the Classic age of horror in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The backlash of the 1980’s has put horror in a place it has yet to crawl out of. Repetitive sequels are not dead in the least; there are plans for additions to both the Halloween and Friday the 13^th franchises. If it is not a sequel to something, odds are it is a remake of a progressive horror film from the Golden Age. To understand how horror got to this tragic point, it is important to look back over the years and mark certain starting points, turning points, and all the terrible mistakes that followed. An understanding as to where this all came from will help us figure out just how it was horror got to be the empty shell it is today.

Continues with Chapter 1 – Putting the Monster Away: The Foundations of Classic American Horror