Today sort of makes me think about that timeless cheesy classic from the 80’s (and a couple of the early sequels…not the later ones on account of how crap they are.)
It makes me wonder why, now 30 years later, is Friday 13th’s very simple horror recipe so difficult to replicate. You could argue that after 3 further decades of cinema, it may be difficult to surprise or impress audiences, and that we’re simply all used to ficional horror.
Fair enough I would say. But more often than not in the past few years, a certain type laziness seems to be coming out of the studios. This is probably true overall, but it’s Horror films that I tend to notice it. You see…I really liked Horror films when I was young. Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and several others made for a great nights viewing, each being full of darkness, atmosphere, suspense and excitement. People were going to die, the killer was coming…I knew it, I knew well how this would end…but I would enjoy how this obvious story was told.
Throughout the 90’s, my interest in horror sort of disappears. A lot of that is down to the Scream series and a lot of other associated films that came out at the time. By then it seemed that Hollywood horror movies had ditched the atmosphere and suspense of older horror…and instead adopted the approach of having idiot teenagers running around and screaming every 2-5 minutes at just about everything.
It wasn’t until the past ten years that I got back into horror. This time however, it was into Japanese horror. The original ‘Ring’ (‘Ringu’) was one of the first horror films in years to really suck me in. (Not literally thankfully, I don’t enjoy the thought of that girl coming out of the TV to get me.) Although I’m glad that Hollywood did sit up and start to take notice of the Japanese talent for horror story-telling, I’m not all that happy about what they did with it.
I kind of miss 80’s horror, and although I could always pick up a DVD from at decade, I would like to see good horror return and not in the silly series re-boots that have been cropping up.
Enjoy your Friday 13th, and pick up a horror classic to enjoy it more!
-Rawr
