Zombies and vampires and werewolves, oh my!

Thanks to horror movies, we can't be sure that anything we see is "safe." You never know if that is a regular frog, or if it is some flesh-eating, radioactive zombie frog. When you see that man coming down the street, you don't know if he will smile at you as he walks past, or if he will pull out a machete and cut your head off. When you walk in a graveyard, you watch your step to make sure a zombie won't poke its arm out of the ground and grab your foot. Because of horror movies, we won't go to bed until we have made sure the closet door is shut and we have checked under our beds for the boogeyman (and whatever else may be lurking there)...although I am not sure what we could really do if we found the boogeyman under the bed...hmmm...




I love horror movies. I think part of it is because I like to be scared, but only scared in the fictional sense. I don't like to be scared in real-life situations. There is a definite difference in horror movies and something horrible in real life. When you watch a scary movie, you KNOW that it is fake blood and that they are only actors. You KNOW that those are fake limbs that are being ripped off, and you know that makeup and animatronics are what make the monsters look so convincingly real. That is why I like horror movies. They entertain you. They scare you, but don't hurt you. They gross you out. They make you cover your eyes. They make you jump in your seat. But they are not real. Real life is way more terrifying than any scary movie. If you don't believe me, watch the news sometime.

Plus, some scary movies are just plain silly. They try to be all scary, but when it comes down to it, they are just plain dumb. Take a movie like Deadly Friend. It is all about a kid whose next door neighbor is killed and he brings her back to life, but she is not like she was before. She, in essence, is a zombie, who is incapable of feeling, but is apparently capable of killing. The acting is terrible, and the plot is pretty much non-existant. It is one of the dumbest movies I have ever seen. Yet, when it was on tv the last time, I stayed up until it was over to watch it...for what reason, I don't know! And how many times can Jason really come back from the dead? By now he should just be a pile of bones. Scary movies tend to suck you in like that, whether they are of good quality, like The Exorcist, or just plain dumb, like Crocodile. They have movies out there about everything under the sun...from killer rabbits (Night of The Lepus), killer frogs (Frogs), killer worms (Squirm), killer fish (Pirhana), and killer bees (The Swarm). They have the slashers like Jason, Freddy and Michael Meyers, who have what seems like a neverending arsenal of weapons, and kill their victims in new and inventive ways. Then they have the monster movies featuring monsters like werewolves, vampires, zombies and radiated, mutated humanoids. I swear, I don't think there is any area that horror writers haven't touched.



I, of course, have my favorites. I love Halloween and all of The Evil Dead movies. I like the straight-on, in your face, thrill-a-minute screamers as much as I like the cheesy horror films, with the horrible acting and not-so-special effects. I like the campy horror films and the low budget slashers. I just like scary movies, period.

There haven't been too many scary movies recently which I have thought were really good. I did like Dawn of The Dead, 28 Days Later, and The Grudge. And I can't wait til The Ring 2 comes out. I have been watching those Japanese horror movies lately, like the Ju-on series (Ju-On means "The Grudge"), The Wishing Stairs, and Ringu (which The Ring was based on). And there was a Cambodian movie called The Eye, which was really good too. What makes those movies so good, is that they favor eerieness over blood and gore. And the creepy quality to those movies is what makes them so scary. Plus, a lot of them have the token creepy little kid in them, and you know that horror movie plus creepy little kid is the equation for a reallllllly creepy horror film...the kind that makes the hair on the back of your head stand up.





I guess there will always be the writers out there who see something and think, "I bet I can make a horror movie out of that!" I am sure we will eventually see a movie about a killer copying machine or a killer microwave. Who knows. Thankfully, there are a lot of writers out there who care about quality, and not about how big their body count is. And I think, because of that, we will continue to be scared in new and neverending ways.