Scary Movies? Not these days.

Now, I may have mentioned this before, but let me state again, for the record, that I like scary movies. Movies with zombies are my absolute, all time favorite, but I can sink my teeth into vampire flicks (hah hah) and my hackles have been known to rise for the occasional werewolf movie. New scary movies are all well and good, don't get me wrong. They rock, but they just aren't as good as the olden time horror flicks.

This is not heresy. This is actual factual, fuckers. The straight shit. Movies today (all genres, not just horror) suffer from a preponderance of movie dollars and are weak in overall plot and character development. It's all about opening weekends, blockbuster actors, merchandise tie-ins, spin-offs, franchise the shit out of every friggin' movie out there. Back in the day, it wasn't like that at all. No, no my friends. Directors and actors were forced to rely on on-screen performances and inherently creepy shit to get the job done, instead of I-fucking-LM cgi that shit to hell and gone. CGI is awesome, don't get me wrong. I myself have been known to turn my crafty hand at the trade, for my own personal amusement, but vital pieces of good scary movie-ness have fallen by the wayside as we've begun to adopt CGI as a cinematic mainstay instead of a costly and carefully considered option when all else fails. Most of today's horror movies rely on shocking visual effects rather than psychological torture. From Heather O'Rourke falling through the ceiling with Craig 'Don't Call me Coach' Nelson amidst a pile of otherworldly pink goo to The Creeper pulling his own damned head off to replace it with one he just ate, we find ourselves more and more inured to that sort of stuff. What about Brad Pitt being handed his own wife's head in a box? What about Jodie Foster being mind-fucked by Sir Anthony Hopkins? Those movies left my skin crawling for days.

Take Demon Seed, from 1977, for example. The first time I saw this, I was a kid. (We had HBO and Cinemax and some other shit like that, and they paid no fucking attention to when they showed shit back then.) It's a freaky film about computers gone completely mental. In this one, a computer goes apeshit and decides it wants to impregnante a woman (hence the title, Demon Seed). There is a scene towards the end, the wonky AI has cobbled together some kind of machinery to force it's creator's wife into impregnation. It uses a pair of scissors to methodically cut away said hapless wife's skirt up. Scary fucking shit.

Or how about Coma, from 1978? Mike Douglas, in one of his non-penis or ass showing flicks, gets caught up with Genevieve Bujold in an absolutely fucked-up story involving healthy patients winding up in inexplicable comas. They get shipped off to some place somewhere (it's a little slow, so I'm kinda hazy on particulars) where some kind of experiments are performed on them. There's a scene where what appears to be hundreds of coma-afflicted patients are hanging from cheap Ikea knock-off ceiling-mounted shelving units. Very unnverving, and the growing sense of frustration and paranoia as Genevieve tries to prove she's not mental is pretty effective.

If people falling unconscious as an insidious plot doesn't chill your blood, there's always Rosemary's Baby. We all know about this one. It's become a prototypical element for dozens of Hell/Antichrist movies since it's inception in 1968. This one is also slow, but very cool, because the mother is convinced that her unborn son is the fucking antichrist, and no one believes her. This is on account of the fact that entire apartment building where her and her husband lives is in on the thing. We get to watch Mia Farrow go completely bugnuts , and just when we think that she actually is only bananas, we see the kid's creepy demon eyes. Booooyah! (Whether she'll admit it or not, Charlize Theron's performance in The Devil's Advocate had to have been influenced by Mia's dementia)

Then, of course, there's The Fog, written and directed by John Carpenter. It's one motherfucking scary ass, clench your hands in terror, cover your eyes up and peek through the cracks movie. I saw this one only once, when I was a babe in swaddling clothes. The only thing that I remember from this charming flick is the sound of big metal coins rolling on the floor every time one of the stupid townsfolk got their heads chopped off by whatever was coming out of the fog. It's also got Adrienne Barbeaux in it. The sound of decapitations in this movie has stuck with me to this day, and whenever I imagine cutting someone's head off, that is the sound I hear.

So, in short, while I am perpetually incapable of turning down a chance to see a scary movie in the theater (Exorcist: The Beginning, a movie so plagued with troubles that the one in theaters is not the one originally shot all the way to completion, and The Forgotten, an extended and limp-dick rip-off of a stolen first season X-Files episode are two notable examples), 21st century horror movies simply do not have the nuts they once did. There are good scary movies out there, but in the Rogers/Blockbuster Combine Consortium Genre Labeling System, these horror films are now classified as Suspense movies. Which is fine by me, 'cuz where I live, I can grab a copy of The Dead Zone starring ever creepy Chris Walken, turn around to pick up Return of the Living Dead Part III and make my way home for a night of murderous intentions. Granted, my choice in movie rentals generally forces the teenager renting me the movies to keep more than arm's reach away, but fuck that little fucker. If he's not careful, I'll poke him in the eye with my video rental card.