Frivolous Friday-Horror movies have been around that long?!

Well this is a cool video. Horror movies have changed a lot in the past 122 years (hell, I didn’t know film has been around that long). Brazilian film critic and editor Diego Carrera has created a fascinating visualization of that evolution by creating a video with a short clip of one horror movie from every year starting in 1895 and ending in 2016. I was glad to see Halloween make the cut in this video, as it’s my all-time favorite horror movie. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen the film, but one thing remains the same no matter how often I see it: I still get scared shitless. I know exactly when Michael is going to strike. How he’s going to kill his victims. That he’s a sadistic asshole with a perverse sense of humor (seriously, he kills Bob and then pretends to be him in a ghost costume to fool his girlfriend Lynda whom he goes on to kill). It’s pretty amazing to think that Carpenter helped usher in the slasher genre by creating the movie on a shoestring budget. More, it’s a testament to the strength of his directorial ability that the movie largely holds up over the decades. Sure, certain aesthetics are different today (landlines with those damn cords that always get tangled up; fashion; vehicles, etc), but it wouldn’t take much tweaking of the movie to make it fit into the 21st century. Even the dialogue wouldn’t need much changing. Of course it wouldn’t fit well with today’s approach to horror movies since there was no blood, and filmmakers today love their blood spatter. I wish modern movie makers would take a few notes from the movies of yesteryear. Don’t know about anyone else, but I could do with less gore and blood and more tension and suspense in my scary movies.

{advertisement}
Frivolous Friday-Horror movies have been around that long?!
{advertisement}

9 thoughts on “Frivolous Friday-Horror movies have been around that long?!

  1. 1

    I’m entirely about slow-burn flicks like “The Shining” and “The Ring” that are less about gore and violence and more about jacking up the suspense. And “Halloween” is good… but it’s a testament to Carpenter’s skills that while it might be his best-known movie, he’s made better AND scarier movies.

  2. rq
    2

    A Trip to The Moon was horror?
    But yeah, less blood and more uncertainty would be nice – not a big fan of gore.

  3. 3

    I agree. Gore is kind of uninteresting. I mean, if I want to see blood and body parts where they shouldn’t be, I can go to work. Suspense is much scarier.

  4. 6

    Have you heard Marc Maron’s WTF interview with John Carpenter on 6/30/16? I really enjoyed it.
    After decades of watching his movies I’ve always wondered what Carpenter was like, he’s actually pretty mellow and upbeat.

  5. 9

    It’s really interesting to watch how the SFX grows and changes over time, too. I mean, it’s gone from crude puppets and bloke-in-a-sheet to super-realistic what-do-you-mean-it’s-computerized level stuff. It’s mind-blowing!

    BTW, if anyone’s up for an intentional B-movie with absolutely no fourth wall, check out My Name Is Bruce — it’s utterly brilliant. (And it’s Bruce Campbell, so…)

Comments are closed.