Something I noticed today - horror movies

Is it just me, or is there a surge in horror movies? Hang in there, I'm getting to it. The last real BIG surge in the horror movie genre was when? During the Raygun administration (Jason, Freddy, Hellraiser, Poltergeist, living dead, original hills have eyes, etc). Now we have been seeing one again (emergence of remakes of Asian horror movies, revisiting old franchises from the 80's, Saw, etc) .

Is there a correlation? Are the horrors we see being committed by our witless leaders translating to box-office bucks? Am I crazy?

I guess that when real life is horrible, people want to go see something even worse than real life. That only leaves axe wielding monsters with a fetish for medical tools.

What's scarier than war, death, taxes, and a corrupt unitary executive? how bout a monster with a tasste for flesh...directed by and starriing Rob Zombie.

Bush1 years. Hmmm, I am liking my pet theory more and more!

crop of asian horror flicks, i'm totally hooked on them and i really, really want to see this one.
http://movies.sacticket.com/movies/movie/detail?id=21408
"The host"

which is his little analysis of the horror genre, he clearly points out that there is a correlation between times of great strife and the popularity of horror movies. Horror movies have always been popular, but have seen huge surges in the 30's during the Great Depression, the late 60's and 70's after the chaos of Vietnam, the 80's when murder rates skyrocketed in the United States and we started seeing lots of slasher films, and now in this decade also.

No, it's no accident. And that is an excellent book by the way. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in horror.

I'm gonna have to go pick it up, it sounds very interesting! Thanks!

Also note that the horror movie trend in the 90's wast the "I Know what you did last summer" and Scream series, which can barely be called horror films at all.

are lousy. There are very few fresh voices, and everyone seems to want to avoid the "horror" tag. Too many "psychological thrillers" and not enough dark, gritty, movies that are hard to watch. It seems to me that the horror genre peaked in the late 70's and early 80's. Clive Barker needs to go back to directing horror.

Although, there are a few good ones like Saw, Event Horizon, and Cabin Fever. Most of them, though, are crappy remakes or idiotic twist endings that have become so commonplace that you already know what will happen.

Or maybe I'm just getting old and don't understand anymore...

Most of them do suck. But then again, most horror movies have always sucked. It's just that there used to be more good ones thrown in with the pile of trash that comes out. Now the good ones aren't just rare, but few and far between.

it just seems to me that there was a higher percentage of good ones 20 years ago. And more fresh voices. Not a whole bunch of rehashed garbage like there is now.

I like horror, but I am bored of all the re-hashes. And a lot of it is crap (hated Saw, sorry ;-) ).

Cary Elwes being in it. I kept expecting him to say "As you wish". And he wasn't very good in it.

Even when he was getting a railroad spike driven through his sack in The Serpent and the Rainbow, I was like "hey, it's Lonestar."

I can never look at Bill Paxton without flashing back to Weird Science. Funny how certain roles stay burned in our minds!

but as a genre it has an astonishing ability to serve as allegory for this or that societal fear: the return of the repressed, the disintigration of the family, the Other (commie, Muslim, what-have-you), and so on. So it does tend to do better in unsettled times; but because the times are never really benign, they'll always do relatively well.

'Danse Macabre' is very much worth reading, and there are other more scholarly analyses as well, like Robin Wood's 'Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan' and Carol Clover's 'Men, Women and Chainsaws.'

This is my area of semi-expertise, so I do tend to go on about it. Oh: small point - "The Hills Have Eyes" came out in '77, before Reagan's time.

I love that type of stuff, but never usually seek it out.