Why is Horror Dis-respected So Much?
It seems to be that critics these days cannot judge a movie on what it tries to be, they instead walk into a cinema or sit on their comfortable sofa with a DVD and enter every single movie with a total blank canvas and judge it by what they see and not what is trying to be told.
If any critic is going to sit and watch a typical slasher movie, and be judging it the same way they would judge say, American Beauty or Citizen Kane, then the movie has lost the battle before it has even had its opening credits.
It sounds like a terribly patronising thing to say, but you really do have to lower your standards on horror movies. There are certain things that people are looking for in a standard slasher movie in order to enjoy it. You are going to look for creative kills, tension, lighting to set the mood, a memorable villain etc. Its not like you will be watching the movie, trying to see the point of it all, some sort of moral value, political under-tones or some character feeling of absolution by the end of the movie.
The very original Halloween which got a nice fresh 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, is nothing more than a man in a man who seemingly cannot be killed, wandering town on Halloween and killing babysitters. The actual story didn't come around until the sequels, yet Halloween was praised for its tension, cinematography and so on. It was not the very first of its kind although arguably the most memorable at the time and to this day. It didn't have any morals or satire about its time, yet anything even similar to it these days will be slated for the exact reason that it has no meaning.
Movies like Halloween 6 are praised by fans for having the best atmosphere since the original. Michael is more threatening than ever, lighting and sound are great, the death scenes are not disappointing, the soundtrack is perfectly decent and although a bit confusing for the average viewer, it took great balls to try and do something very different with the series. It's a risk that didn't really pay off, but it TRIED to make sense of a story that was basically going nowhere. How many times could we have Michael wandering around killing the friends of a family member only to survive at the end after he has apparently been destroyed for good.
Take movies like Saw, although the sequels turned into over the top gore and a little bit of story and took the M. Night Shaymalan approach of throwing a contrived twist at the end of every movie...the original Saw was pretty good - the twist was good, the violence was actually not over the top and left a lot to your imagination. It had a story, yet once again critics bash the movie and I can't help but feel that this is simply because it is a horror movie which seems to be a joke in Hollywood these days. Yes you will get good horror movies from abroad. Yes, they are well made, look scary as hell and are very artistic, but you can tell that they had made the decision to make it an artistic horror and not just entertaining.
Horror is getting too much disrespect these days, from critics, filmmakers and the general public. They do not seem to understand that without horror, the limitations of cinema would not be as good as they are. Without horror we would not be able to show a child die in a movie in such a way that Assault on Precinct 13 opened to us.
We would not have a great amount of violence on screen at all, it would probably have followed the whole 'scream before the camera cuts away' thing. This kind of genre is a stepping stone in cinema censorship issues and had a very artistic opening for those who work with prosthetics and make-up. I do not think a lot of people will agree with me, and I'm sure, like myself, you will probably just make your own mind up about a movie. But a lot of people sadly do follow critics and their opinions and movies which are getting less than what they deserve in the first place are going to suffer for it.
