Things are looking up for horror movies.

I don't normally do posts like this but I think I will from now on whenever I feel strongly enough about something that I think needs written down. I was a massive fan of horror and horror themed movies (comedies and action movies with an obvious horror influence) when I was a teenager. I must have had 200-300 horror movies on DVD and this was when DVDs were still expensive, we're talking at least £13 for a crappy low budget movie. I was mostly a fan of the classic horrors like Dracula, Nosferatu, Witchfinder General, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho etc... Every time I got paid I would go out and buy at least five more DVDs.

Horror movies where a big passion for me and as a teenager all I wanted to do was make movies of my own. However I completely lost interest in watching horrors during the mid 2000s. I was so fed up with seeing the same old un-scary crap over and over again. By the mid 00s most horror movies were all about the jump scares. No scary monster or ghost, no atmosphere and no decent story. That was the norm for horror movies in the 2000s. Jump-scares aren't even a true scare, all it is is a human reacting to a loud noise. Play back the scariest jump-scares you know without the sound on, almost all of the time you don't jump. It's not fear at all, it's just your body getting ready to rescue a child or run away. I hate any movie that concentrates on the jump scares as I find them boring as hell. The other reason I grew to hate the genre I once loved was the amount of 'twists' in the movies. This is still way over used today. I mean it is extremely disappointing and a little soul destroying to invest so much in a story just to find out it was all a dream in the end. I do think, however, that there where some gems poking out through the mounds of crap in the form of Jeepers Creepers, 28 Days Later, Paranormal Activity, The Mist, Quarantine, The Grudge and Creep there's very few Hollywood movies amongst the best horror movies of the last 15 years.

The -obviously- main reason Hollywood made so many crap horror movies in the past 10/15 years is the same reason people hate Hollywood as an entity: the studios didn't care what they were making as long as it made them as much money as possible in the first few months of it's release. It's the same reason every other genre of movie got stale. The greedy dicks in charge seen one movie become successful so they made everyone make soulless rip-offs of that movie. It was the same with remakes. This is why the decreasing DVD and Blu-ray sales resulting in cuts in actors wages is a good thing. This not only gives smaller movies the same chance as the larger ones (as people are more likely to watch it on Netflix, Sky Store or Amazon Prime than they are to buy it) and it stops actors thinking of movies as nothing more than a paycheck. It also means there's a lot more cases of directors having more control again which is always a good thing. Another thing that's happening more often these days is that people who want to make movies for the passion and love of it are making more movies. A perfect example for the horror genre is Rob Zombie who's love of old school horror has seen him make quite a few movies worth putting on top 10 best lists.

The other reason things are looking up for all genres but horror in particular is the fact the people that make the movies have stopped giving so much time to critics and started to listen to the public. Since the rapid growth of social media and websites that allow me and you to vote on our favourite movies, it has been proven time and time again that in the majority of cases the general public want the opposite of what the critics say we want. This has resulted in the amount of jump-scares in movies being dramatically reduced and we've almost done away with movies that end with 'it was all a dream' or 'it was all in a mad-man's head' all together. The first modern horror I gave a chance was Woman In Black which was fantastic as it went back to the traditional way of telling a ghost story. This is what we want from a horror, to be shitting ourselves at every innocent shadow or every time there's a gust of wind. 

I hope we continue to have horrors like The Conjuring, Dead Silence and Insidious where the jump scares are few and the creepiness factor is so high you shit yourself every time the camera pans past a door, window... well every time the camera pans... or doesn't... basically all the damn time.