Today’s show kicks off a month-long Halloween theme on Sounds of Cinema. 2019 concludes this decade and one of the extraordinary phenomena in movies these past ten years has been an exceptional crop of horror titles. Horror is presently enjoying a moment in quality and quantity that the genre hasn’t seen since the 1970s and 80s. This program will highlight some of the trends in the genre and some of the outstanding titles of the 2010s.
The End of Body Horror and Found Footage
The horror films of the early 2010s continued and resolved the themes that had dominated the genre in the previous decade. Horror works in cycles and starting in the mid-2000s the genre had been devoted to extreme body horror and torture movies following the success of Saw and Hostel. This came to an end in 2010 but filmmakers seemingly saved the strangest and most excessive titles for last, chief among them A Serbian Film, which easily ranks among the most disturbing movies ever made. Also released that year were Saw 3-D, The Human Centipede and the remake of I Spit on Your Grave. These films, but especially A Serbian Film, took the torture subgenre to its ultimate conclusion.
The other horror trend that traced back to the previous decade and concluded in the 2010s was found footage. Like body horror, the found footage format is still with us but there was a glut of these films following the blockbuster success of Paranormal Activity. A lot of these movies were awful but a few stood out and used the found footage gimmick effectively such as Paranormal Activity 3, The Sacrament, Creep, The Bay, and Unfriended.
Remakes and New Horror Franchises
Remakes are a staple of Hollywood’s release slate. For better or worse, the horror genre led the way and in the 2000s virtually every major property of the 1970s and 80s was remade. This continued into the 2010s but the remakes of this decade were exceptional or at least innovative. The remakes of Maniac, Child’s Play, Evil Dead, Fright Night, and Suspiria paid homage to the original films while offering new visions and fresh takes.
While some of the old standbys were remade, horror filmmakers of the 2010s also created new franchises. The biggest of these was The Conjuring. Two titular installments have been released so far but The Conjuring created its own cinematic universe through spinoff films like The Curse of La Llorona and the Annabelle series. While the spinoffs weren’t very good they did make money and pointed a new way forward for sequelization. The Conjuring was overseen by James Wan who also supervised the Insidious films, another popular supernatural franchise of the 2010s which featured some of the same actors as The Conjuring. The Purge was also successfully franchised. Starting from a modest debut film, The Purge had success with progressively better sequels and a keen feel for the political zeitgeist. The Purge has now moved to television.
The Influence of John Carpenter
One of the major influences on horror filmmakers of the 2010s was the work of John Carpenter. The filmmaker had been prolific throughout the 1970s and 80s with such varied titles as The Fog, Big Trouble in Little China, and Starman. Carpenter’s last directorial feature was 2010’s The Ward after which he turned to music and released a few albums. However, Carpenter’s filmography influenced many filmmakers of the 2010s. The Purge series echoed Escape From New York and Assault on Precinct 13, The Hateful Eight and It Chapter Two contained obvious homages to The Thing, and It Follows channeled the original Halloween. Carpenter served as a producer on the 2018 Halloween sequel and he co-wrote the music with Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies.
Fan Documentaries
One of the curious outgrowths adjacent to the horror genre throughout the 2010s has been the advent of independent, fan driven documentaries about popular film franchises. These were distinctly different from the studio-produced featurettes usually found on DVDs. The documentaries were feature length examinations that catalogued the behind-the-scenes stories and the legacies of these films. Because they were made outside the studio and usually long after the productions had wrapped, these filmmakers were free to be honest and address the flaws or disappointments of these moves as well as dig into the details that fans obsess over. The two best examples of these documentaries were Never Sleep Again and Crystal Lake Memories which recorded the making of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series, respectively. These documentaries were extraordinary not only in their depth but also in their production values, humor, and creative visuals. Also notable were 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene and the Return of the Living Dead documentary More Brains as well as Room 237 about the various interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and the Jaws documentary The Shark is Still Working.
The Quantity and the Quality of 2010s Horror
The horror of the 2010s really took off in about 2013. That year gave us Byzantium, Escape from Tomorrow, The Purge, Stoker, The Last Exorcism, and the remake of The Evil Dead. Throughout the rest of the decade came an incredible run of horror movies including Annihilation, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, The Babadook, Cam, Don’t Breathe, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Green Inferno, Hereditary, It, It Follows, Krampus, Life After Beth, Midsommar, Mother!, The Neon Demon, Only Lovers Left Alive, A Quiet Place, Raw, The Sacrament, Under the Shadow, Us, and The Witch among many others. These movies were varied with some reworking classic horror tropes like vampires and slashers but many others presenting original concepts. And it is in that way that the horror boom of the 2010s was distinct from the horror periods of the 1930s and 40s or the 1970s and 80s. The movies of the 1930s and 40s repurposed folklore and Victorian literature like Frankenstein and Dracula while the movies of the 1970s and 80s like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween centered upon slasher villains. The horror films of the 2010s were primarily about ambitious ideas presented in original scenarios.
This decade’s horror films were also characterized by cleverness and irreverence and a willingness to reinvent or lampoon horror tropes. Consider the zombie films The Girl with All the Gifts and Cooties or the psycho killer tales Creep and The Voices. There were also outright silly movies like What We Do in the Shadows and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil and politically loaded fare like Get Out and The Purge. We also got a lot of anthology films like The ABCs of Death and V/H/S and XX which allowed for experimentation and the horror of the 2010s was an especially fertile genre in which filmmakers were able to be both narratively and technically innovative. The sum has been an extraordinarily rich period in horror filmmaking the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades.
The New Masters of Horror
Previous high points in the horror genre were driven by filmmakers who the press (and publicists) dubbed “masters of horror” such as John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven, Dario Argento, Clive Barker, and George A. Romero. These names have been the standard bearers for the genre for about two generations of horror audiences. In the 2010s many of these filmmakers died or faded away and new horror filmmakers made their mark to become the new “masters of horror.” Among the most successful of these new horror masters was also one of the most unexpected: Jordan Peele. He was best known for comedy but with Get Out and Us Peele refashioned himself into one of the horror genre’s most interesting voices. Peele’s rise was assisted by Blumhouse, a production studio specializing in horror films, and its CEO Jason Blum has become one of the most important figures not only in horror but in American cinema at the moment. James Wan had established himself in the 2000s with Saw but his career really took off in the 2010s as he oversaw both the Conjuring and Insidious franchises. Elijah Wood is best known to audiences as an actor but Wood turned to producing through his production company SpectreVision whose credits included Mandy, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and Open Windows. Other filmmakers to emerge throughout this decade include Ti West, director of The House of the Devil and The Sacrament, John Krasinski of A Quiet Place, the Soska Sisters who co-directed American Mary, and Ari Aster had one of the most impressive directorial debuts of recent years with Hereditary which he followed with Midsommar. Whether these filmmakers are here to stay is yet to be seen but together they have reinvigorated the horror film and made the 2010s one of the most exciting periods in the history of the genre.