“Today’s horror movie directors are deliberately trying to bait the censor,” says the horror cinema guru Alan Jones. “They actually want to come up with a film that forces you to go, ‘God, you won’t believe your eyes! It’s so shocking!’ ” Jones, the author of The Rough Guide to Horror Movies, and the co-director of the FrightFest horror movie festival, which opens in London this Friday, adds
that it’s nonetheless increasingly difficult for modern horror directors such as Eli Roth (Hostel) or Christopher Smith (Creep) to produce censor-baiting shockers in our increasingly sophisticated viewing culture. “It’s mostly seen as fantasy violence now, isn’t it? It’s a good night out, rather than something that’s going to be harmful to the audience.”
Horror, of course, has traditionally provided fertile hunting grounds for the scissor-happy censor. From garish X-rated action in Hammer films such as The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974) to banned 1970s horror classics such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Last House on the Left, right through to the mid- 1980s “video nasty” hit list (Zombie Flesh Eaters, et al), horror movies have always provided the moral guardians with ample evidence of cinema’s rank depravity.
Sometime in the mid-1990s, however, around the time of the phenomenally successful Scream series, high-profile horror movies were tamed by the power of irony. Everything was a joke, a gag, a reference, and a parody of a parody. Films such as Scream, Urban Legend, and I Know What You Did Last Summer, though often needlessly violent, were protected from the wrath of the censor by a layer of brazen irony. “Geddit?” they said. And we did. Elsewhere, the mainstream was beguiled by the sappy spiritualist horror in The Sixth Sense and the kiddie-friendly occultism of Harry Potter.
It’s the legacy of this same safe censor-friendly horror that Roth and his ilk, and indeed many of the film-makers at FrightFest, are trying to combat with their darker, more provocative fare (see Adam Green’s slasher shocker Hatchet). “The old tricks that used to shock us don’t work any more,” says Jones. “So these directors are going back to that feeling of dread created by films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
They’re always trying to push the envelope of what’s acceptable with each movie. And I, for one, am really pleased by that.”
The Zone Horror FrightFest, Odeon West End, Leicester Square (www.odeon.co.uk 0871 2244007 www.frightfest.co.uk), Aug 25-28