Right Rubbish

How many truly great horror movies are there? Three? Five? Maybe ten? Surely there are more than that. But there’s also a ton of garbage. And I know it’s all subjective. Part of the fun is that we’re allowed to enjoy camp and cheese. We can even tolerate ineptitude, as long as some aspect of our interest is satisfied. And with horror, those interests can vary quite a lot.

For example, I’m not the world’s biggest slasher movie fan, which removes a whole wing of the house. When I was a kid, I was into creature features. Something with an actual monster in it. Werewolf, vampire, zombie, irradiated mutant insect, giant kaiju. Rubber suit or stop-motion monstrosity, I was all about the beasties.

My tastes began to evolve when I saw David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), which I’d place among the best horror movies by any accounting. It’s very much a monster flick, based on an earlier science-fiction horror film from 1958. But Cronenberg took the premise into far more disturbing territory, using body horror to explore aging and the emotional toll of degenerative illness. The result is a film that works on several levels without sacrificing the visceral pleasures of the genre.

Having awakened to new cinematic and thematic possibilities, I eventually gravitated toward psychological horror, ranging from lurid entertainments like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? to artsy fare like Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf. Of course, psychological and supernatural horror often overlap, and I’ve been known to enjoy that combination, both onscreen and in literature.

But back to the idea that there are only ten good horror movies. It’s obviously an exaggeration. I do think, however, that the genre’s economics may have something to do with the enormous disparity between quantity and quality. Horror is relatively cheap to make, and for the most part, that’s always been the case. Studios occasionally throw enormous amounts of money at it, with mixed results. Generally speaking, though, a horror movie doesn’t need to earn Avengers numbers to justify its existence.

Those economics also make horror fertile ground for cinematic insurgents. New generations of filmmakers frequently emerge through the genre because the barriers to entry are comparatively low. Francis Ford Coppola made Dementia 13 (1963) for Roger Corman early in his career. James Cameron also came through the Corman filmmaking factory, alongside numerous others who would eventually reshape American cinema.

Today, there are filmmakers like Curry Barker, whose Obsession showed what could be accomplished on a baby budget, and Kane Parsons, whose Backrooms videos became the basis for a commercially successful feature film. Jane Schoenbrun employs horror conventions in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow, and the new Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma to explore psychological and emotional territory the mainstream typically ignores.

A cheaply produced horror movie can attract a distributor willing to pay millions for the rights. Some pay comparative peanuts. Either way, this encourages experimentation, but also guarantees a steady supply of disposable product. The result is an enormous glut of movies competing for attention in a streaming-centric marketplace where new titles arrive constantly.

I have my favorite horror movies, and I could probably give you a top five. But there are variables. An American Werewolf in London will always be on the list, no matter how you slice it. Whether the list is three, five, or ten, The Fly will be there too. Other movies might move up or down, appear or disappear, depending on when you ask.

Horror fans tend to be a forgiving bunch. We can tolerate shortcomings in this genre that might be dealbreakers elsewhere. A film can have lousy dialogue, wooden acting, or an absurd premise and still deliver something worthwhile. Sometimes the atmosphere is enough. It could also be the concept, a single great performance, the scares, or even the sheer ludicrousness.

And yet, after all these years of watching horror, there are still only a handful I’d consider truly great. If I’m really feeling like starting a fight, I could say the same thing about heavy metal.

But that’s a rant for another time.