With the success of fright films like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer amongst the youngsters, classic horror movies just don't seem to register with today's youth.  It's enough to make a even a young classic monster flick fan wonder...

By NATE YAPP

(Note:  Nate Yapp, crypt-keeper of Classic Horror, herein shares with us his feelings about the lack of classic monster movie support evident in "Generation Whatever."  Although we certainly endorse Nate's views, one person, John-John, doesn't and has posted his rebuttal here.  Check it out!  Nate says he'll wring John-John's neck if he can ever get his hands on the little pest.) 

One time I was riding to the local mall with some friends, and we had the "new kid" along, just to show her what their was to do in our Midwestern city (answer: not much). We were going back and forth on what some of our favorite things were, hitting such hot topics as books, stores, and music (Douglas Adams, Border's Books, and Aerosmith, respectively).

Finally, the discussion turned to movies. The new girl, let's call her Elsa, asked me what I liked first. Well, as any regular reader of this webzine would respond, I told her that I loved horror films. She absolutely beamed, and start talking up the genre: "Oh, rilly? I just loooved I Know What You Did Last Summer. Freddy Prinze, Jr. is, like, soooo hot."

I had to calm her down and qualify my statement. I said I loved older horror. Again, Elsa's face lit up like a pumpkin on Halloween. "I know, the older stuff is so much better. I didn't want to say anything, cuz I didn't wanna sound stupid or something. So, how many Friday The 13th movies do you own? I have, like, the whole series at home."

Obviously, I had a problem on my hands. I again had to clarify. I explained that I loved the old 30s black-and-whites, and that my favorite horror film was Frankenstein. Elsa scrunched up her face. "Oh my gawd. You like that boring old stuff. Weirdo."

This only illustrates the problem: I can't get a date. No, wait, that's not the problem. The problem is that this latest generation has little appreciation for the classics, and those who do love their Universals and Hammers must face living in the closet or being viewed with the same social distaste as Dungeons and Dragons players and Perry Como fanatics.

Now, I'm not some person who lived through the Great Depression and sold apples on the street just to be able to afford a third viewing of The Black Cat, and to heck with food and shelter! Nor am I a Baby Boomer who yearns for the old Friday Fright Movie Nights or the incredibly cool yet ridiculous horror hosts. I am something else.

I am a member of the generation with no name, despite feeble attempts by Newsweek and Time to call us something unimaginative like "Gen Y." I am old enough to vote, but not old enough to have seen Poltergeist when it first came out. To put it bluntly, I am the same age as the people I've come to complain about. I am 18 years old, and I'm embarrassed.

The reason for my humiliation is that my generation loves horror films, eats them up at the box office and at their local Blockbuster, but has no appreciation for the genre's past, or its roots. They jabber on about Wes Craven's latest, or the new Halloween flick, while they forget about James Whale's greatest and the best Wolf Man movie.

Case in point--The Blair Witch Project. While I enjoyed the movie and thought it was spooky, I was annoyed by the constant blathering of this entirely original concept of never showing the monster, and creating "suggestive scares." Of course, they've never heard of a guy named Val Lewton who just happened to do it 10 times better back in the 40s, but who cares about that old stuff anyway?

I guess it all goes back to Elsa's comment about how old movies are "boring." I suppose I can see where she's coming from. There's no gratuitous blood, no gratuitous nudity, there's no Smashmouth or Marilyn Manson on the soundtrack, and you can't decipher what's going to happen next through key music changes and tell-tale close-up shots. The editing doesn't jump around so much that each scene is practically a subliminal message in itself.

Don't get me wrong. I loved Scream. I enjoyed Dracula 2000. I even thought Friday The 13th was "not horrible." The past 20 years have not been bad for horror as a whole. It's just all half a genre apart from the days of Karloff, Lugosi, Chaney, Cushing, and Lee. It's still horror, of course, it's just not the same kind of terror that our fathers and grandfathers had.

My problem is not with the movies themselves. It's with the constant insistence to disregard decades of chills and call anything from Night Of The Living Dead to Friday The 13th the beginning of horror. For nearly every horror film made in the past 23 years has a counterpart that it borrowed or blatantly stole from. Friday The 13th took elements from Mario Bava's Bay Of Blood. Carpenter lifted heavily from Dario Argento when he made Halloween. The Hollow Man was a violence-plus remake of The Invisible Man.

However, MTV has killed our attention spans and the nightly news has desensitized us. I've watched people squirming through Phantasm because it takes "too long" to get to the point. Teenagers want their scares quick, easy, and painless, and Hollywood is more than happy to provide. Many modern horror films, from Halloween on up, have placed a major murder (often the most grisly one) right up front, so that nobody has to wait for their gore.

A Nightmare On Elm Street 2 director Jack Sholder recalled in an interview how test audiences were giving his movie middling scores, and how he struggled to place the first important killing further up, so that people could be satisfied early, instead of having the suspense built gradually. Later, after he had accomplished this task with a little creative editing, Sholder was pleased to find that scores were up.

Now, I realize that Sholder was in the business of making a commercially viable movie, a quickie follow-up to a successful terrorfest, but it's a shame to see a man more subservient to the needs of a testing audience than to making a good movie (of course, from seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, I don't think any amount of editing could have saved it).

So, Hollywood is pandering to the low attention spans and the show-it-all attitudes of the teen population, and the teens don't know any better because Blockbuster stocks roughly 5 horror movies made before 1970, and flicks that are even close to approaching the style of the older classics are called "indie" and "art" and only shown in small university theaters. How do we remedy this?

There is a twofold method. One is a call to the teenagers, and one is call to Hollywood, for only with cooperation from both ends can we find a way to make the teen population aware.

I think my generation is, for the most part, going to be stuck where they are. We need to move on to the next set of victims...uh, future film fans. That's how I became a classic horror nut. After a nasty experience with a too-gory film when I was 8, my mother introduced The Wolf Man to me, and we became fast friends, and later his buddies Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy joined us, and the distant cousins at Hammer popped in a few years later.

I am doing my part in turn. I baby-sit occasionally for a group of young ones whose idea of classic film is Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie. So, every once and a while, I bring in some of the easier stuff from the Thirties and Forties...and they love it. They thought Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was hilarious. House Of Frankenstein was their new favorite movie of the week (quickly supplanted by Mulan, but hey...it's Disney). My one misstep was showing The Wolf Man to the three-year-old. It deeply affected him, and he had nightmares for the rest of the weekend. However, the boys now clamor to have me baby-sit because I bring over the "cool old movies." I'm moving into comedies now; Bringing Up Baby was "awesome."

However, for this indoctrination to stick, Hollywood must provide continued reinforcement. Blockbuster must provide a wide and diverse selection of Universal, Hammer, and AIP films (and while they're at it, they should separate Science Fiction from Action. I'm sorry, but 2001: A Space Odyssey does not belong in the same section as Rambo). Studios must start understanding that, if allowed, audiences will use their brain and think about the movies they're watching. American Beauty proved that. Now let's apply the same idea to horror.

Actually, Hollywood hasn't been doing a horrible job. 1999 provided several movies that a classic horror nut could love. Sleepy Hollow was a fantastic homage to Hammer. The Sixth Sense and A Stir Of Echoes both provided some great psychological horror, and some truly chilling moments. Even The Mummy, despite being an overblown Indiana Jones adventure, gave Universal enough reason to put its major horror classics on DVD and in new video releases. Of course, the Industry (as, I'm told, insiders like to call it) has had a relapse with the dismal 2000, and 2001 has hardly any horror films at all.

Well, unfortunately, there will always be people like Elsa who simply don't understand that the present is a result of the past, and that the contributions of the 1930s are just (if not more) relevant than those of the 1980s and the 1990s. However, we can always try to get more weirdos to join our ranks. An increase in demand for classic horror can never be a bad thing...right?

Right, Nick!  In fact, an increase in demand for classic horror might even elevate the quality of the fright films being produced now.  And may I add...what?  Oh, go away, John-John!  All right, all right...again, you can read a certain person's rebuttal here.

Article copyright © Nate Yapp.  Visit his Website.

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