Making A Horrific Comeback

Back in the 80s it was names like Michael Myers, Freddy Kruger, and Jason Vorhees that were the face of the horror genre. The original Halloween was shot on such a small budget that John Carpenter himself composed the chilling theme for the film and is to date one of the scariest themes ever composed. Wes Craven launched a franchise called A Nightmare on Elm Street that helped jump start New Line Cinema and turn it into a serious contending movie studio. Unfortunately things began to go from horror to comedy in the years that followed, and in the 90s a new face of horror emerged from the movie ‘Scream’, he was known as Ghostaface. Scream achieved success and is credited to giving new wind to the horror genre. With its success came the idea of bringing back the old faces of horror, and with that we got movies like Jason X, Freddy vs Jason, Halloween Resurrection, and a few rebooted and continuation of franchises like ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ , Scream 4, Rob Zombie’s take on ‘Halloween’, and more recently Poltergeist starring Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Jared Harris. Poltergeist wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anything fresh.

In the last few years there have been a only a handful of horror films who have been worthy enough to truly give off a good scare, movies like The Babadook come to mind. The name itself sounds a bit silly and it doesn’t produce a constant amount of cheap jump scares, it gave us more of a psychological scare. It doesn’t rely on the shaky camera and is not told from the found footage point of view which has become overly popular since 1999's ‘The Blair Witch Project’ and it has been thrown into the mainstream even more by horror franchise films like ‘Paranormal Activity’. It’s horror films like The Babadook that are going to bring back the story element of horror films.

So what’s wrong with found footage horror movies, or found footage movies in general? Nothing really, it’s all a matter of preference, but sometimes in the found footage film it can feel like we’re seeing all of the regular things that people do (boring) and not enough story telling. ‘It Follows’ is another example of good horror storytelling without all the non-found footage style, of course the whole score and an 80s vibe also helped give it a good nostalgic feel. ‘It Follows’ is also a bit of funny movie title, but it works (pun intended). The next big horror film to come to the big screen will be ‘The Gallows’ and it will have plenty of shaky cam and be found footage style. Will it be any scary? The trailer below makes it out to be very promising. Check it out below and let us know if you think it will be scarier than Poltergeist. Horror is making a comeback, or maybe its been back but without a face to the genre.