American horror, not terror

Going to the cinema to see an American horror movie may be a novelty.

"Meghan" was released in the mainland last week, breaking the pre-sales, first-day and single-day box office records of horror films in the past three years. As early as January this year, the film was popular before it was released, the live-action Megan frequently appeared on the North American variety show or talk show stage, and the embarrassing dance video gained countless fans on social platforms, with more than 20 million views of related videos on YouTube and more than 1 billion views of videos on Tiktok.

In overseas markets, "Megan" has also become a rare horror film hit after its release, with a global box office of more than $170 million and a freshness rating of 93% on Rotten Tomatoes.

However, the domestic audience's acceptance of the film is not high, the Douban score of "Meghan" is just 6.0 points, except for the first weekend 3 days, the current single-day box office is difficult to exceed 1.5 million yuan. The common impression of many viewers is: "It's not too scary, but it's funny." ”

If "American horror" is regarded as a collective concept, "not scary" must not be a feature of this collection. Hollywood has also contributed many horror film series such as "Moonlight Panic" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", and single-piece classics such as "The Shining" and "Cabin in the Woods" are also numerous, all of which have frightened countless audiences in their respective periods.

In addition to the reduction of horror itself, "Meghan" is also a concentrated embodiment of another trend - the horror theme is just a "bottle", and any wine can be filled in it.

In the time dimension, "Ghost Doll" and "Horror Doll" have had films such as "Ghost Doll Returns to the Soul" and "Annabelle", but the ancient "Ghost Doll Returns to the Soul" is to let the murderer's soul enter the doll, and "Megan" has been changed to artificial intelligence with the times; In the genre dimension, themes such as "artificial intelligence awakening" or "robots with consciousness" seem old for science fiction films, but they seem to play new tricks when integrated into horror films, and they also reflect one of the most popular topics of the moment, ChatGPT.

It should be said that "horror" is no longer the goal pursued by contemporary horror films represented by "Megan".

Go to "more terrifying"

Generally speaking, American horror films focus more on presenting visual spectacle and rendering bloody violence. If we talk about "American horror", a standard story template is a group of people who come to an isolated lake/manor/island, encounter mystical creations such as monsters/ghosts/murderers, and finally defeat the enemy after the death of some companions.

But even if there are more recognized style commonalities, and even the formation of template routines, "American horror" is not actually an independent concept, it is often mentioned when compared with other horror styles.

In the past, comparisons with "Japanese" and "Thai" were common, but in recent years, several rounds of discussions about "Chinese horror" have often included American horror in comparisons. Because the characteristics of the object of comparison are more prominent and concentrated, "American style" has been semi-forcibly summarized. American horror films themselves have a relatively long history of development and change, and on a fairly long time scale, horror films are meant to be scary.

Many research literature will mention a sentence: "The history of horror movies is as old as the history of movies themselves." But it's really mass-produced as a genre, starting with Hollywood's "golden age" in the 2030s. At that time, Universal Pictures produced a large number of films with monsters as a source of horror, involving Dracula, Frankenstein, Mummies, etc., and another company Lei Dianhua's "King Kong" has the classic picture of "a giant orangutan climbing to the top of the Empire State Building versus a combat plane", which is both the originator of monster movies and the beginning of the commercial era of horror films.

"King Kong"

It is worth mentioning that the original intention of the monsters at that time was different from the pursuit of realism or science fiction that the audience is accustomed to today, like the first generation of King Kong, his face is hideous, and his appearance and behavior are creepy. In addition, Universal Monsters have since become valuable assets of the company and have been remade many times. The original single-day box office record holder of horror films surpassed by "Meghan", "The Invisible Man", released in 2020, came from that "monster horror" period.

The horror trend does not appear in a vacuum, but is affected by a specific industrial environment. In the 30s, with the advancement of the film industry, feature films became the mainstream of movies, and the "nickel cinema" that used to be all over the American cities and could watch a movie for 5 cents gradually disappeared. However, during the Great Depression, Hollywood in order to stimulate civilian consumption under the condition of rising ticket prices, the implementation of the "two-film system", that is, two films bundled play, A-grade films are large-scale productions, the box office is divided by the film party and the theater, B-grade films are bought out of 7-80,000 US dollars each.

Horror films are one of the main forces of B-grade films, undertaking the historical mission of attracting more audiences with intuitive stimulation and even "saving cinemas".

After World War II, affected by the nuclear threat, the space struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, horror began to combine with science fiction, and the source of horror began to be dominated by aliens, plants, insects, etc., such as Howard Hawkes' "Under the Magic Star", Don Seeger's "Outer Magic Flower" and so on. By the 60s, some famous directors began to get rid of the supernatural interest in horror movies, and turned to human psychopathy to scare people, pursuing psychological horror rather than visual horror, such as Hitchcock's "Psycho", Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" and so on.

During the same period, there was internal polarization in horror films. There are both Hitchcock and Polanski's famous directors on the big screen, and B-grade cult films focusing on midnight small theaters. In fact, horror films face a set of eternal contradictions: they must rely on horror to attract people, but they can't be too scary to scare people away.

Small-budget horror films that take the late-night cinema, videotape, or disc route are completely unrestricted by popular preferences. They serve a niche curiosity audience that prefers horror experiences.

Some marketing methods at the time of release can illustrate the goals of such horror films. For example, William Cassel's "Journey of Horror" was released to buy insurance for each audience at the screening, and nurses and hearses were equipped at the entrance of the theater, and Herschel Lewis provided the audience with vomit bags when "The Holy Feast of Blood" was released.

George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968, is considered the dividing line between Hollywood's "traditional horror" and "postmodern horror". Prior to this, non-human monsters were the most common elements of terror, according to the aesthetic theory of American scholar Noel Carroll, the psychological basis behind this is that "the core elements of horror aesthetics include fear and disgust", and dirty, disgusting is the main shaping direction of non-human monsters.

"Night of the Living Dead"

At the same time, the film shows some naked aesthetic orientations that advocate violence and blood, and deny reason, and the story can not go to the fixed ending of "humans defeat monsters", but can end in chaos and disorder. The postmodern wave catalyzed, coupled with videotapes and discs providing a market, the horror of American horror films reached its peak.

In the 70s and 80s of the last century, the "Four Great Murderers of Film History" were born. They are Freddy in the "Ghost Street" series, Human-skinned in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, Myers in the "Moonlight Panic" series, and Jason in the "Friday the Thirteenth" series. Screaming pictures such as human dismemberment are not uncommon in such horror films, and these works still conform to the dual trigger mechanism of "fear + nausea", and the degree is greater than ever.

Before the millennium, American horror films collected many horror elements such as monsters, ghosts, science fiction, and perversions, so that in the 90s, there were some self-ironic and humorous movies, such as the "Scream" series. Whether it is a widely circulated "psychological horror" or a small-cost work, it is also continuing to explore, the former such as "The Shining", the latter such as "Blair the Witch" in a pseudo-documentary style.

But just as the perverted murderer turned into the mild-mannered Dr. Hannibal in the "Silence of the Lambs" series, as tapes and discs died out in the late 90s, the market soil for supporting "absolute horror" was gone, and horror films finally went from the shadows of the night to the sun.

Dr. Hannibal in The Silence of the Lambs

"Not terrifying", maybe it's right

There are some "fates" that have been gradually established in development, and they are still applicable to today's horror films.

For example, horror films tend to have low production costs, but if they sell well in exchange for high profits, such as "Chainsaw" at a cost of $1.2 million, it hit a box office of $103 million.

Low-cost "Chainsaw"

However, the disc market is shrinking, and the source of income for horror films must be mainly based on theaters, and the natural niche attribute of horror, as well as the difficult to grasp horror scale, still limit the upper limit of horror films. According to a statistic StephenFollows.com the website, among the movies released in American theaters from 2010 to 2018, horror films have a shorter release period than feature films, comedy films, romance movies, action movies, etc., and are the shortest in various genres, less than 2.5 weeks.

Expanding the audience through genre fusion has become inevitable. It is more common to integrate with suspense, and the horror type that originally pursued intuitive stimulation was combined with stories with high intelligence, reversal, and brainburning, and the pleasure was not discounted but doubled. And the psychological horror films and suspense genres that have survived from the big screen have a higher phase.

"The Sixth Sense", with an IMDB rating of 8.2, gives a huge twist at the end, and although it also has a ghost element, the story progresses without horror as a selling point. This kind of "pseudo-horror film" that attracts the audience with suspense and narrative layers has gradually become a fixed route, and films such as "Fatal ID", "Groundhog Day" and "Happy Death Day" have emerged one after another. Even "Chainsaw" actually creates a profit miracle through a succession of suspense settings, and to some extent, "horror" does not dominate its genre composition.

Sci-fi, monster-type horror films can be regarded as both genre fusion and a genre return, in any case, these two theme elements are naturally included in horror films as regulars. "A Quiet Place", which has achieved more than 200 million box office in China, has terrifying monsters, of course, there are not many monster shots, whether the monster is the protagonist has now become the standard for distinguishing such and horror films and monster films, and "Invisible Man" without many "invisible man" shots in the whole film is an extreme case.

Monsters in A Quiet Place

According to Lighthouse Professional Edition, among the American horror films introduced in China, the box office champion is "Alien: Contract", and the third runner-up is "Alien Awakening", their sci-fi attributes are thicker than horror, and there are more "like" horror films like "Megan", but they are evaluated by the audience as "originally sci-fi/comedy". The commonality reflected in these films is that horror "degenerates" into an element, or can serve as an embellishment for other types of films.

In addition to genre integration, there is also cultural integration. At the end of the last century, American horror films had fallen into the bottleneck of self-breakthrough, and even the sign of bottleneck - anti-genre films. In the context of globalization, the strength of horror films in other countries has allowed Hollywood to learn from it repeatedly, so the American version of "Midnight Bell" and the American version of "Ghost Call" remade from Japan, and the American version of "Ghost Shadow" remade from Thailand have been born.

Remakes are inevitably unsatisfactory, and a typical case of seamless integration of Eastern and Western cultures is one person - Wen Ziren, who still carries the banner of "horror film master". In 2013, "The Conjuring" created a box office record of $320 million at a cost of $20 million, and by 2021, "The Conjuring Universe" has 8 films in 8 years, including derivative works such as "Annabelle" that are self-contained 3 parts, Wen Ziren has obviously found a commercial solution to the current horror film.

"The Conjuring" "Annabelle 2"

One of the main reasons why Wen Ziren's films can "renew life" horror films is to integrate the oriental horror style into Western-style horror films based on dolls, exorcisms, haunted houses and other elements.

In terms of specific techniques, he is good at shaping objects in daily life into inanimate horror images, such as the doll Billy in "Dead Silence" and Annabelle from "The Conjuring". Associating fear from inanimate objects is a typical oriental thinking, such as red lanterns and paper money that are often used to create "Chinese horror aesthetics". This is very different from the creatures and criminals that are loved in the American tradition.

In addition, Wen Ziren's works like to take family affection as the main axis of the film. Not only does this kind of thinking belong to the Eastern tradition, but it is easy for the audience to feel greater fear from the contrast by turning the home that symbolizes warmth and peace into a place where horror stories occur. After joining the oriental horror style, Wen Ziren's success in the United States has to be attributed to the inherent nature of "terror".

There is a saying that has existed for a long time that "watching horror movies is the safest adventure", it doesn't really matter what kind of culture the horror is created, all horror elements point to the human "escape" instinct, this ancient animal instinct is engraved in everyone's DNA, it is the same as the animal instinct represented by pornography, violent elements, etc., and can always hit people's hearts in the simplest and most brutal way.

After watching it for a long time, the films of "horror for horror's sake" and "the more terrifying the better" have never shined on the big screen for the public.

Horror experiences will always be needed, but better suited as a concoction. Only terror cannot go far.