Don't Be So Dark
In post-Columbine Hollywood, the horror genre is up for grabs.
      by Sarah Kendzior

"Post-Columbine." That phrase, and its alternatives -- "after Littleton", "in the wake of the shooting" -- have been used by wary executives to the point that they become rote, summoning less a feeling of sensitivity to tragedy than a desire to be obsequiously inoffensive at all costs. To say the entertainment industry, particularly genre entertainment, was a scapegoat for the tragedy that cost the lives of over a dozen individuals at Columbine High School last year would be incorrect. A scapegoat is defined as one who is forced to bear the blame of others, but post-Columbine Hollywood simply volunteered. No one coerced network executives to postpone Buffy episodes, change Killing Mrs. Tingle to Teaching Mrs. Tingle, or cancel the Crow TV series. Nobody had time to. Each was a preemptive move, one based on the dual assumptions that people certainly wouldn't have anything better to do than picket a TV show or movie, and that entertainment holds such importance that it is the catalyst for crime. And with this self-proclaimed importance and guilt, so went the horror genre.

1999 was a great year for horror movies, and it was also a very dark one. The subjects of the year's most popular films included a tearful child who communicated with dead people, a crazed horseman who lopped off the townspeople's heads, and a bunch of egocentric teenagers who confront a faceless fear in the woods. All three films were released in the months after Columbine, and two were tinged by the tragedy: Sleepy Hollow had a well-publicized bout with the Motion Picture Association of America resulting in the censorship of one of their posters, which showed, oh so shockingly, a severed head; and The Sixth Sense received a small amount of criticism for daring to portray a child in a horrifying situation. Blair Witch escaped any real controversy of this nature because no one expected it to do well in the first place. The fact that it did do well, along with so many other 1999 horror films, speaks volumes of moviegoers' interest in dark subject matter. And when audiences are interested, movie studios will respond in kind, you would assume. I mean, that's why there are nine Friday the 13th movies, right? (Hey, I said they had to be interested, not appreciative.)

Thankfully, the MPAA knew better than to cut this shot from American Psycho.

Well, not really. With the exception of The Cell and Final Destination -- New Line, the House That Freddy Built, seems a rare hold-out -- I haven't really seen a good horror film this year, at least nothing rivaling the glut of good genre that was 1999. It's a sad day when the film I'm looking forward to seeing the most this year is the big-screen re-release of The Exorcist, and it's even sadder that the trailer for this 1973 film was censored by the MPAA and denied distribution in the year 2000. Come to think of it, another really good horror movie, American Psycho, was also forced to make edits by the MPAA for reasons not of violence, but of "tone". (Apparently, the prostitutes didn't look "happy" enough being exploited by Christian Bale's serial killer protagonist.) Meanwhile, the darkest movie of 2000, Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, was recently slapped with an NC-17, the same rating that ultimately resulted in a trimmed-down American Psycho. Of course, the best horror movie I've seen all year, Peter Filardi's moving, wonderful Ricky 6, hasn't even been rated by the MPAA, because no studio will touch the film with a ten-foot pole. Ricky 6's subject matter? The fact-based story of an alienated upper-class teenager who turns to Satanism and ultimately, murder. How surprising, eh? (More information about Ricky 6 can be found in the September Fangoria or at http://www.ricky6.com.)

On the surface, American Psycho, Requiem for a Dream, and The Exorcist have little in common -- one's a satire about an urban yuppie turned serial killer, one's a depressing tale of drugged-out Brooklynites, and one is, well, The Exorcist -- but they all share one quality that basically signals their death knoll in the MPAA's eyes. That is, they're good. They're smart. And they are dark. They are willing to confront painful subject matter in a way that is neither glib nor stylized, and all three come to some pretty uncomfortable conclusions about human nature in the end. Things don't always turn out okay. The bad guys sometimes win. Evil exists. And even the sweetest surfaces -- a handsome young stock broker, a sweet old lady, a cute little girl -- can get pretty damn ugly inside. These are classic takes on the horror genre, a genre that has been long known for examining social ills -- whether 1950s conformity in The Twilight Zone or rampant consumerism in 1979's Dawn of the Dead -- through supernatural metaphor. But this is post-Columbine, and that kind of thought isn't going to fly anymore. In fact, no kind of thought is.

Here's what does get by at the MPAA: graphic shots of male genitalia, including a distended pair of testicles. Semen shooting to the ceiling. Not to mention brutal murders, flagrant drug use, and that old standby, gore -- all in the name of comedy, of course. Many in the media were surprised that Scary Movie escaped the watchful eye of the people who censored Eyes Wide Shut's orgy scene, but they shouldn't have been. After all, Scary Movie is comedy. Not razor-sharp satire like American Psycho, but something, well, not so sharp. Something a little dull, a bit stupid actually, and oh, let's cut to the chase: bad. But for the MPAA, or for a studio like Miramax, who avoid controversy like they did Dogma, the thoughtful Kevin Smith film they dumped (post-Columbine, natch), this is the ideal horror movie. A spoof of the horror genre is good, they assume, because it nullifies the importance of that genre altogether. And so films that function as sort of a cinematic superego -- American Psycho's withering take on corporate materialism, for example, or Ricky 6's look at teen depression -- are not just ignored, they're mocked.

This Sleepy Hollow poster replaced the one deemed "too scary" by the MPAA.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't think Scary Movie set out to do something that profound -- they were out to spoof the Scream series, and to make a lot of money. But the fact that this effusively marketed movie slipped past the MPAA unscathed, despite being the most graphic and gross film in recently memory, speaks volumes of what is acceptable, post-Columbine. A scare with a smile, a penis through an ear -- what's the difference, it's all just so gleefully trivial and inane. It doesn't help that the horror films that do try to take themselves seriously -- The Hollow Man, Bless the Child, The St. Francisville Experiment -- are so damn bad, and bad in the same way: thoughtless and derivative. There is almost no originality in horror movies anymore, not just because directors are afraid to explore dark subject matter, but because they could end up like Peter Filardi, without a distributor, or like Mary Harron, with a film bearing unwanted, unwarranted editing. You gotta admit it, it's probably easier to be the Wayans brothers.

Of course, horror movies don't have it nearly as bad as horror TV does at the moment. We did just get to see The Cell, after all. But TV, where the rules of censorship are harsher and the investment often much greater... TV's got it bad. And so here's where I'm going to do the unthinkable. Here's where 11th Hour is going to rank on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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