Bring Back Horror!

Where have the days of the good old gothic horror movies gone? Whether it was Christopher Lee majestically stalking his prey as Dracula or Vincent Price being depressingly obsessed with death in a good old Edgar Allen Poe story such as the Fall of the House of Usher? Why do we have to modernise movies now and soften them so they can be sold to teens?

As a child growing up (and ironically part of this growing up was as a teenager) I remember being able to go to bed and turn on the TV and more often than not you could find a horror movie on.  This was the days of the VHS were you could record more than one of these movies on one tape and have a whole collection rather than just one DVD per movie.  I’ve lost count how many times I’ve seen all Lee’s vampire movies and even the ones without him (my personal one without Lee of course being The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires).  We seem to lack the ability to make movies like that anymore.

I know it’s arguable that The Wolfman was a return to the gothic horror, but I’d counter argue that’s just a modern horror with an almost Photoshop style gothic world coloured over it.  You can take that movie and almost say “that’s out of American Werewolf in London” or “that almost feels like The Howling”, even though I did LIKE it, it felt like a facsimile of a true werewolf movie.  If you want a good gothic style werewolf movie hunt down The Curse of the Werewolf, another movie the Wolfman stole off.  Oliver Reed plays the tragic Lycanthropicly cursed character perfectly, but then again I doubt you could show me a bad Reed performance.

My point is we lack good old fashioned horror nowadays.  They don’t even show Hammer Horror movies on TV anymore which is a crime itself.  We have hundreds of channels on TV now, we even have horror channels so why can’t they show them? Look at Sci Fi (SyFy) now in the UK.  Almost every night they seem to reshow American Werewolf in London, it’s an awesome movie BUT why not replace repeats of movies with some classic horror? I bet it would be easy to really if they wanted to.

As much as I applaud the fact the Hammer Company is back making movies I find it a shame that they aren’t helping the cause of the old Hammer movies.  Clean them up, get them on Blu Ray! (if the new Hammer company have rights to the movies of course).  I know I for one would buy a Blu Ray collection of all the old movies, even if it did cost a lot.

The same goes for Roger Corman’s Poe movies with Vincent Price of course.  I would love Blu Ray releases of these movies so I could add them to my collection.  Even if it was just Fall of the House of Usher, Pit and the Pendulum and Masque of the Red Death they would take pride of place in my collection.  They were always my favourites and I miss that they’ve not been shown for years.

My guess is that the lowly horror geek who wants to see these movies shown again is a little spec of dust on the wave of the “WE WANT TWILIGHT” voices that seem to control horror now.  I’m just an old school fan who has to sit back and watch horror become all glittery and fluffy so that teens can be easily manipulated into buying into crap.  So yes, BRING BACK REAL HORROR! That’s what I say.