where will the next big movie fright come from?
With only sloppy sequels and murderous zombies on the horizon, Stuart Heritage faces the scary prospect that Hollywood has lost its horror mojoEvery five years for the last decade and a half, a film has appeared out of nowhere and effortlessly dictated the next half-decade of horror. In October 1999, for instance, The Blair Witch Project managed to wrestle the genre back from the gibbering self-awareness of the Scream years, scaring audiences stiff with little more than wobbly footage of trees and snot.
Then, a decade ago, Saw came along and set the agenda for torture porn by throwing a grisly series of moral conundrums – and Ben from Lost – into the mix. And then, after that, Paranormal Activity’s widest theatrical release in 2009 turned everything upside down once again, by scaling things back and focusing on anticipation over overt scares.
And now it’s Halloween 2014. Another five years have passed. By rights, we should be throwing ourselves at the feet of a new gamechanger; a film that’s lurched out of left-field, reacted to the predominant horror tropes of the day, made buckets of cash and set us off on a new path of terror. Except, that clearly hasn’t happened.
The biggest horror film of the moment is Ouija, a knackered, critically reviled Hasbro franchise that half-heartedly hits all the beats you’d expect it to and then limps away again. That’s it. That’s the big Halloween release. Aside from that, this year’s horror output has been a soggy collection of sequels (The Purge: Anarchy), spin-offs (Annabelle), rip-offs (As Above, So Below), and reboots so graspingly unnecessary that they make your teeth hurt to even think about them (Dracula Untold and I, Frankenstein). Not only has there been no gamechanger, there’s barely even been an original idea.
Admittedly, the big films of 1999, 2004 and 2009 all wore out their welcomes especially quickly. Blair Witch essentially destroyed its own future in 2000 with Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, a rush-released conventional horror so uniformly reviled that its own writers used the DVD commentary to berate it at every turn.
By upping the gore level of the previous instalment at the expense of such things as basic logic, the Saw sequels quickly descended into such irrelevance that they’re currently best known for inspiring a quite-good Thorpe Park rollercoaster. And, even though Paranormal Activity’s formula – 40 minutes of static shots of corridors followed by a vase falling over – was barely enough to sustain two films, that hasn’t stopped the producers from churning out sequel after sequel to increasingly jaded reactions.
New horror film Ouija Dispiriting … new horror film Ouija, produced by Michael Bay. Photograph: Matt Kennedy/AP
In spite of all this, the kernel of each idea has been strong enough to force an entire genre down a new avenue. They’re each the product of an enterprising film-maker with a big idea that outstrips their budget or experience. And there doesn’t seem to be another one of these on the horizon.
The horror scene of 2014 looks a lot like that of 1994, with producers just idly spinning their wheels until the next big idea comes along. Then, as now, audiences had to make do with sequels like Leprechaun 2 and Watchers 3, or films that had post-colon subtitles such as Lord of the Dead (Phantasm 3) or Raven Dance (Mirror, Mirror 2) where their plots should be.
But let’s not give up hope completely. It might just be the case that a film from 2014’s fallow crop is simply setting the scene for the next big thing. That happened 20 years ago, too – though disappointing, the Nightmare on Elm Street sequel Wes Craven’s New Nightmare demonstrated fleeting metatextual touches that laid the foundation for the phenomenon that was 1996’s Scream. So, perhaps the future of horror is simply hiding in plain sight. Who knows, maybe in 2016 we’ll be able to look back and see that the future of horror movies was Zombeavers all along.
_poster.jpg)
Exodus: Gods and Kings 
No Good Deed (2014)
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
_poster.jpg)
The Hobbit
Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) 
