Word: horrors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...something else attracted critics and the first knowing viewers to Blair Witch, and that is the film's bold sense of withholding. Horror, after all, is a genre that gravitates to the lurid edge. The jaded audience wants more--more teasing sex, more gross-out gore. So directors make their young minor characters play the sin-and-repent game: you have sex, then you die horribly. Makeup maestros like Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead) dream up (or nightmare up) grotesque faces and prostheses. Screeching violins italicize the killer's abrupt entrance as he raises his knife behind the fair...
...limited to one conk on the head. There's no slashing--except of everything extraneous to the creation of psychological disorder. Blair Witch tweaks Mies van der Rohe's dictum into "Less is morbid" and makes the viewer collaborate actively in both the scenario and the scariness. Says Sanchez: "Horror is something that works in the viewer's mind, not really onscreen...
...archetype of these renegade fright fests is Night of the Living Dead, George Romero's 1968 horror film about ghouls who rise from the grave to devour the living. Made by a bunch of unknowns in Pittsburgh, Pa., for a piddling $114,000, the film has a grainy look, cheesy acting and a preposterous premise. But the characters we root for are eliminated with grisly dispatch, and the claustrophobic tension mounts so ruthlessly that many early filmgoers had to leave the theater midway--in shock. Sequels and imitators notwithstanding, it remains the most terrifying movie ever made...
Poverty-row chillers were a staple in the 1950s, with a string of lower-than-lowbrow horror movies by such directors as Roger Corman (Not of This Earth) and William Castle (The Tingler), films that were enjoyable in direct proportion to our sense that they were made without adult supervision. The tradition was carried on by filmmakers like David Cronenberg; though later celebrated for the high-toned horror of The Fly and Dead Ringers, he never matched the shocks of his early, amateurish offerings such as Rabid and They Came from Within. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, directed by Tobe...
...problem with renegade horror, of course, is that it quickly gets domesticated and respectable. Directors such as Hooper and Raimi went on to big budgets and big stars. Horror villains such as Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger became kids' Halloween costumes. The Blair Witch will undoubtedly reappear in a sequel. But nothing will match those first bone-chilling, totally unexpected nights in the woods...