The trailer for the new Martin Scorsese directed thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer and Jackie Earle Haley is available here.
Wow, we might actually get a truly GOOD horror film, something I really don't think we've had (with the POSSIBLE exception of the first Saw) since Hitchcock died.
You think there hasn't been a good horror film since Hitchcock with the exception of the first Saw film? Wow. You must've missed alot of great cinema over the years or have very specific tastes and definitions of what horror is.
Name me a good horror film. I probably don't like it. Even the "classics" of horror (friday the 13th, Alien, Predator, The Haunting, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc) were mediocre at best.
Well if you consider Alien mediocre you probably wouldn't consider Halloween, Exorcist, Dawn of the Dead, Night of the living Dead, Shining, The Evil Dead, Braindead, Carrie, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Frailty, Jaws, Suspiria, The Thing, The Omen, Phantasm, Don't Look Now, Drag Me To Hell or the Hitcher to be any good and that's without mentioning any of the fantastic J-horror films to have come out recently or really delving into Giallo.
If you think all those are mediocre at best then you've really missed out on enjoying not just some of the best horror films but some of the best films of the past 40 years. Fascinating.
Of that list I liked the Shining, and had forgot about it. HOWEVER, The Shining came out in 1980, the year Hitchcock died. Therefore, my vague wording makes me not wrong. Hooray!
However, I'm not a fan of the rest of that list. Horror for the sake of being scary isn't "good" by my books. The exorcist would probably come closest to my "good films" list from the one you wrote out, but there was something I couldn't place about it that I just didn't like. Something about how little I cared about the characters and their misfortunes, despite being a devout Catholic and generally being against priest death and Satan.
Some of those on your list are flat out surprising that you'd consider them good. Jaws? The Omen? Drag Me To Hell? Granted, I've never seen Drag Me To Hell, but perhaps that was because it looked and was reported as an absolute piece of garbage.
I counter-counter your final paragraph though, by saying that limiting yourself to the general junk that most of Hollywood churns out, you've missed out on a lot of films that, although maybe not being as friendly to the mass markets, are a good deal better than a lot of what's on your list. A film that I'd put on the level of The Shining, but much less easily understood or "entertaining" is Peter Weir's Picnic and Hanging Rock, a horror of types made in Australia to little fanfare (or so I'm told, I'm born in '88). Peter Weir's more entertaining, but less interesting (to me at least) film The Truman Show is and was much more well known and popular, despite not necessarily being better than Picnic at Hanging Rock.
The same has been true of other directors. The Godfather is a fantastic film, and the trilogy is one of the most important works of popular film today. However, Coppola's less famous film, The Conversation, is, in my opinion, superior to the Godfather films. It's much more complicated, gets inside the head of the main character, and is altogether unsettling in a way the Godfather trilogy never even approached.
Anyway, I suppose taste in film is subjective. You can like what you want, and I'll keep on liking what I want.
Jaws is an amazing film that was brilliantly made by a group of people who knew their craft. There is not a thing wrong with that movie. The suspense, the performances, the pacing, every element of that film is spot on. The Omen is not quite in the same league but there are som many classic moments and bits of that film that set the precedent for horror for a long time afterwards. Drag me to hell was the best horror film I've seen in nearly 20 years and was expertly made by someone who knows how to make a movie. All reports I saw about it were extremely possitive so I don't know where you read that it was garbage.
I assume by "general junk that Hollywood churns out" you are referring specifically to Jaws as that is the only film on that list that was a "Hollywood" movie and all the others were either low budget or independently made films by people who were largely ignored by Hollywood. I don't really know what point you were making with Picnic at Hanging Rock, it's a good film and is hardly overlooked, regularly making critics best film lists.
I also have no idea where you got the idea that I would limit myself exclusively to those films as being my favourite films. I was merely extolling the virtues of those horror films as a selection of great horror films of the past 40 years as that is what you were railling against. I really don't know where you got the impression that I limit myself to the general junk of Hollywood.
I'll give you pacing in jaws, but a lot of what you just said was specifically why I don't like the film. It's perfect from a technical standpoint. It's well made, but uninteresting in its form for the most part (at least to me). I'd liken it to a less charming, giant-shark themed Casablanca. It's got no flaws, but it's got very little that goes above and beyond. I LIKE both movies, but I don't necessarily consider them GOOD.
Maybe I should alter my terminology. I should really not be using "good" when I'm really closer to looking for "great." There are tons of "good" movies around that come out on a regular basis, but very few can really be called great. I ENJOYED watching Jaws, Alien, Predator, The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Omen, etc, but I didn't come out thinking that it was anything MORE than good. It's for that reason that I don't consider them "some of the best films of the last 40 years," and horror as a genre hasn't really impressed me in a long time.
I was nodding mostly to jaws with the Hollywood comment, but also in part to the concept of a Hollywood film as a formula being re-used repeatedly with different scenarios and still being lapped up by audiences. The modern horror film has had little variation within itself, and I'm continually losing faith in it as time goes on.
You mention that Drag Me to Hell was fantastic, and now that I'm looking into some reviews and the synopsis it's actually looking alright. However, the trailers I'd seen made it look like yet another straightforward cookie-cutter horror flick where something supernatural and dark happens, and then whatever small few it's happening to have to stop it with no assistance at all. The centerpiece of the entire trailer was a fly flying up a woman's nose. It looked lame as fuck, I'm not a big enough fan of Raimi to excuse such a stupid looking concept (or at least the concept the trailers presented), and a few of my friends who saw it and knew at least a decent amount about film thought it was garbage. At this point in modern horror, that's enough for me to decide not to spend money to see it, and I didn't bother looking further into it. I might take a look now that I've done a bit of searching and heard such praise from you, but my point is that the current cookie-cutter, low-creativity standards of horror have driven me away from a potential diamond in the rough such as Drag Me to Hell.
My point with Hanging Rock is not that it wasn't well received by critics. Critics at large seem to be alright at picking up on a good movie. My point is that it's overlooked by the majority of the target audience. Since seeing Hanging Rock a couple years ago I've met ZERO people outside of a film studies classroom that even knew what it was, much less had seen it or had comments about it. A more modern example might be 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, the 2007 Palme D'Or winner about an abortion in 1980's communist Romania. It's an incredible film, and I'd count it as my one of my absolute favourites of all time, even though it's so recent. Critics obviously liked it, and the Cannes audience did as well. However, although it's a truly important film in regards to its form, its content and its message, and is PROBABLY a film that would make money in an American market (were it in English, of course), it's also one that almost nobody this side of the ocean has ever heard of, simply because it's a foreign film.
As to your last paragraph, if that's all true I apologize for throwing that insult your way. I misinterpreted.
EDIT: Because I think I recall that Film_Geek really likes Casablanca, I'll mention that I do indeed love the movie, but it owes almost all of my love to the final scene of the film, which largely breaks from its classic Hollywood "invisible" form.
