When I first made the choice to become a film student back in 2002 it was after I saw Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil, the film cost roughly $40 million to make, made about sixty five million at the US box office and has managed to spawn three sequels.
As I sat there watching this so called adaption of a video game, I was livid. I grew up playing the games, I knew what the series was about, and what made it special. The movie a poor combination of Alice in Wonderland, The Matrix, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Dawn of the Dead (original), Aliens, and one or two nods of the actual video games.
There was no Chris, Jill, Wesker, Sencer Mansion, Tyrant, Hunters, or even mention of the cannibalistic murders in Raccoon City. The movie had the T-Virus, zombies, zombie dogs, and the Lickers.
Instead of the STARS team, we got Milla Jovovich staring like a clueless mannequin performing uninteresting poorly conceived Matrixstunts, Michelle Rodriguez scowling at the camera for seventy five minutes hoping you don’t notice she forgot her lines, a supporting cast of characters that are about as smart as a peice of shit with a pair of glasses, and unconvincingly flat special effects.
This was listed as a horror movie. There wasn’t any horror here, or suspense or anything. Then I noticed a pattern that has been repeated in US horror movies, the “generic horror” rule is that in the first thirty minutes of a movie you have one cheap thrill that involves the killer/monster, and two cheap thrills that are fake outs by the comic relief character, and then there are at least two other cheap thrills from the killer/monster, two or three short suspense scenes, and a chase scene or two before the monster/killer dies, comes back for a second and is killed again, happy ending which turns out to be a cheap twist that just creates a headache. Rinse, lather, repeat. This is the formula we’ve been watching forever.
There is more to horror that what I’ve listed even though its all there is on the market, its 2010 and Hollywood is just now barely starting to ditch this dead formula. But since it always generates a profit, it still lingers.
I’ve come to terms that as a writer and a very abstract person, that my ideas for what makes horror, horror are simple, but they aren’t bad.
Rather than keeping all my ideas to myself I figured I might as well share them (not all of them, but most) as well as my theories of what makes horror work.
A lot of these ideas are what created the animated Two Minutes of Terror series I did in 2009, and I managed to prove that most of my concepts do indeed work.
Many of my ideas and concepts are a combination of American and Asian horror. Both are unique in their own ways, combining certain elements of the two can indeed create a unique and terrifying experience.
If you have any questions feel free to just post a response here.
