Horror movies have always been an exciting escape for many people. A good scare gets the blood pumping and the adrenaline flowing. But have movies been getting scarier in 2023? If they are, why, and what are the reasons we as a society require bigger and more elaborate frights?
M3GAN released earlier this year to help once again reinvent the horror genre and proceeded to switch things up with its R-rated Peacock streaming release. So how has M3GAN and other recent films displayed the transition of early Hollywood horror to today?
Horror Back in the Day
Horror movies have been a staple of theater for over 100 years. They first peaked during the days of the Universal monster boom when audiences were introduced to Dracula, The Wolfman, and Frankenstein’s monster. The black-and-white movies came courtesy of folktales and classic novels at a time when Hollywood pulled quite a bit of content from preexisting properties.
However, when we look back at this time, the horror seems quaint. There are lingering fears, but the stories feel less compelling. It's as if the bones are there, but the script was never brought to a point where true scares were allowed to exist. Yet at the time, they were considered scary.
The difference is that, at the time, people were getting more of their scares from the radio. Audio dramas and late-night frights were still very much engrained in the culture. Sound design was at a point where a person could imagine their greatest fears lurking around every corner. Radio brought just enough narrative for people to fill the gaps.
The Beginning of True Cinematic Horror
As people began to move away from their radios, film became the true language of the culture. However, the one thing that remained constant was that people were still reading books. One director who took this to heart was Alfred Hitchcock, whose seminal film Psycho was groundbreaking in its version of horror and led the director to buy all copies of the book it was based on in an effort to keep the twists and turns a secret for as long as possible. However, this movie, much like his others, was more about the suspense and the thrills, although the jump scares were now very much ingrained.
A film that continued this tradition was Rosemary’s Baby. Also based on a novel, this film kept the suspense and creep factor while adding in sex and supernatural elements. It came out at a time when cinema was ushering in a more visceral form of scares, including the move from the Hitchcockian style of you-thought-you-saw to the more realistic you-definitely-just-saw visuals. This culminated in The Exorcist in 1973. Many see this film as the beginning of modern horror. A fascinating story that crept up on the viewer until presenting all-out bedlam and disgusting moments that caused many people to walk out. But many people stuck around. This led to an even more visceral form of horror cinema.
The Slashers of Cinema
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As the 70s continued, horror became more grindhouse, with gory scenes and buckets of blood. People were getting torn apart by chainsaws, and psycho slashers were everywhere. This was when the public became truly divided over scary movies. Horror became less about the creeping terror and more about the creativity of the kills. It was also a point where teenagers and scream queens ruled the roost. Demonic possession was starting to fall out of fashion but was replaced by the truly psychotic guy down the street or the monster that cannot die. Halloween took the silent killer and made the jump scare a pivotal part of the movie. You never knew where the killer was, and he was slow and menacing. It was also a continuation of the zombie films of the late 60s.
As movies entered what people consider a more modern era, we began seeing scares based on gross-out body horror with the Hellraiser series, Scanners, and the beginning of the Evil Dead series. These movies were far from the tame, psychological features of only a few decades before, but the audiences flocked to the theaters to watch. This was also a time when VHS started becoming more prevalent, and people were able to start getting their hands on more underground horror from directors that may not have previously received attention.
M3GAN and Current Horror
That puts us in the last ten to twenty years. We’ve seen a definite rise in the variety of horror with a variety of different sub-genres existing beside each other. This does not include remakes and reboots of the classics. But with all of these, movies have remained at a level of frightening without letting up. The term “torture porn” rose to prominence with films like Saw and Hostel, but these films often included psychological aspects alongside things like xenophobia and the consequences of a guilty society.
But are they scarier? In many cases, they are. With the rating systems in the US and a lack of rating systems in other countries, everything seems within reason. Not that they are suitable for everyone, but that they are accepted as long as people meet the age requirement. However, even then, streaming services such as Shudder have opened the doors to horror directors looking to top even their most successful works.
Movies like M3GAN are an example of a preexisting genre that has been pushed to new levels of fear based on new issues. In the case of M3GAN, you have similar themes to the Child’s Play movies (scary doll), but the demonic possession has been replaced by the fear of AI and technology. However, the gore has been updated, and the creepy factor has entered the full uncanny valley, a place where M3GAN can go that Chucky, as a small doll, could not.
The other piece that has become obvious in the past ten or so years is the need for the camera to never turn away. Where Hitchcock will slowly pan away from someone being strangled, Eli Roth is happy to show a person having their Achilles tendon not only sliced but the aftermath of them attempting to walk away. Horrifying.
The entire industry has come to a place where people are no longer asked to use their imaginations. In fact, the days of radio and sound design are long gone, replaced by absolute visuals where turning away is no longer an option. Imagination may be scarier than reality, but the reality of the current horror movie climate is on a definite path to being more frightening.