Schlock Will Eat Itself

This Friday will see the release of the movie Prom Night. If you're over 35, you may remember a 1980 release with that name starring Jamie Lee Curtis in another of her scream queen roles. She'd probably rather you not spread that around, though.

Last year, Rob Zombie continued his desperate quest to convince America he's as awful at making movies as he is at making music by remaking 1978's Halloween. Also starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and again, please keep that just amongst ourselves. The original starred her, that is. She'd gathered a little movieland clout by the time 2007 rolled around.

Coming up later this year, April Fool's Day, a remake of the 1986 slasher movie which did not star Jamie Lee Curtis. She was busy making the just-as-horrible non-horror film Perfect. Also on tap, Train, a remake of 1980's Terror Train, which starred -- yikes! Jamie Lee Curtis!

On tap for 2009? A remake of Friday the 13th, a movie which already has a bunch of remakes disguised by Roman numerals as sequels. Also upcoming is a remake of 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street, and let's not forget the 2006 remake of the 1977 movie The Hills Have Eyes. And no, I'm not linking any of this crap.

As a genre, horror movies have been largely unblemished by ideas, and horror directors and writers have discovered their own version of Clearasil in the form of remakes. We now have a movie genre that offers derivatives of its own derivative plots. In calculus we would call the second derivative of function f and write it f''(x), where x=the intersection of the set of standard tissue-thin characters with the set of even thinner recycled plots as bounded by the sadism of the filmmakers, figured as creativity approaches zero.

A horror moviemaker has two options open to get a reaction from the audience: Terrify or shock. Shocks are pretty easy -- a sudden movement, a sudden loud noise or other camera or sound gimmick and you can startle almost anybody. Throw lots of gore on the screen or show some incredibly violent act and you've got a gross-out, which is a kind of shock. Almost every horror film made today relies on startling shocks instead of actual frightening.

Older horror movies, made before the improved special effects and devolved moral sensibility of the modern-day director and writer, couldn't shock so easily. Production codes forbade explicit gore or actual cruel acts, and what they didn't prohibit was sometimes not possible with the effects technology of the time. A director had to build suspense first before triggering the shock effect or fear because he or she couldn't take the shortcut of throwing a few gallons of red karo syrup around the set or show some poor teenage girl whimpering while a man with a knife brutally killed her.

Most of what's new today as a part of horror film -- ahem -- creativity involves precisely those shortcuts. Deviancy has been defined far enough down that a filmmaker can create scenes of violence, brutality and sadism and be explicit with them -- there have been four Saw movies, after all. Somebody still gives Eli Roth something to do that doesn't involve soaping windows at a car wash.

Movie remakes are nothing new. The Ten Commandments, the movie that helped launch Charlton Heston as a major box-office star, was a remake of Cecil B. DeMille's own silent film of 1923. Most of the time they don't measure up, but sometimes they do. Which may be one reason horror remakes are so much worse than their already-dismal predecessors -- when you're failing to measure up to something that's already about as low as might be imagined, you're pretty much guaranteed to suck.