Contrary to popular belief, humans of the 19th century had familiarity with the difference between art and reality. They knew that the latter was not in black and white or 16 frames per second, so no one was actually scared of L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1886), no one actually thought an image of a train slowing down meant their death was imminent.
So were Georges Méliès films like The Haunted Castle (1886) or A Nightmare (1886) the first horror films? Perhaps asking where horror movies started is the wrong question. The history of horror films is not the history of films that have scared audiences. It's the history of films being marketed on the promise of scaring audiences. Carl Laemmle sold The Phantom of the Opera (1925) with the promise of Lon Chaney's make-up effects being so startling that "in order not to destroy your surprise, it is positively stipulated in his contract NO advance pictures of him are to be revealed". Phantom of the Opera (1942) was sold on "superb spectacle and romance" with "a chorus of a hundred voices, a ballet of a hundred dancers, a cast of a thousand". It won Academy Awards and scared no one. There is nothing innate or natural about horror, as a genre, as a marketing tactic, as a self-selected way of life for fans. Our appetites form from what we consume. What we consume is formed by the industry chasing our appetites. The wheel keeps turning, a feedback loop.
And this wheel kept turning for a century, with audiences chasing scares, studios chasing audiences. Dracula (1931) begat The Mummy (1932) begat Bram Stoker's Dracula (1974) begat Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). Throughout the 20th century people tried to sell all sorts of wild shit as scary, from cannibal babies (It's Alive [1974]) to hermaphroditic alien Svengalis (God Told Me To [1976]) to killer yogurt (The Stuff [1985]). And that was just one guy.
In 1999 the wheel was quite wobbly, at least in America. The sensation around Scream (1996) created a wave of hip, post-modern whodunnit slasher flicks but a mere three years later that wave had receded and nothing had taken it's place. Hollywood knew there was massive money to be made in scaring audiences, but was flailing when it came to getting butts in seats. Many American horror films of the year pitched themselves on the startling effects and superb spectacle being one and the same, taking more inspiration from Jurassic Park (1993) than Scream (1996). Movies like Deep Blue Sea (1999), Lake Placid (1999), The Haunting (1999), The Mummy (1999), The Faculty (1999), Virus (1999), Sleepy Hollow (1999), The Haunting of Hill House (1999) and Bats (1999), all promise experiences where famous actors are pit against lavish cutting-edge special effects. Or, in the case of Bats (1999), special effects. In the quaint 60's, these films' trailers seem to tell us, we used to have to pretend to be scared of the unknown, of whatever malevolent force was pounding behind that door in The Haunting (1963). Now it is the 90's and it's time to throw the door open and gaze unblinkingly at what waits on the other side. Fun fact: The Haunting (1999) cost 80 million dollars and made 91 million dollars while The Blair Witch Project (1999), a film that is metaphysically committed to not showing the audience what's behind the door, cost 60 thousand dollars and made 140 million dollars.
Horror wasn't only being gentrified at the multiplex. Just as the 90's witnessed mini-major independent studio Miramax consolidate and commoditize the world of independent film, Blockbuster had begun to do the same to the world of home video. Video store horror sections were once a democratizing force that let no-budget amateurs compete against critically acclaimed auteurs. Sledgehammer (1983) could proudly sit next to The Shining (1980), with customers deciding which they'd rather spend their Friday night with. By 1999 Blockbuster Video had devastated their local homespun competition and with it their eclectic and quirky selection: why carry movies like Pink Flamingos (1972), Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980), Fitzcarraldo (1982) or Natural Born Killers (1994) when you can stock 4 copies of Big Daddy (1999) instead? By 1999 many of the genre's direct-to-video releases were no longer idiosyncratic personal cheapies and instead assembly line entries in tired franchises: Candyman 3: Day of the Dead (1999), From Dusk Til Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999), From Dusk Til Dawn 3: Hangman's Daughter (1999), Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies (1999), Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return (1999), Warlock 3: The End of Innocence (1999). Even The Fear (1995), that crappy slasher with Morty the killer wooden mannequin got a sequel: The Fear 2: Resurrection (1999). It was an age of needless sequels with meaningless subtitles. Or, in the case of theatrical release The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), the needless sequel was the meaningless subtitle.
If America was in a horror rut, Japan was going through an explosion. And while shockwaves from Ring (1998), Japan's highest grossing film of the year, wouldn't be felt in America until 2002, the effect locally was immediate and immense producing Ring 2 (1999) (technically the fourth Ring film), Shikoku (1999), Hypnosis (1999), Gemini (1999) and Tomie: Another Face (1999). Not all of these films took inspiration from Hideo Nakata's tale of a cursed videotape but they would shortly all be lumped together and sold internationally under the heading of "J-Horror", a movement of bleak supernatural tales that would dominate the genre for the early years of the 21st century. Almost as important, and standing apart from it's contemporaries, was Audition (1999) which introduced the world to a different kind of explosion, a dirty bomb named Takashi Miike. If "J-Horror" was to be eventually replaced by the equally reductive "Torture Porn", Miike had mastered them both as early as 1999.
There were other little pockets of activity in the genre. Irrational fears of a new millennium spurred a handful of satanic shockers like End of Days (1999), Stigmata (1999), and The Ninth Gate (1999). Satan also fueled the stoner horror-comedy flop-turned-cult-classic (is there any other kind of flop these days?) Idle Hands (1999). David DeCoteau, a name you will be seeing a lot in this column, was at his peak productivity making five films that year including Retro Puppetmaster (1999), The Totem (1999), Witchhouse (1999) and the truly unhinged The Killer Eye (1999). The 90's may have been unkind to dwindling indie shit-stirrers Troma Entertainment, but their foray into the crowded post-modern slasher movement produced Terror Firmer (1999), one of the studio's high water marks. And if the world of no-budget shot-on-video horror films had largely collapsed no one told the nations of Germany (Violent Shit III: Infantry of Doom [1999] and Das Komabrutale Duell [1999] prove that the Deutscher love of mindless splatter is endemic) or New Jersey (W.A.V.E. Productions' Tina Krause had quite a year starring in the spectacular Eaten Alive: A Tasteful Revenge [1999] and writing & directing Limbo [1999]).
There are always outliers as well. How do you classify a runaway smash like The Sixth Sense (1999), which combined the scares of The Changeling (1980) with the weepy melodrama of Touched By An Angel so well that M. Night Shyamalan became a permanent fixture of our cinematic lives? Stir of Echoes (1999) aimed for the same effect with far more mediocre results because, well, Koepp. Antonia Bird's Ravenous (1999) is a brilliant frontier cannibal film that, in an era of "clever" pop-culture references instead aims for Noam Chomsky. And Outer Space (1999), avant-garde auteur Peter Tscherkassky's brutal and jarring manipulation of footage from the notorious ghost-assault movie The Entity (1982), may or may not be a horror flick but it scares the shit out of me.
Fortunes rise and fall, trends bubble up and dissolve into vapor: these patterns are easy to recognize with hindsight. The wheel never stops turning. With Silver Screams I intend to peer back into the 21st century's horror films and ask if where we are can be explained by where we came from. Or, barring that, make a bunch of lame weed jokes about Leprechaun in the Hood (2000).
Next on Silver Screams...Leprechaun in the Hood.
Top Grossing Horror Films of 1999 (Domestic)
1. The Sixth Sense
2. The Mummy
3. The Blair Witch Project
4. Sleepy Hollow
5. The Haunting
6. Deep Blue Sea
7. End of Days
8. Stigmata
9. House on Haunted Hill
10. Lake Placid
My Favorite Horror Films of 1999
1. The Blair Witch Project
2. Outer Space
3. Ravenous
4. Audition
5. The Sixth Sense
6. Eaten Alive: A Tasteful Revenge
7. The Faculty
8. Terror Firmer
9. The Mummy
10. Limbo