Horror Film Glut Lays Bare Sept. 11 Myth

The Hills Have Eyes is the latest in a long line of sadistic slasher films that have been released over the past few years. It’s a remake, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre before it. Films such as The Devil’s Rejects, Saw and its sequels, High Tension, Hostel, and many, many others continue to be cranked out by the studios. Most of these films are crap, yet they keep making money and finding audiences. What can I say? People like seeing other people killed in gruesome and creative ways.

There’s nothing remarkable about horror films——except that only a few years ago, dozens of America’s top media critics were convinced that Americans would turn away from horror and violence.

A common media myth that sprung up after the September 11, 2001, attacks was that American tastes in entertainment would be forever changed. After seeing real-life horrors, they claimed, Americans would yearn for non-violent, wholesome family programming. Entertainment Weekly devoted much of its September 28, 2001, issue to, as the cover put it, “The challenge to our culture.” The magazine joined in the media chorus talking about the death of irony and the dramatic impact terrorism would have on nearly all facets of the entertainment industry. Jeff Gordinier wrote that “it’s hard to believe that we’ll ever see anything the same way....it took only an instant of excruciating reality to render our old [entertainment] appetites moot, piddling, even nauseating.” The effect was so profound, Gordinier melodramatically wrote, that “the mere glimpse of a quippy sitcom was enough to induce a sour grind of physical revulsion.”

The magazine filled pages and pages with well-intentioned but mawkish commentary second-guessing America’s taste in entertainment——nearly all of which turned out to be overstated or flat-out wrong. Less than two months after the attacks, writers began backpedaling, noting that, “‘Nothing is ever going to be the same,’ showbiz experts intoned on Sept. 11, predicting that in a newly threatened and threatening world, pop-culture junkies would now avoid all things violent, dark, and cynical.” The article cited an online poll of over 20,000 people showing that 75 percent of the respondents said that their taste in films and television had in fact not changed in the two months since the attacks.

Susan Whiting, president of Nielsen Media Research Company, confirms that the “everything changed” myth just didn’t pan out. “All of the pundits who said this would happen were wrong. Shows like The Osbournes became wildly popular, along with shows like Fear Factor.” A look at the films released in the year following the attacks shows that the filmgoing public didn’t shy away from horror, violence, or even terrorism-themed entertainment.

The second-guessing continues. In the March 28, 2003, issue of Entertainment Weekly, showbiz writers were still questioning whether or not “American moviegoers still have an appetite for Hollywood-style destruction.” Myopic, hand-wringing writers and moralists aside, of course blowing big things up and watching people get killed is entertaining; it always has been and it always will be.

Americans are entertained by torture even as American troops have subjected other human beings to gruesome, unethical, cruel, and illegal abuse. The Abu Ghraib prison photos——showing helpless people being beaten, abused, suffocated, and degraded——hasn’t curbed our nation’s appetite for fictional torture.

If anything, horror films have become nastier and more sadistic since 2001. The success of the Saw films is particularly instructive, being essentially a series of sadistic tortures. (To be fair, I should mention I wasn’t a fan of Saw; readers can see my full review HERE, but I think this quote sums it up: “I suspect that the script might have been written by a slightly retarded six-year-old horror film fan for whom English is not his native language...Everybody involved in this film owes me a personal apology and a refund.”)

The next time you hear a journalist or pop culture “expert” talk about how “America has been changed forever,” remember that those clichés have been applied for decades: after school shootings, after bombings, after snipers and assassinations, after terrorism. It’s all just histrionics and hyperbole spouted by those with short memories and shorter attention spans. Real-life horror fades, but fictional horror is forever.