The genre judgement conundrum part II: learning to love horror

August 2006. 13-year-old Avery sees a Blockbuster VHS case (my God, those are archaic words, right there) in her dad's hand. "What's that?" she asks.

Dad holds it up so she can see the title. The Rocky Horror Picture Show. "What's that?" she asks again, because up to this point, her only exposure to this cult classic has been the Kidz Bop cover of "Time Warp," which she hasn't listened to in forever because, at this point, she has clearly outgrown Kidz Bop. (But, being the child-at-heart she is, if she still listens to those old CDs time to time...well, who's going to know, really?)

"It's an old musical. From the 1970s." Her mom and dad exchange a look. Is their child old enough to see this? After all, their objective thus far has not been to censor her viewing material (she's been allowed to watch Big Trouble and My Cousin Vinny and The Replacements--movies that most of her friends would have had to see behind their parents' backs) but this is considered widely to be the most raunchy musical of all time. Can they really...?

Finally, assuming (and rightly so) that most of the jokes will go over her head, her mom casually says, "You should watch it with us. It's got Meat Loaf and Tim Curry in it. You'll like it."

And for the first forty-five minutes or so, she does. She giggles at "Dammit, Janet," gets up and dances to the Time Warp, and squeals in delight at her first sighting of Dr. Frank-N-Furter. "That is Tim Curry?" she gasps, not recognizing the man who co-starred in Pirates of the Plain and Home Alone 2--some of her favorite movies of the day. She's a little nervous when Rocky is born, but when she sees not a hideous Frankenstein monster but a muscle-bound jock running around in shiny gold underpants, she starts laughing again. So far, as her parents predicted, she loves it. Sure, a lot of the sexual references are lost on her, and she's a little confused as to why Frank-N-Furter seems to be gay or at least bi (since she knows, from years of watching Eddie Izzard, that "most transvestites actually fancy women"), but those are minor things and overall she's happy.

And then comes Meat Loaf's entrance. And, with it, his gruesome death at Frank-n-Furter's hands. That's when she starts to cry. That's when her parents start to think, oops, might've introduced this one a bit too soon. They let her watch for a bit longer, right up through "Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me," which they hope she will find sufficiently funny to erase the memory of Meat Loaf's untimely demise, but they're careful to shut off the movie before Eddie the Delivery Boy's final...uh...resting place is revealed. Because if she can't handle an ice pick and some blood, they know she won't be able to handle that.

One year from now this movie will be one of her favorites, and she will go to see the play live, dressed as Magenta and singing to every song, squirt gun in hand and a smile on her face. But you couldn't convince her of that now. Not for all the money in the world.

~

So fast-forward now to Halloween 2012. After a lifetime of actively avoiding horror movies, I was facing a conundrum because, you see, my teacher had put The Exorcist on his syllabus, as it's one of the most famous (and, admittedly, one of the most groundbreaking) horror films of all time. Most of my classmates are psyched. It's a great horror film, they insist, and it's just perfect that we're watching it on Halloween night. I'm sure they're right, but I have a problem. I hate horror. I really, truly hate it. There are few times that I've seen a horror film and not hated it: The Blair Witch Project, Let the Right One In, Psycho, and of course Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow. That's it. The number of horror movies that haven't terrified me into oblivion can actually be counted on one hand.

My mother always said that my problem with movies--and she still says this, now, in 2015, when I'm a college graduate who consistently sleeps with the lights off--was that I had a hard time telling fantasy and reality apart. Maybe that's true. All I know is that up to my college days I could not watch a horror movie without my parents holding my hands. In fact, during a Genres class at Interlochen, we watched Diary of the Dead to study "documented" horror, and I was so shaken I had to leave halfway through the screening and, afterwards, spent the night at a hotel with my parents because I was too afraid to sleep alone in the dorms. I believe by now I have hammered the point home: horror and Avery did not mix. Just couldn't happen.

But on Halloween night, 2012, I caved for the sake of my grade. My teacher was very nice about it, but he would not let me get out of seeing the film. He let me bring my girlfriend and looked the other way when I buried my face in her shoulder during the worst parts, but still I had to sit there, without sneaking out of the room, and watch the movie. And I hated it. Take away the terror factor and I still doubt I'd have liked it; I can see why it's hailed as a masterpiece, but The Exorcist just isn't my taste. But I could handle it. I hated it, but I watched it. The whole thing. Levitation, head-twisting and all.

And I cannot stress how big a deal it is that I stayed for the whole thing. Up to that point I'd even avoided horror films that were part of a class (see: Diary of the Dead incident) and skipped out on Halloween parties because my friends always wanted to watch, well, the Halloween movies and I couldn't do that. I still covered my eyes during certain parts of Lord of the Rings, for crying out loud. I went out of my way to avoid anything scary, much to the frustration of just about any teacher who had me in their class wherein a horror movie was present. This same teacher, the one who gently refused to put up with my B.S. where The Exorcist was concerned, had already had to convince me the previous semester that Planet of the Apes was really worth a second look and that Alien was not, in fact, more terrifying than Paranormal Activity.

So willingly going and not only seeing The Exorcist, but taking notes on it and calmly discussing it in class the following Monday, proved something to me: whether I loved or hated them, I could watch horror movies. I could handle it. I would not collapse into a panic-stricken jelly lump just because a movie had some scary scenes in it. I could do it.

I started pushing my boundaries that very night. I let my girlfriend talk me into seeing Scream - my very first Wes Craven movie - and discovered a simple fact about me and horror films: if it could be defeated, I wasn't afraid of it. A flesh-and-blood killer was something I could deal with. I didn't like gore and I didn't much care for the supernatural (hence my disdain of films like Saw, The Evil Dead, and The Exorcist), but as long as there was a way to defeat the villain I could not only watch a horror film, but find some enjoyment in it. I didn't love Scream, but there were a lot of parts that made me laugh and, unlike Diary of the Dead, I didn't regret going to see it.

More incidents like that one followed. I went to see Warm Bodies, the first - and, to this day, the only - zombie film that I absolutely loved. I started watching Supernatural, a show that I'd avoided for years because I thought it would be too scary, and delighted in watching the villain get defeated in every single episode. Ditto for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I realized that I'd been scorning horror for years, without realizing that there was so much that I already liked (Tim Burton, Alfred Hitchcock, German expressionist films like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - heck, Roman Polanski's Fearless Vampire Killers had captivated me long before Twilight Fever rocked my high school), and I had been limiting myself out of fear. I resolved not to do that anymore.

When I transferred to Oakland University, my World Cinema teacher showed us Somos Lo Que Hay (translation: We Are What We Are) the same week that I re-watched Let the Right One In for the first time in years. I fell in love with foreign horror - especially of the European variety. I came to the realization that what I really loved, not just tolerated for a grade's sake but loved, was psychological horror. I watched The Sixth Sense and loved it. I watched The Shining all the way through for the first time, and loved it. I watched Silence of the Lambs, I watched all the Hannibal Lecter movies, and I loved them. That fall I saw Peeping Tom in a film theory class and absolutely adored it. My love of psychological horror stemmed from my love of Tim Burton, of Loki the God of Mischief, of the Goblin King and Alex DeLarge and all my other "favorite villains" - the idea that everything isn't what it seems. I realized that without pre-conceived assumptions and fear getting in the way, I could see whatever the hell I wanted to.

I also began to understand my own rules. I needed to have some degree of control over the movie. I needed to be able to pause it and walk away if I had to. I needed to have someone with me, or at least near me, to remind me that it was only a movie. With those few guidelines in place, what couldn't I watch?

I still have moments of doubt, believe me. No power on this earth can make me sit through the Evil Dead or Saw canon. And good luck convincing me to ever, for any reason, sit through an episode of The Walking Dead. I won't go through haunted houses or haunted mazes (acting in one my senior year of high school was more than enough, believe me) and I will never, ever go to an amusement park "fright night" again. I didn't suddenly morph into a horror-lover. I have my limits. If I see a movie that I might like, but looks like it's a scary one, I'll wait for the DVD, thankyouverymuch, and there are plenty of deal-breakers for me. Zombies are a red flag. Cannibalism is pushing it. Possession is a hard limit. And God forbid I ever see anything with the word "exorcism" in the title again.

But this Halloween I will watch Nightmare on Elm Street with Ian. I've always wanted to see it, but dodged it based on the assumption that it would be too scary for me. But it's a fantastic movie, or so I've always heard, and it's one of the defining horror classics, and it's got all the elements I love: a villain with a dark past who attacks his victims on a psychological level, highly stylized aesthetics, and the headship of a kick-ass director. (No one can see Red Eye and not believe Wes Craven was a genius. I'm 100% sure of that.) Maybe I'll have a sleepless night or two over it. But I'm not worried.

After all, I've already handled Pazuzu. After that, how bad can Freddy Kruger really be?

The genre judgement conundrum

Okay, I’ll admit it: sometimes I don’t practice what I preach. I’ll write here all night and all day about not judging a movie before you see it, watching a variety of movies instead of sticking to your favorites, seeing movies outside your preferred genres, giving movies a chance even if they don’t get good reviews…but I confess, there are a lot of movies where I take one look at the trailer (or a DVD cover) and go, “Nope. Not a chance.” I have my pet peeves within a film, and if I know going in that the film I’m watching has those issues, it’s practically guaranteed I won’t like it. 

I can’t stand gore or torture porn. If you ask me to watch Evil Dead or Saw I will run away. I don’t like supernatural horror, mainly because it scares the hell out of me, but also because those movies have a tendency to rely on archetypes and jump scares instead of fleshing out a real story. I don’t like R-rated comedies where 90% of the jokes revolve around sex, controlled substances, or petty crime. Oh, and don’t even ask me to consider knockoff parodies like the Scary Movie series--there is no chance in hell. I hate those cheap comedies most of all, because all I can think about when I watch them is, if only I had those resources…God, what I could do instead of making crap like this.

So when I found myself putting Ted into my DVD player, all I could do was stand there, disgusted, and ask myself, what in God’s name am I doing.

Let me back up here and explain that back in May, Ian took me to Motor City Comic-Con and it was pretty much the best date of my life. I got to sit in on a panel with a Supernatural writer, meet some of my favorite actors, and oh yeah, meet and talk to Billy Boyd--thanks to Ian, who surprised me by not only taking me to the con, but getting me a photo op with my favorite Hobbit. So, to thank him, I offered to let him pick the next ten movies we saw together. So far I’ve loved all of the ones we’ve seen (up to yesterday we’d watched treasures like The Truman Show and Angels in the Outfield) but when he came over the other day he handed me a DVD that I desperately wanted to throw in the trash can.

I hate, hate, hate movies like Ted. They are full of raunchy, cheap jokes that rely on shock value and foul language instead of actual humor. The acting is usually half-assed at best, unless a weirdly good actor randomly ends up in an otherwise-shitty movie. One of the reasons I get so pissed off when people like Ethan Hawke compare all mainstream films to “hamburgers and hot dogs” is because it means they’re lumping in truly brilliant blockbusters, like Back to the Future and Jurassic Park, to crap like This Is The End and Epic Movie. These films are, in my mind, truly empty entertainment. I can’t remember the last time I watched one of those movies and came away thinking, “Y’know, I’m glad I watched that.” I’d sooner watch any of the junk featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 than put myself through Superbad, Bridesmaids or The Hangover.

So you can imagine it took a fair bit of convincing to get me to watch Ted. Ian had to repeat over and over that it was really cute, that the jokes weren’t all centered around sex, that it was one of Seth MacFarlane’s better projects, and that the acting was actually pretty decent. I tried to guilt him out of it, reminding him that my ex had once forced me into seeing Scary Movie 5 and it gave me nightmares and I hated porn jokes and can’t we please watch, I don’t know, Nightmare on Elm Street instead? But he reminded me of my promise and I finally gave in and watched Ted.

Now, I won’t say I loved it. I didn’t. It was decent, but it’s not going to be on any of my top ten lists. And I can see why it wasn’t an Oscar favorite. I can’t say I’m suddenly interested in watching another handful of similar comedies. I’m not about to run out and see the sequel, and God knows it’s not going to turn me into a MacFarlane fan.

But…

But for all its flaws, Ted is actually pretty damn cute. It’s raunchy, yes--for anyone who hasn’t seen it, allow me to drop a little spoiler: the teddy bear gets laid--but there’s enough wit in the humor to offset some of the more tasteless potty humor. Okay, maybe it’s still about as stupid as you’d expect (at one point I told Ian “if they make one more fart joke I’ll throw something") but there are some pretty good lines, there’s some nice banter here and there, the celebrity cameos are well-timed, and the romance between Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis’s characters is actually fairly believable. Not only that, but there are some moments that would make any Tumblr warrior proud: a gay love story is casually tossed in and treated like it’s no big deal, and at one point Wahlberg’s character sarcastically says that if he’s assaulted it’s his fault for “asking for it.” Little things like that keep the movie from collapsing into pure, unadulterated piles of yuck, but underneath all of the both PC and non-PC humor, the whole thing is actually…sweet. Surprisingly sweet, in fact, given that the film is about a foul-mouthed twentysomething teddy bear and his childish human BFF.

Like I said, I’m not about to run out and rent all three of the Hangover movies. And no power on this earth will make me see the rest of the Scary Movie franchise. And, please, someone shoot me on the spot if I ever think about making a movie with that many fart jokes. But watching Ted--and actually enjoying Ted--gave me a new perspective. I’ve been sulking furiously over every last indieWIRE article that makes fun of Jurassic World or insinuates that blockbusters are empty brain candy, only to turn right around and call a whole other genre “brain candy” without even watching the majority of the films in that category. And that, as I’m sure any sane person would tell me, is not fair.

No, Ted isn’t a masterpiece. But it’s still a movie that took time and energy and, yes, a lot of money to make. Someone had to come up with the idea, however cringe-worthy, of letting a cute, fuzzy teddy bear have sex with Norah Jones. (And can we just take a minute to admire the guts it took for that woman to take on a film role where she fondly reminisces about getting it on with a frickin’ stuffed animal? I’m not sure I would’ve done that.) Someone had to write, direct, film, edit, and distribute this thing. Just like all my favorites, Ted was the product of a group of very dedicated people who didn’t give a shit about anything except the fact that they had a story to tell. 

And whether you liked the film or not, you’ve got to at least give it some credit for that reason alone. At least, I have to. Because I can’t call myself a bad-movie champion, and give the critics hell for judging a movie based on its genre, and then refuse to give movies like Ted a chance.

Let's talk about blockbusters

Okay. So there’s this website I like, indieWIRE. I follow them on Facebook. I read their reviews time to time. Generally I read the site for news. I mean, how else would I know that there’s a documentary about the lost Tim Burton Superman movie coming out this summer? Or pick up some Duplass-approved filmmaking tips? Or discover how much ass Unfriended kicked at the box office? But the thing is, sometimes indieWIRE can get, uh, a little ahead of itself.

Like when they put one of Tim Burton’s most underrated movies on a “you suck” list.

Or when they put up a blog post indiscriminately trashing fan theories, going so far as to imply that anyone who comes up with a fan theory is not a “real fan.”

Or when they trashed the shit out of Jurassic World for no ostensible reason other than that it dared to beat their favorite indies at the box office, then threw in some commments about Mad Max to half-heartedly defend blockbusters as a thing.

That last one was what really got my goat. I mean, a review is one thing. I have immense respect for film critics because I know how unbelievably hard it is to write a film review that adequately represents your love, hatred or indifference to a particular film. So I’m not going to bust anyone for writing an unfavorable review; much as I loved Jurassic World, I know it wasn’t perfect and everyone is allowed their own opinion. But when you post one article after another relentlessly degrading a film and beating the “but it’s a blockbuster!” dead horse, that’s going too far. Especially when your main complaint about the film ties back into the “blockbuster bad/indie good” dichotomy that seems to have infiltrated the minds of generation after generation of film students.

To pin a movie’s worth entirely on its financial standing is absolutely ridiculous. I mean it is truly, deeply absurd. This dynamic of popular vs. unpopular has got to stop. It’s why Tim Burton still gets his ass handed to him by critics even when he comes out with the best thing he’s made in almost a decade. It’s why guys like Ethan Hawke put on airs about their films being more “interesting” simply by virtue of their non-blockbuster status. It’s why filmmakers like William Friedkin point fingers at Marvel and other superhero franchises for “ruining” the film industry and insist their work is a hundred times better than any of that useless popular stuff.

And it’s why indieWIRE is sneering at Jurassic World simply for having the gall to gross more than Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, despite the fact that they’re two very different films aimed at very different audiences. It’s become de rigueur for critics and independent or midbudget directors to nail blockbuster films to the wall--whether they’re out of envy or simply different taste is unclear, but I have a pretty good idea. It’s the same reason I used to hate the most popular kid in my high school, simply because everyone liked his movies better than mine. If you’re seriously comparing Me and Earl and the Dying Girl to Jurassic World, well, let me ask you, what are you hoping to accomplish? It’s like comparing Beauty and the Beast to A Clockwork Orange. Both are fine pieces of cinematic artwork, but they are made for completely different audiences. Of course a movie like Jurassic World is going to gross more on its opening weekend than Me and Earl and the Dying Girl; it’s made for a wide audience, whereas Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is made for a niche audience. They are both good movies; why are we pitting them against each other?

Let me be clear: there is always room for different opinions, and there is always room for critique. I’ve got some of my own that would make Roger Ebert whack me with a punishment salmon; I hate Titanic and can’t stand Von Trier, but I love A Clockwork Orange--which scares the pee out of most people--and basically worship Gus Van Sant; I can’t stand Coppola and I think Tim Burton hung the moon. Meanwhile I also think there are some serious issues with the Academy Awards. So yes, it’s a good and wonderful thing to criticize an industry that’s as out of whack as the film industry, and it’s perfectly natural to have different opinions on what constitutes a great movie.

But here’s the thing. Aggressively mocking fan theories, calling directors “failures” for making films that aren’t to your taste, and bemoaning Jurassic World’s impressive turn at the box office doesn’t do a damn thing except make you look like that kid standing on a soapbox in the middle of the schoolyard yelling fight the power! stand up to The Man! popular is not good, go against the grain, be unique! I wouldn’t be so vehement about this, if not for the fact that those people who yell “Be unique!” frequently turn around and lecture the people who dare to have different opinions. It’s like the people who claim feminism is about women’s freedom of choice and then call every woman who chooses to have children instead of a career “unfeminist.” You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say “have your own opinion!” and then nail someone else for, y’know, having an opinion.

About a week after the Oscars I had dinner with a classmate who spent half the meal lamenting the fact that Boyhood didn’t win Best Picture. Now, I think we all know how I feel about Boyhood (and if you forgot, let me remind you that it is hands-down my least favorite Linklater film of all time), but having felt the pain of seeing some of my favorites lose and, in some cases, not even be nominated, I listened to his venting. He called Boyhood a groundbreaking epic, Linklater’s best film, the highlight of 2014 in movies. He said that the film resonated with him on a deeply emotional level--which, knowing what I know about this person’s history, I definitely understood. I may not have liked Boyhood, but I certainly got why he did.

At some point he asked me who I would have seen win Best Picture--a loaded question when aimed at me, considering my taste in movies and my disgust for the pretentious nature of awards shows in general, but I took a whack at it. I answered honestly that I would have loved to see Big Eyes or Guardians of the Galaxy at least make it into the running.

He looked at me like I’d just said Cap’n Crunch was the cure for cancer. He railed on about the glorification of the blockbuster and how all blockbusters were turning into Michael Bay films and, in a Friedkin-approved way, blamed Marvel and DC for the “brain candy” that he insisted had infiltrated every theater from hell to Houston. And Big Eyes, according to him, was no better. It was Tim Burton grasping at straws, trying to prove he had one more bullet in the chamber, but it “wasn’t interesting.” It was “pretty, but there was no real story and no real hero.” He conceded, however, that it was better than the “empty, feel-good fairytale” that was Guardians of the Galaxy.

When he was done venting I gently pointed out that Guardians was a big hit with kids and asked him if maybe, just maybe, Guardians of the Galaxy could have resonated emotionally with someone else the way Boyhood resonated with him. To his credit, he actually paused and considered that for a moment, before shaking his head and concluding, “No. It could have, if it hadn’t been just another franchise money-grab. Like, if they’d done it right. But they didn’t, they just made another blockbuster out of it.” I’m not exaggerating when I say that he said “blockbuster” like a curse word.

Once again, he is entitled to his opinion. If he didn’t like Guardians, that’s just fine. But his whole argument was built on the idea that because it was made by a major studio, because it was made to appeal to a wide audience, Guardians of the Galaxy was inherently  “mindless entertainment.” I can’t speak for everyone who saw it, but I cried watching Guardians. There were so many little moments, character quirks that might’ve gone unnoticed, that made me look at Peter Quill and think “oh my God, that’s me.” It was funny, it kept me guessing, and it made me do something I’ve never done before: go back and see it two more times. Not even the Harry Potter films enticed me to do that. My mom, who never watches Marvel movies, watched Guardians with me and enjoyed it. So maybe it’s no Rear Window, but I will defend Guardians of the Galaxy as one of the better films in the Marvel canon.

But to my friend, there can be no gray area on this issue. He complained bitterly about Big Hero 6 taking Best Animated over The Tale of Princess Kayuga. He laughed outright when I suggested Lego Movie should have won. (“It was a shameless marketing ploy for LEGO. How could anyone take that movie seriously?”) He rolled his eyes at the idea of Sebastian Stan getting a nomination for Best Supporting Actor. (“What did he do, stand there and scowl? I could have done that.”) But he hated that Boyhood lost above all, even to Birdman, a movie that he admitted was “way, way better than if American Sniper would’ve won.” If you’re seeing a theme here, well spotted. Anything that made big money at the box office was automatically poison. And anything that originated overseas or in someone’s basement was wronged if it didn’t win.

To someone like me, who loves many different kinds of movies, the kind of dork who can happily watch Django Unchained back-to-back with Home Alone 2, this black-and-white presentation of one type of cinema being inherently better than the other is confusing and even harmful. I’ve been shamed for liking certain films and I’ve seen others get the same treatment. It’s worse when you’re in film school, but I can’t imagine it’s easy for people who are actually in the industry. It’s the dichotomy that Tim Burton explored in Big Eyes: either you can be loved by audiences and hated by critics, or loved by critics and ignored by audiences; it’s nearly impossible to be both. And I can’t understand why. Art is and always has been subjective, but why do we turn it into a battlefield when it doesn’t have to be? Or as one astute Facebook commenter said on an article about Claire’s heels and whether or not they represent sexism in Jurassic World, “Can’t we just enjoy the movie and stop bitching at each other?”

So by all means continue to critique films and the film industry--after all, discourse is one of the things that makes pop culture so dynamic--but for the love of God, I beg you, have better criticism for a movie than “it’s a blockbuster.”