By William I. Lengeman III
Wouldn’t you just kill to see a really scary movie right about now? You
know the kind I mean. A movie that makes you shrink down in your seat and peek
through your fingers. A movie that sets your heart to fluttering like you’ve
just washed down a handful of pep pills with a gallon of strong coffee. That
kind.
Maybe I’m looking for scares in all the wrong places or maybe I’m jaded from watching hundreds or thousands of purportedly scary movies of every shape and shade and there’s nothing that can be done to scare me, but it seems like truly frightening movies are becoming as rare as hen’s lips. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs when one of the most suspenseful movies I’ve seen lately is Spellbound, a movie about a bunch of geeky kids competing in the National Spelling Bee. This really had me on the edge of my seat, now that I mention it, and I give it my highest recommendation, but it’s not really a scary movie.
When it comes to celluloid horrors, I’ll admit that I’m probably jaded. I guess it was inevitable that the things that once scared me should become less frightening either by virtue of repeated exposure or simply because I’ve grown up (sort of) and am now more terrified by menaces such as financial ruin or having to wear a truss than by the creepy critters that might be hiding under the bed.
This theory was illustrated quite explicitly on two separate occasions when I went revisited horror movies that I used to find quite frightening. The first was The Evil Dead, a movie that, in the years since I’d last seen it, was built up in my mind to be one of the most terrifying bits of film ever to roll through a projector.
Well, it wasn’t. Actually, that’s not quite true. It was, but now it isn’t, if you get my slightly obtuse meaning. I watched The Evil Dead with my daughter, born a mere four years after the movie release. She grew up with a whole different breed of scary movies, stuff like Scream (which, all jesting at the tried and true conventions of teen crapola horror movies aside, actually managed to sneak in some truly scary moments), I Know What You Did Last Summer and that sort.
As it turns out, my daughter has little patience for low budget horror movies
and she didn’t find The Evil Dead the least bit scary. I shouldn’t
have been surprised, I guess. What did surprise me is that I no longer have
much patience for low budget horror movies and, if the truth be told, I didn’t
find The Evil Dead to be very scary anymore.
Ditto for Psycho. Yeah, I know that to even suggest such a thing borders on
heresy, but its true. Revisiting Hitchcock’s tried and true classic after
all these years, I discovered that it no longer packed much of a punch and,
of course, my daughter found it to be a colossal bore. Fortunately, it is Hitchcock
and thus, while I found that it was now at the lower end of the scare scale,
it was still vastly entertaining to watch.
And then there’s Jeepers Creepers, a contemporary horror flick that we
screened the same weekend as Psycho. Yeah, I know Jeepers Creepers 2 is out
now and the first one is yesterday’s news, but, to tell the truth, I’ve
developed a bias toward the younger generation’s teen crapola horror
movies and so it took me a while before I could bring myself to watch it.
Too bad, really. Jeepers Creepers was so close to being a truly scary – and
great – horror movie that it hurt. It could have been a contender, ma,
but in the end it blew it. Well, not quite the end, but more about that in
a minute.
Jeepers Creepers opens with a pair of teens – brother and sister – driving
home from school through the middle of nowhere. One can’t help but be
reminded of the opening of that venerable old scarefest - Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
though I have to say that the witty bickering that opens Jeepers Creepers is
much more clever than in TCM.
Of course, this is a horror movie and so this more or less idyllic scene can’t
remain idyllic for long. Before you know it, a battered, rusted old van is
bearing down on the teens and trying to force them off the road. They outmaneuver
it in a rather suspenseful chase scene, only to see it parked next to an old
decrepit church farther on down the road, with a shadowy figure standing nearby,
dumping a wrapped up body into a pipe leading down into the earth.
There’s a lot to like about Jeepers Creepers – at first. You can
even excuse our mostly likable young protagonists for doing about the stupidest
thing imaginable – yes, they go back to investigate – when they
could have been home free.
The movie proceeds in unusually suspenseful and imaginative fashion for about
the first half and then derails abruptly, changing gears so completely that
one is forced to wonder if the production changed directors in midstream.
Where Jeepers Creepers erred and where the suspense went whistling away into
the ether with a loud swoosh was when it decided to break the paramount rule
of scary fiction, the one that old Howard Phillips Lovecraft knew so well
- don’t show the monster. Let me say that again, in case you’re
planning to make a scary movie and you are taking notes. Don’t show
the monster.
Jeepers Creepers does just that, at about the halfway mark, and things go careening downhill from there. Not knowing what was causing all the havoc up to that point was infinitely more suspenseful than knowing, especially since the scary dude looks like a cross between Freddie Kruger and a lame comic book superhero.
Nothing that follows this revelation has much zing, aside from one or two brief moments and the reasonably nifty and not at all happy ending, but you should probably watch Jeepers Creepers anyway, if you haven’t already. The second half is not that bad, all things considered, and the first half probably makes up for its shortcomings.
While we’re speaking of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho (pardon my leaden transition, but I couldn’t think of a clever segue), what the hell is it with Hollywood and its warped obsession with remakes? There must be about a zillion really great scary stories and novels that could be turned into movies, so why is it that we need to see another version of Willard, just to name one in a flood of recent warmovers?
Willard is another movie that I remember as being quite shocking, but after
my Evil Dead/Psycho experience I’m hesitant to revisit it. Although not
as hesitant as I am about watching a remake, even if it does star the eminently
twisted Crispin Glover.
I guess what really baffles me is why Hollywood chooses to remake movies like
Willard or half a hundred others or why they feel compelled to trot out a new
version of Frankenstein or Dracula every decade or so. But then again, I’m
being deliberately naïve, because after all there really is only one purpose
to all this mindless rehashing, and that’s to rake in as much of the
old do-re-mi as you possibly can.
I suppose this even explains why Hollywood chooses to remake movies that really don’t need to be remade at all, in other words movies that were so great the first time around (ummm…Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre) that nothing that anyone could bring to the table could possibly better them.
Well, I’ve had my say now and that’s all I have to say, so I’m going to shut up now and watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre (yes, the original one – haven’t you been paying attention?). Then again, maybe I won’t. I don’t know if I can stand to have my bubble burst again.
Oh, and by the way…DON’T SHOW THE MONSTER!