Camp Grisly

Christopher Kelly’s piece on the current relevance of the new strain of grisly teen horror is interesting, but mostly in the way that a man juggling cats and chainsaws is interesting. It’s one of those bits of fist-waving, extended showy bullshit that dares you react. What? He can’t possibly be serious! Final Destination 3 as a metaphor for the Iraq war? Like the gore-spattered slasher flicks it discusses, it’s more an attempt to provoke than a serious work (though, with both, there may be a bloody, ragged, shred of truth buried in there somewhere).

And I’ll admit, just like the ever more brutal and inventive violence of the films, it’s somewhat creative, if entirely unaware of its own extreme views (Wes Craven casually guesses that “the average kid who watches these kinds of movies has seen on the Internet someone getting his head sawed off with a kitchen knife,” a made-up statistic that I somehow doubt.) And, of course, Kelly pulls a classic film crit argument device—a favorite of NYPress nutjob Armond White—and, instead of marshalling any evidence for his claims that the director of Wolf Creek is great, simply namedrops a classic, brilliant director that his subject in no way resembles:

The fact that [Wolf Creek] announced the arrival of an immensely gifted new director named Greg McLean -- whose patience, control and ability to play the audience like a very cheap fiddle would have done Alfred Hitchcock proud—seemed lost on most adult moviegoers.

See? He’s got patience! And control! And ability—there’s a specific for you—and he’s like Alfred Hitchcock! What’re you saying—that you don’t like Hitchcock? Sure, Chris. Whatever you say.

But there’s an interesting paragraph about the moviegoing experience that’s worth noting:

What struck me the most about watching Final Destination 3 was how quietly my fellow moviegoers were behaving. In fact, the loudest giggles came from me -- a thirtysomething weaned on the "If you have sex or do drugs, you will be slaughtered" slasher cycle of the 1980s. That silence seems to speak volumes. Watching movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, you were more likely to root for Freddy or Jason than for their victims. But today's teenage and college-age moviegoers don't see themselves as standing above the characters on the screen but right alongside them. Whether consciously or subconsciously, they're experiencing these movies empathetically.

I noticed this myself a while back. Strangely enough it was while watching Freddy Vs. Jason. I had taken my younger brother and a pack of his high school aged friends (my brother’s birthday), fully intending to enjoy the film in the only way a movie like that should be enjoyed: in the company of juvenile delinquent males hell bent on heckling the film as mercilessly as possible.

So we got there and started laughing and snickering, but before long it became clear that the rest of the audience wasn’t in on the fun. They took the movie seriously, at face value, and we got dirty looks when we cackled. Which we did. A lot. It seemed impossible, especially in that film, but the audience had no appreciation for the utter absurdity of what we were seeing. The next year (birthday again), I took a similar group of very smart but, well, immature guys to see Aliens Vs. Predator. Same thing. We laughed, they scowled. This is a movie where a security guard gets killed when he’s pinned to a wall by an invisible harpoon (of all the ways to die, sheesh-ed.)—not exactly high drama.

What it suggests to me is that, somewhere along the way, a large part of my generation seems to have lost the ability to appreciate camp. With the cluelessly ridiculous flair of MTV stars, talk shows that obsess over the importance of every petty emotion, the hokey formula of network dramas, and the self-serious absurdities of reality shows (Eat bugs! Survive on the island! And express honest rage about it for the camera, ok?) all pushing material that has absolutely no sense of its own ludicrous nature, there’s a significantly reduced ability to appreciate something for its goofiness. Despite our obsession with kitsch, I think that when it comes to this sort of goofy, unserious material, a large segment just doesn’t get it. And that’s sad. Because, as any guy who’s gathered with a pack of his buddies to ridicule a D-list horror flick knows, it’s really damn funny.