Howdy imaginary readers. As promised, here is the second part to my theory on why low-budget independent horror films are so much better than their big budget Hollywood counterparts.
I stated in my previous post that my theory was backed up by Stephen King. That's not technically correct. He wrote his article before me, and I'm kinda building on it, so the foundation of my theory comes from the lord of all things scary.
King writes articles for EW magazine called T
he Pop of King. I highly recommend it. The article in question is called Horror Movies: Why Big Studio Releases Are Rare to Scare. His basic theory is that blockbusters are ruined by the need to fit too much in (to justify the budget). Too many effects, to much action, too much story.
Those movies blast our emotions and imaginations, instead of caressing them with a knife edge.
I couldn't agree more. Especially about too much story killing the fear. All the scariest characters in film (and books) are the ones where you just don't know why. Or that the answer is frighteningly simple.
But I'm not going to repeat his article, he writes infinitely better than I do. I'd just like to take it a step further. You see, I keep seeing horror film makers make fantastic, independent first films, and then follow them up with shitty, big budget numbers. You know they have talent, so why do they even accept the bigger budget when they know what is required to make a good horror movie? It's tempting to put it down to greed, but I think that's a little simplistic.
I'll let you know my own personal opinion tomorrow :D
This is an interesting theory, and the more I think about it the more I agree with it. The real Horror is usually the unknown and the unseen - what lies within our imagination, and low budget films have a better chance of hitting this mark (by necessity usually, if they can't afford to show 'the monster').
ReplyDeleteI think another point is that bigger budget films will usually be able to employ a few well known actors, and this runs the risk of taking us out of the film. Throw in a bunch of unknown actors and we have no idea whose going to die, adding to the tension...