Chris Rock has an incredible bit about the decline of rap music’s artistic integrity. Angered at how, in these superficial, over sexualised, trend focused times, it’s becoming increasingly impossible to for him to defend it. He paces like a lion in a cage, filled with self-hatred for accepting what his favorite genre now stands for in the eyes of the public and the media. A once pure and furious channel for voicing political anger, social problems, circulating ideas and empowering the minorities of American culture, rap music has become a fat, vacuous symbol of money, misogyny, violence and materialism. These problems, Rock claims, are new. It was once easy for him and us to call Grandmaster Flash art, to comment on why Run DMC was creating important work and admirable to stand by the fact that Houdini was musically intellectual and culturally important.

It struck me after lunch with some friends last week that I’m faced with this predicament also. I love horror films. I love them. But, man, I’m tired of defending them. Any horror fan will confess that after years and years of watching gallons of gore and terror vomited from a television or cinema screen alone in the dark, there is now an omnipotent sinking feeling that comes along with settling in to watch a “terrifying” new release. Sometimes it happens before you’ve even seen the film, sometimes during the first 5 minutes, sometimes at the half way point but almost always that creeping dirty feeling of disappointment washes over you in a less than awesome wave. Lets not forget, for every solid horror there are 8 Saw films, and that’s impossible both to comprehend or defend.

The general cinema going public is showing itself as a beast more terrifying than any conceived on celluloid. This mass of like-minded bodies assembled in the dark waiting for entertainment are now armed to the teeth with a self-serving back catalogue of post modern twists, an eye for homage and that smug, all-seeing killer of anything remotely frightening; Irony. The huge majority of the gimmick laden, mashed-up shock fests that bubble up from the ground of the mainstream horror world – be it a remake, a sequel, a prequel, a re-imagining or a regurgitation – are often flimsy and patronising at best;

They are saturated with over used tactics, empty characters and usually – the cinematic equivalent of pissing in your audiences lemonade – “ready for sequel” endings, all of which render a film or an idea which was once perhaps somewhat unsettling or original as nothing more than a severed hand in a ditch. The psychological, lasting impact of a film is rarely seen. It’s nearly been wiped off the face of the earth in the horror world. Loud noises and CGI distorted monsters crawling on ceilings, faces in mirrors or an increase in volume purely to get a jump does not constitute horror. That’s fright, not horror.

Of course, I’m complaining too much and there’s certainly a sadomasochistic element to sitting down and watching horror. There has to be. You know what you’re there for and you don’t mind. You hope it’s going to hurt a little bit. OK, here we go, scare me, give me sleepless nights, torment me but please… treat me like an intelligent human being while you’re doing it. Respect for an audience is paramount in horror. These are, on the surface, bare bones films. Films whose lasting effectiveness relies solely on how we feel about our own insecurities and fears as, in turn, they have to use them against us. There’s a crazy man in the woods, a creature under the bed, a virus in the water, a killer in your dreams, whatever. Their job is to unsettle you with the unknown, with technique, with music, pacing, and atmosphere. Not with bad characterisation, terrible dialogue, worse acting and a fumbling last gasp attempt at something which vaguely resembles a resolution.

At their best they can be intensely moving, undeniably shocking and seriously funny, unintentionally or not. But at the minute the mainstream horror film industry resembles nothing more than a child under a white bed sheet with two eye holes cut into it. It’s not scary anymore because it thinks it’s audience is as lazy and unimaginative as it is. I can’t defend the fact that The Devil Inside and Paranormal Activity 4 both made more than $50m at the box office last year. 2 blockbuster films built on the success of countless others like them. What happened? Did we do this to ourselves?

Since Wes Craven’s self-aware shocker Scream arguably made the horror film bankable again for studios and The Blair Witch Project blew open the doors on a large warehouse labelled “found footage” for low-budget film makers I cant help but think that these two innovative game changers, in both content and campaign, were, in hindsight, a swishing double-edged sword. Barring a few solid examples, the found footage craze may have seriously damaged fanatical audiences’ expectations of what horror really can be and has undeniably dulled the publics’ expectation of getting nothing more than an average film.

Torture porn, Japanese girls with long hair and now grainy CCTV footage have all, at some point, had instant money-making appeal for studios riding the wave the success of unique one offs from over seas and the rejuvenation of mainstream horror 17 years ago. It would seem that horror tools are now in fact “trends” to be examined, blue printed and regurgitated into oblivion. Of course Similar trends have shaped horror in the past; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre pushed the boundaries of sight, sound and endurance, influencing an army of young low-budget film makers to find their own cabins in the woods. Trends aren’t always bad, if we have the patience enough to get past the flood and the drought and wait, once more, for the innovation which causes another and another and another. Maybe only time can allow us to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Much like rap music, the cultural weight of horror films and the importance of them has seriously declined. We’ve almost come to expect them to be overlooked come awards time on all fronts, special effects and sound design included as if that’s always been the way. After all, these are only horror films, perhaps the oldest staple genre of film making? Ethan Hawke’s fantastic performance in Scott Derickson’s pretty great Sinister or Jessica Chastain’s in Andres Muchietti’s pretty average Mama never draw the attention deserved because they take place in a horror film. The Exorcist‘s 10 Oscar nominations seem like they happened a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away. Maybe we’re just not looking at them with the same importance or maybe it is rarely to be found anymore. Who is to say?

I’m going to keep searching for gems, regardless; They’re out there. Hiding, waiting, grinning in the dark. I believe horror can be important again, that it can say something about how we are living once more, about how we are changing as creatures, I believe it can comment on our own mortality and our preoccupations and more than this I believe it can do it well. I do wonder if I’m stuck in the “it’s not you, it’s me” relationship death throes with a somewhat sadomasochistic partner. Or maybe we’ve just grown apart. But, if there are film makers and writers and readers out there that feel the same my hope is that horror can rehabilitate, shake itself off, take a deep breath and crawl out of our cinema screens and into our society once more.

-Neil Innes, April, 2013