Films that use a long psychological build up towards a finale are also miniature examples of how the horror genre overall can live or die on what we do and don’t see. All too often it seems as if the films that do make it through a first offering by delivering a great balance of tension and action have an irrepressible need to destroy all their good work with a sequel. For example, the first of the Paranormal Activity franchise reminded audiences exactly why it is that the found footage genre can be so effective – effortlessly drawing chills from the simple sight of a character standing and staring into space, and ending with the revelation that this thing could, and would, touch you. The profound malevolence of the first film was continued fairly successfully by the second, which relied on the same devices of almost subsonic sound and the most physical presence that could be achieved by an invisible entity. But the temptation was apparently just too much, and the series promptly self-destructed with the third instalment for the simple reason that it just tried to do too much. The argument here might have been that if a third film was made, audiences would want to know this time what was actually going on. Clearly it didn’t occur to anyone at the studios that the simple solution to this would have been to just not make the third film.
Spanish ‘shaky-cam’ zombie classic .REC was also survived by its immediate sequel, the faster paced path of which had clearly been left open to it by its predecessor and which conformed to a perfect definition of a sequel. It then went entirely rogue with REC3 [Genesis], replacing the highly effective found-footage style with conventional cinematography and the highly effective everything else with blatant black comedy. The Saw franchise is another example of a clever and frightening concept being eventually turned into a scheme through which to simply draw the most blood in a myriad of rather worryingly inventive ways. Even The Ring managed to join the ranks of disgraced film series’ when it produced its inevitable sequel in 2005. We see very little of Samara in the first film, her concealed face and grainy appearances an essential part of the dark and unrelenting mystery that this film does so well. In the second film, however, Samara pops up so often that we start to quite miss her when she’s not there.
Moving on then to the next place along the spectrum and we start to enter the realm of the more obvious horror. Here, things get a little more complicated; we haven’t as yet moved too far away from the emphasis on dread and suspense and yet now the gore and violence start to become important in their own right. One of the most perfect examples of this stage is the aforementioned .REC. Whereas it is bloody throughout, and entirely outplays its own hand at this during the finale, .REC has one of the most celebrated endings of any recent horror film for the simple fact that it remained relentlessly frightening from beginning to end. The recent pair of V/H/S films are ruthless with their gore, but subsume it within such weird, realistic or claustrophobic contexts that the carnage extends quite naturally from the often slack-jaw-inducing horror. I Saw the Devil is renowned equally for both its emotional engagement and its shockingly grisly end. The 1977 cult classic Suspiria also qualifies here, with murders that are horrendously graphic from the outset, an assailant that is largely concealed and the nightmarish appearance of the film overall making it another fine example of how filmmaking can remain beautiful and skilful even when the subject matter is the grotesque.
