But there are some more obvious titles that make this point along the spectrum possibly the most important of all. In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock introduced to mainstream cinema a feature that today we take completely for granted but was relatively new to that era. This was, of course, the concept of – as the title of his most famous work suggests – the psychopath. Psycho wasn’t gory as such, but what the film did do was alert the filmmaking industry to the fact that people, as it turned out, liked the extreme; along with the idea of the psycho naturally came the unpredictable and terrifying things that a psycho would actually do, and of course, the awful dawning realization in audiences’ minds that this could happen to them.
The slasher subgenre had begun its rise to fame. Black Christmas (especially important for its introduction of what was to become a genre-standard formula of naïve adolescents and a mystery stalker in an isolated location), Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street – films such as these helped propel horror out of the dark realm of the B-movie and into the light of the generally popular where they have remained ever since, bringing with them some of the most enduring cultural references and lending an instant fear factor to many of the ordinary things of life – cabins, sleepovers, balconies, hitchhikers. It was also during this time that George A. Romero’s iconic Night of the Living Dead unleashed zombies onto the mainstream scene, where they continue a very healthy non-life today, cheerfully merging gore and fear as horror-movie-nature intended.
Even though a few of the titles above are not especially bloody by today’s standards, the point about all the films mentioned at this middle stage of the scale is that what is explicitly grisly is vital to the realism upon which the fear in these particular films depends. The visually shocking and the unnervingly invisible are meant to work together as equal partners. But sadly, it is many of the titles in this area that prove what can happen when the artful use of gore is turned into the equivalent of standing ten feet back from the canvas and throwing buckets of paint at it. This process is also known by another name: The Remake. Here we have endless examples of originally excellent films being made – for lack of any word that will convey quite how bad this endemic is – not excellent. In the 1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre the gore is relatively limited, the rest of it being left to the not-too-challenging mental image of the sort of damage that would be caused by such a weapon. The 2006 version, however, made it look as though the original Leatherface was simply indulging his real passion of feather-duster tickling. Halloween showed relatively little blood in its original 1978 form, while the criteria for being doused in it in the 2007 remake was basically just standing still for too long.
The most popular tact among the re-makers seems to be ‘take everything that wasn’t seen the first time around and beat the audience senseless with it.’ In the 1963 version of The Haunting, malevolent forces terrorizing the characters staying at the house remain largely unseen. In the 1999 remake, director Jan de Bont manifested them into as many obviously visible forms as possible. The result was not an increase in the sense of threat – it was general hilarity. De Bont clearly disagrees with the idea that certain types of horror can be increased by allowing some things to remain unseen. God forbid he ever tries to remake the infamously mysterious Cat People–he may as well just employ the costume designers from Broadway’s The Lion King and have done with it. The House of Wax, The Wicker Man, The House on Haunted Hill, The Amityville Horror, The Omen – reams of innocent film reel have been senselessly lost to pointless re-imaginings of all types of horror stories and characters when audiences were still more than happy with the first versions. Vince Vaughn was so badly miscast in the remade Psycho that we probably wouldn’t have noticed the difference if he’d been playing the shower curtain.
