Today’s horror films are upping their level of nastiness in pursuit of cheap controversy and box office bucks, says Calum Waddell.

Horror movies have often been used as a scapegoat for society’s ills – from the British ban on the old Dracula and Frankenstein movies during the Second World War, to the more recent video nasty furore.

As a result, fans of the genre are commonly on the defensive – making a case for even the most extreme material – just in case a new authority figure appears and tries to take away our copies of The Evil Dead all over again.

Only the most uncritical horror fan can possibly accept everything that is thrown at them, however. It is difficult to deny that many of today’s horror offerings are little more than platforms for pointless, misogynistic violence.

Once, excessive brutality was limited to only the most underground films – usually turgid, shot-on-video rubbish. But now you can catch all sorts of grisly violence at your local multiplex.

This is because more and more first-time directors are eager to court controversy, simply to get their names known and to attract a few box office dollars. The result is films such as Wolf Creek and the American independent opus The Lost – both of which revel in repugnant scenes of pain and violence – most of it enacted on women.

So when will enough be enough?

Vulgar and degrading

Unfortunately, the end is nowhere in sight. Tartan Films recently picked up a Spanish export called H: Diary of a Serial Killer – a vulgar and degrading feature, wherein the title character kidnaps young prostitutes, ties them to a table and starves them for days on end. After assaulting each woman on a daily basis, he ends their ordeal by hacking off their limbs with a chainsaw – the women’s screams tearing through the screen as he does so.

The only logical conclusion after watching this trash is that debut filmmaker Martín Garrido Barón has some very deep issues, or simply wants to create a stir. Curious schmucks who bought tickets will have been witness to nothing more than a simulated snuff flick.

Of course, horror buffs may well bring up such blasts from the past as Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as examples of movies that were once lambasted for pushing the boundaries of onscreen terror, yet are now seen as classics.

But both of these stand up to intelligent analysis, offering a message among the madness. Last House on the Left, in particular, is a smart meditation on Vietnam, as the liberal, anti-war generation faces death at the hands of a grown-up ‘other’. There is nothing being said in Wolf Creek as one hapless woman after another is cut to bits.

Even slightly competent efforts, such as Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses and Bernard Rose’s Snuff Movie still boil down to a catalogue of very gory murders, without justification or reasoning behind their depiction. Compare this to the classy, clever horror efforts that surfaced in the late 90s (Blair Witch, The Sixth Sense and Scream for example).

Horror fans deserve much better, and such obvious shock tactics should not be tolerated. Only the most incompetent filmmaker can really believe that there is no difference between disturbing and disgusting. At its best the horror genre can touch our nerves, make us think and scare us silly – sometimes all at once.

Sliced and diced

Great directors such as David Cronenberg, John Carpenter and George Romero never needed to slice, dice and then snap the spine of a terrified woman (as in Wolf Creek). Yet many of today’s horror releases can’t wait to undress and/or massacre the female characters.

The misogyny that now permeates the genre is apparent even in a film such as Eli Roth’s Hostel, which largely victimises men rather than women. The film defines its actresses (all of them beautiful) entirely by which male character they are having sex with. In one especially gratuitous scene, a nude woman straddles her male partner, allowing the viewer to ogle her, while the man’s body is covered by her own.

Roth’s take on womankind is most graphically illustrated when one character has her right eye burned out. After seeing her mutilated face in a mirror, she jumps to her death in front of a speeding train. In the world of Hostel, a woman’s life is worth nothing without her beauty.

But Hostel is not alone. In fact, finding a recent horror film with a strong, central female role is nigh on impossible. The Devil’s Rejects, The Hills Have Eyes and Reeker – to name just three – all have their actresses do little more than go through the motions: scream, run around, die.

But The Lost is perhaps the worst offender in this respect. Again, every female character is beautiful and marked out only by which man she is sleeping with. But the heavily sexualised violence goes way beyond Hostel, or even Wolf Creek. When the protagonist guts a woman in the early stages of pregnancy, the temptation to leave the cinema was never more tempting.

Endurance test

Of course, the death of lame PG13 horror is welcome, but the genre should still be fun, rather than an empty, misogynistic endurance test. The best place to look for such thrills is now the Far East, where titles as varied as Audition, Dark Water, Dumplings, Old Boy, R-Point and The Host easily out-class and out-scare their Western equivalents.

So what can be done to combat this new wave of brutal misogyny? The filmmakers would argue that they are only providing what the audience demands. So do your research carefully before picking what to see at the cinema, and reject those that delight in the bodies of women – both dead and alive.

Sooner or later, the studios will have to understand why a film like Saw 2 became the biggest scary movie of 2005. That suspenseful but fun shocker was refreshingly indiscriminate in whom it killed, as men and women alike met grisly deaths.

As a form of outlandish escapism, its terrifying rollercoaster ride left audiences feeling exhausted rather than disgusted. Heck, it was even acceptable as a date movie.

A trip to see Wolf Creek, on the other hand, has probably ended more new relationships than any other film in history.

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