The Horror!

Watching the penultimate episode of Rome last night, it struck me that it’s the only new drama I’m actually watching on television right now. Even more odd given that when the first season was screened it took me a long time to really get into the show.


It may seem very silly at times, but Rome certainly enlivens the stories I remember from the one Latin class a week that was dedicated to Roman History. Although the lashings of sex and violence must have been something the Latin Master purposefully omitted.

As for everything else in the schedules, Jekyll I gave up on when it returned on Saturday. The set may have stayed on but after a few minutes I dropped the volume and stopped paying attention until it was time for The Thick Of It.

Even House, which I regularly turn to only holds my attention when the titular character is having one of his bastard moments. Shark is just as disappointing because James Wood has dialled down on the utter bastard-o-meter and comes across as almost cuddly on some occasions. And that’s just not right.

The past few nights, after a weekend when my sleep pattern went completely out of whack, I’ve been revisiting various DVDs that I hadn’t watched for a while. Monday night, I’m still not sure why exactly, I felt in the mood for a horror film. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much on the shelves here.

Alien, John Carpenter’s The Thing, An American Werewolf in London, 28 Days Later, Near Dark, Fallen, Shaun of the Dead. That was it. If I had shuffled through the pile of films that came free with The Times or The Sunday Times, I’d have found The Wicker Man and Don’t Look Now. But I didn’t.

Actually, because of the depth of the bookcase being twice that of a DVD case, on most shelves there is a second row of discs behind the spines I can see. Most of the films were at the back and I forgot I had them. So from what I could see there was only Alien, The Thing and Fallen to choose from. And The Mummy and Van Helsing*.

It surprised me I didn’t have any more horror films. Most all of the ones on the shelves cross genres. Fallen, which went into the DVD player is more a supernatural thriller than straight horror. What about pure undiluted horror?

Thinking about it, I can’t think of one available on DVD. It’s not that I’m a big scaredy-cat wuss and don’t watch horror films. I don’t watch them because a whole lot of the time the stories don’t do it for me. The characters are usually idiots and the stories maybe not that well thought through.

Scream, for instance, was interesting up until all the kids were introduced. At that point, along with the nudge-nudge, wink-wink post-modernism it became so irritating I wanted them herded together and done in, all in one fell swoop. Almost all the other slasher/torture flicks seem to be made by people who really have issues they need to sort out as quickly as possible.

I watched The Blair Witch Project once. Boy they were morons. Listen, if you get lost in the woods and there’s a river, follow the river downstream. You’ll find your way back to civilisation. I know you’re supposed to suspend disbelief, but it would need a gravity-free environment for that one.

I know horror films find an audience and they can be done on the cheap, so if you want to make a low budget movie, this is the genre bouncing up and down at the back saying, “Me, sir! Pick me sir, please!” But I don’t think a lot of them have enough thought put in to get past the cheap thrills and gore fest.

What available horror film proves me wrong?


* Some of the DVDs here were bought for “research purposes”. Van Helsing was certainly one of those. Same for 28 Days Later, which was in a Woolworths sale up the road and cheaper than an M+S sandwich. After watching it once, I really missed that sandwich.