Computer Animation Will be the Death of the Horror Movie

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against computer animation--in many movies it works. Though I can't really think of any right now--heh heh.

But when it comes to horror movies, computer animation is a big wet limp noodle.

The amazing thing about horror movies is that the mind is what fills in a huge amount of the fear that makes these movies a success. And thankfully, many of the most successful horror movie filmmakers are AWARE of this and have thus abided by the rule "less is more." They are aware that all they have to do is HINT at something that shakes us to our very core, and our brains will fearfully and tremblingly fill in the rest.

The original The Haunting is one such example, especially in comparison to its garbagey, scum-sucking god-awful remake.



In the original The Haunting, little to nothing scary is shown. Instead, the viewer finds themselves in the position of the main characters, trapped in a room where a loud pounding noise is moving up and down the hallway, unable to see or really KNOW what terrifying entity is making this noise, watching in horror from the eyes of the characters as the doorknob slowly turns and something tries to get in.

In the remake they show too much, making the movie more silly than creepy by having statues in the walls come to life, the house physically attack the main character, etc:



And herein lies the problem. Certain filmmakers get way too geeked out at the prospect of having computer animation at their disposal and end up focusing not so much on how to make the movie as creepy as possible but how to use computer animation as much and as "cleverly" as possible. They decide not to test the limits of our fears, but to test the limits of their computer animation skills, which, more often than not, results in clunky, completely unscary moments--i.e. the transformation scene in the recent werewolf movie Cursed, pretty much the whole remake of The Haunting. The list of recent horror flicks that have succumbed to this goes on and on.

Greanted, I enjoy the occasional over-the-top horror movie--ones that are replete with as much gore and blood and gruesomeness as possible (think of the explosive pus scenes from The Evil Dead or the splatter-fest lawnmower massacre of Dead Alive).

But even the success of these movies is not contingent upon computer animation. It rests on good old fashioned special effects--fake blood, fake pus, fake amputated body-parts.

And even so, for ANY movie to be a truly successful horror film (even something as border-line campy as The Evil Dead, the original of which still creeps me out mightily every time I watch it), the filmmaker has to have that understanding of what it is that makes humans fearful--not so much what IS seen as what elaborate imaginings the mind concocts in the absence of such.

The mind is an amazing thing. It can leave us reeling hours after watching something scary, make us jump at the slightest of noises, concoct elaborate visions of people creeping around the shadowy corners of our apartments. More modern horror filmmakers need to start remembering this and returning to their horror movie roots instead of tumbling into the land of computer animated flops, that way we can stop sitting through the likes of The Haunting (1999). Please, horror filmmakers. I beg you.