O Horror! Where art thou?

Last weekend, I watched The Exorcist. Twice. On TV with ads. The movie is just brilliant (watched it at least 10 times). With no cheap gimmicks and scares, or a some mythical logic that usually brings down a horror move, The Exorcist excels on several aspects - right from excellent writing to some fine performances and the script being realistic and surprisingly serene for a horror movie. Thoroughly deserved the Best Picture Oscar nomination (I believe the only horror movie besides Alien to have achieved that distinction). The movie nicely balances between the aspect of faith and science, and shows how both hasn't got a clue when something unexplainable happens.

I miss horror movies. For a kid who was shit scared of anything that moves in the dark, I'm surprised with myself that I ended up liking this genre. I had fever for 2 days after I watched Evil Dead! Somehow, I had grown out of the "fear" aspect of this genre and was more attracted to the "thrills" and "surprises" of a horror movie. It's got something to do with my brother, who used every opportunity to scare the hell outta me and made me yell - "Mom! He is doing it again!!"

Some of my favorite horror movies continue to be The Exorcist, Alien (by Ridley Scott) and Aliens (by James Cameroon), The Omen, The Evil Dead.

There were some really good comedy horrors as well. Evil Dead 2 and Evil Dead 3 : Army of Darkness were extremely hilarious (in spite of some nice suspense moments). My other favorite comedy horror is Peter Jackson's lesser known Braindead (one of the first zombie comedies).

Just when I thought I had run out of good horror movies, I watched Blair Witch Project, a couple of  years ago (the movie was released in 1999). Top Notch! My roommate - K and I had started watching the movie after dinner and slowly the movie was getting creepy and it was freaking scary. We switched on the lights, opened the doors and windows (like that would matter) and continued watching the movie. We couldn't sleep all night and were discussing the movie for the next two days.

The last decade or so haven't given us great horror movies that the 70s and the 80s did. Horror nowadays is all about torture/extremely disgusting violence. They fail to generate that chill-in-the-spine feeling..if you know what I mean. Some honorable mentions are The Ring, Drag me to Hell, 1408, The Sixth Sense, The Signs & The Paranormal Activity.

I sometimes wonder if it's the information overload and the emerging atheism towards the existence of a supernatural power, have brought down the interest in horror movies. Well, we've got some gems from the previous century. We'll live with that. May be Sam Raimi should direct one more Evil Dead movie.

P.S: There were amazingly good Tamil horror movies as well - which as a kid would have been quite scary - but now they are hilarious. My Dear Lisa, 13am Number Veedu, Uruvam, Vaa Arugil Vaa, Naalaya Manithan, Athisaya Manithan etc are some of the Tamil horror movies that still have a cult following! But of course, I'm not going to talk about that movie where a psycho who disguises like an Owl kills people in a movie set. My Dad spent a good portion of the movie comforting me outside the theater and my mom for the next 2 days due to my high fever.