State of Horror Address: The Bad Horror Movie

     It was Aristotle who stipulated that what makes something bad is failing at its function; and it was Jim Wynorski who retorted that what makes something bad is not having enough tits. But there's no such thing as 'enough tits,' so that definition is useless. And if the horror movie has any one function, I don't know what it is.

    What I do know is there are some filmmakers who, like a Russian bride after the wedding, just don't care. They make movies for the same reason God makes yeast infections: just because. They make movies like they make bowel-movements, imagining no audience at all.

    One such type of filmmaker is what I and his mother call 'the DeCoteau.' David DeCoteau's movies are made on miniscule budgets and guaranteed to turn profit by means of Netflix distribution deals. DeCoteau distributes these movies to put food on his table and cocks in his mouth. If he ever makes a good film, as he sometimes does, it is thanks to the screenwriter and Kamapuaa, the mighty Pig God of Hawaii. It's certainly not because he has any desire to keep you entertained.

    Another type is the middle class white kid who's gotten so bored of World of Warcraft and not having sex, that he gets a few buddies together in mom's backyard to shoot a movie. Rather than concluding the result of his hobby, much like his Star Trek quilts and Naruto fanfics, is best hidden beneath his Final Fantasy 'doujinshi' porn comics, he decides to try distrubute it as a real film. This is possible thanks to indiscriminate distributors like Brain Damage Films, which carries the full oeuvre of virgins like Todd Sheets. Unless you're the 'director's' grandmother, these films offer you nothing. Like a smooth, prehensile turd, they're fun to make, but no fun to watch.

    Some filmmakers really do care, however. But like true cowboys, they can't let you know they care. Quite the opposite, they go out of their way to make you think they don't care. They give their movies ostentatiously bad titles that impishly dare you to hope they'll be good, titles like, "Big Tit Schoolgirls in the Playground of the Dead," or "RoboPimp Flamethrower vs. the Bible Belt Hookers." Sometimes these titles, like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Hobo with a Shotgun, and Schindler's List are a cue that you'll be getting cheaply-made, tongue-in-cheek entertainment. But often, the titles are the best part of the movie, as in the case of Bikini Girls on Ice. And this way, when their movie does suck, they can play dumb, DeCoteau, or dead, and say they weren't even trying.

    Finally, there are the filmmakers who, unlike Rhett Butler, give a damn and an unnecessary urine sample. And often these filmmakers, like a clumsy but earnest lover, will hit the right spots and transport you to horror movie heaven. We're not interested in them now. We're interested in the earnest lovers who get us wet and sticky in the wrong places, and makes us laugh when we should be moaning; the heroes whose indelicate probing has caused me to beat the hell out of this metaphor. In this category we have our fertilizer salesmen like Hal P. Warren, who saw The Wizard of Oz and said, "I could do this with a broken wind-up Bolex and my knobby-kneed drinking buddy." And transvestites like Ed Wood who wrote the most epic sci-fi horror since Little Women and tried to make it with ten bucks and a 98% dead Bela Lugosi.

    Yes, this is the category of filmmaker who is full of ideas and passion, so much passion it has to beat the crap out of know-how, talent, and common sense to make extra room. These are ideas so grand that they can only be realized with ineptitude. But from the cousins of ineptitude and pennilessness come the inbred children of strangeness and uniqueness. Plan 9 from Outer Space, Troll 2, Manos: The Hands of Fate, The Chooper, Blood Orgy of the She-Devils, and, of course, Intercessor: Another Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare are bad movies, but brilliantly entertaining in their earnest zeal to excite, shock, and terrify with stuff that isn't remotely exciting, shocking, or terrifying.

    At the end of the day, the beginning, even sometimes during the middle of the day while eating a sandwich, horror fans are an accepting crowd. Yes, we ask to be entertained, sometimes shocked, frightened, horrified, maybe even intellecually engaged--but really, the bare minimum we ask is some passion. When the filmmakers don't even care--and we know, not through our ubiquitous bathroom cameras, but through intuition--that's what makes a bad horror film. We just want to know you love us. You don't have to say it; we just have to feel it.

In memory of Ray Dennis Steckler