Tuesday 4/23/24
For me to find a work of horror art compelling, it has to involve the dead, the supernatural, ghosts, coincidence, the imagination, the otherworldly, or some combination thereof. Human on human fare doesn't do it for me with horror. Home invasion films and the like. I have been trying to watch Eden Lake and I just don't care about any of of it at all. Animal horror films and stories also usually mean nothing to me. I don't really consider slasher films horror films. One exception to what I've just said, after a fashion: 1934's The Black Cat.
I watched 1988's Child's Play, which is pretty stupid, but you can see how it would be effective with mid-teens and memorable precisely as this thing that one would recall having seen at the theater--because of the concept. There was some great stuff made in the 1980s, but also a low bar--then again, unlike today, there was at least a bar--with no shortage of cheese in the vicinity of the bar.
The doll-come-to-life idea was not new. The 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone, "The Dummy," had itself been filched from 1945's Dead of Night, but some time had passed and a boy's doll was a further wrinkle. The child actor is quite poor, but I don't suppose it mattered. Would the film have been better if he was good? That's not really the point, is it? The last-second-voodoo-on-the-fly/the-verge-of-death stuff is amusing. I like how the cop stops his pursuit in the toy store so the bad guy can do his whole black magic ceremony. That was helpful.
Also: voodoo stuff usually doesn't interest me either. Nor zombies. I very much like Night of the Living Dead, but it's not really a zombie film to me. It's about the dead--as the title says--and the unknown, and how terrified people react when essentially made to comprise a mini-society--a society on the fly--that has to assess, trouble shoot, and adapt. Think of the main settings of Night of the Living Dead: a cemetery and an old farmhouse. That's dead and ghost stuff, not zombie stuff.
