Halloween is a holiday like no other. Evolving out of a pagan ritual to scare off monsters and other creepy crawlies, it is more or less unique to the United States. No other country celebrates fear the way we do.
I wonder where the fear went. Hollywood hasn’t made anything truly frightening in a long time. Oh, there’s a great deal of blood and gore and things leaping out at the camera, but that’s not fear-inducing.
Take the “Saw” movies for example. The villain kidnaps people and puts them through karmic torture. That’s it. There’s no logical plot to the movie. No progression of ideas or build up of tension, and it’s not actually scary. It’s gross. Gross inspires disgust, not fear.
Turn back the clock to 1982, and we have an excellent use of gross to create fear — something Hollywood seems to ignore. John Carpenter’s “The Thing” used the most disgusting visuals available at the time to make the movie’s villain seem as inhuman as possible. The movie, unlike “Saw,” has a plot and actually makes use of fear.
Set in a remote research station in Antarctica, a shape shifting and malevolent alien has overtaken some of the researchers and is killing the rest. Carpenter has the audience on the edge of its collective seat, wondering what nightmare will erupt when they uncover who among them is actually the alien.
Rising tension is also gone from movies today. “Paranormal Activity” and “The Unborn” both suffer from this. Events just randomly happen in both movies, with the devil as their alleged connection. But there’s no actual link. It’s like they were shot without a script.
Rising tension is the core of a true scary movie, but not even M. Night Shayamalan seems to understand. “Devil” contains the exact same random events masquerading as a plot.
Movies about mundane creatures inciting fear manage to create a thread of rising tension, such as “Jaws.” It’s something missing that could create a truly frightening movie.
Fear is a base emotion, and it’s wonderful to experience in a movie theater. Even better is when you’re glancing over your shoulder all night looking for something you know isn’t actually there. What we have this year is shock. You’ll jump up in your seat or cover your eyes (same if the movie is gross), but you won’t have that little pit of dread in your stomach.
Hollywood should go back and look at its old successes and then not do remakes of them. “A Nightmare on Elm Street” is being remade and completely misses the point of the first one. An inhuman beast, a dead pedophile, stalks the dreams of its victims, only able to strike when they’re asleep. The new one, from the trailers, looks like it humanizes him. That doesn’t work. Darth Vader went from fear incarnate to whiney little boy in “The Phantom Menace.” It will make Krueger considerably less frightening.
Look at Rob Zombie’s remake of Carpenter’s “Halloween.” In the original, you meet young Michael Myers (the in-movie name of the villain) for one scene. He’s scary because you don’t know why he kills. The new one, where the kid kills more people in the first 5 minutes than the entire original, shows his horrible, bully- and abuse-filled childhood.
The newer “Halloween” manages to make him too inhuman, as well. Without the mask, the original movie’s Myers could pass for anyone. In the new one, he’s a huge, monstrous, invincible gorilla who can’t be killed. He’s no longer frightening if he’s not a man.
Give us a good scare, Hollywood. Make a good, frightening Halloween movie. Please.

Joshua Ensler/News editor
Joshua Ensler can be reached at [email protected].