Commander of Awesome;812536 wrote:Growing up I was a huge horror movie fan, I've since lost some interest. Maybe its just me, but horror movies of the 70-80s were just better.
This. Is. True.
Older horror films had a certain grimy realism to them. Now, it's nothing but attractive model-type people and half the movies are remakes of the classics, anyway. Or horrible SyFy Original ripoffs of them. Although those at least are good for comic relief.
Like, I rented Day of the Dead (generally considered the least great of Romero's original trilogy) a few years back. In the three days I had it, I watched it 5-6 times. A couple years ago, I got a free copy of Land of the Dead. I watched it the night I got it...and haven't since. There's just something lacking. Like a subtlety in the writing. Like, with Day of the Dead, you had more complicated character conflicts (like, the soldiers were assholes...but they had a point considering the head scientist was crazy and using their corpses as food to train his pet zombie), while in Land of the Dead, everything with the exception of Cholo was more of a black and white good vs. evil thing.
That fit with his other two older movies, too. In Night of the Living Dead, one of the neat facets was that, in retrospect, the jerkass guy who was painted as a coward was 100% right. If they stayed hidden in the basement, they'd have had a good chance of being saved by the redneck zombie-killing guys (if they didn't get shot like the black dude did). The black guy was heroic and made the "manly" choices, but each one seemed to lead to someone getting killed. In Dawn of the Dead, the whole biker/zombie apocalypse at the end might not have happened if the heroes didn't suddenly enter "NO THIS IS OUR MALL FUCK YOU" possessiveness.
You just don't see depth like that in horror that much any more. Everything's so cliched, it's just sad.
