I love horror films. Spooky horror films. Gruesome horror films. Paranormal horrors. Horrors with aliens, horrors with demons, horrors with axe-wielding serial killers. That wasn't always the case, though.
I remember as a child being so freaked out by the presence of a rented VHS copy of The Exorcist in the house that I literally couldn’t sleep. I was so unnerved by the stories I’d heard - I can’t even remember who told me, or how they knew - about how William Friedkin’s masterpiece was supposedly 'cursed’, that it kept me awake all night worrying about evil juju being brought to our house via the portal of doom that was Xtra-Vision in Blanchardstown Village.
I don’t know when I started to warm to the idea of scary films, but they gradually held less clout over my sleeping patterns. And yes, I did eventually manage to watch The Exorcist and all of the other classics of the genre. In my late teens, I found a sub-category that I really loved (and which remains my favourite): folk horror. The Wicker Man is a film that I could watch weekly for the rest of my life. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a rewatch of those old BBC Ghost Stories, many of them adapted from M.R. James and Charles Dickens stories (A Warning to the Curious and The Signalman are especially brilliant). Recent favourites in that realm have included Robert Eggers’ The Witch and Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar; anything, basically, that involves paganism, superstition, rituals or people generally acting weird and/or creepy.
what they're looking at is pretty horrible.
There was one film I saw in my early twenties that proved a lot more disturbing than it should’ve been, though. These days it has spawned a ridiculous number of sequels, but the first Paranormal Activity film remains an incredibly effective horror film. Like The Blair Witch Project, when it was first released it was very new: this was before the found footage genre was overdone, so there was still a novelty to it.
I remember seeing it on a trip to New York in 2009, before it was widely released; a friend had tipped me off that an independent film had been doing well on limited release around the States, knowing I was a horror fan. Watching it in a packed midnight screening with an American audience - known for being vocal in cinemas - was an experience I’ll never forget. In fact, I didn’t forget it for a long time; when I got home from that trip, I literally slept with the light on for months afterwards, terrified that a phantom hand was going to rip the duvet off my bed at any second and my dreams plagued by visions of someone standing at my bedroom door. There are few films that manage to get into your head in that way - although the films that followed it were pretty poor in comparison.
That’s the problem these days: Hollywood doesn’t know when to stop flogging a dead horse if there’s money to be made. Horror sequels rarely improve upon the original, mostly because you’re aware of the premise and have an idea, however vague, of what’s coming next. That said, I’ll probably still watch that new Exorcist: Believer film at some point. I just won’t keep a copy of it in my house. Just in case, like.
