Despite the laundry list of rules horror movies like Scream tell us there are, there really are only three: 1. Hot women, black guys, and older cops don’t fare so well, 2. The best person to be is a little kid, since Hollywood executives typically don’t let them die even if they might be in serious peril for most of the movie, 3. R rated horror movies are scarier than PG-13 ones.
Well, rule 3 might be coming to an end.
PG-13 horror used to be a joke. Tame, watered down stuff made and released with the hope of appealing to a wider audience of casual horror fans (i.e. pussies) hoping to get by well enough on date night or 14 year old kids who couldn’t get into R rated horror movies after their parents dropped them off on Friday night. They were big at the box office, but they were not, by anyone’s estimation of the word, scary.
The real juice was in blood curdling R-rated horror that would keep you from eating for a week. The general idea being that truly scary horror movies had to be rancid, nightmarish stuff incapable of getting a PG-13.
Now that ideal is changing. Starting with the runaway smash hit The Sixth Sense (no one’s idea of scary, but the only horror movie to get a best picture nomination in years), PG-13 horror started cementing itself as quality stuff like 1408 and The Others. These were films that used the internal hell their main characters were in instead of an external madman chopping up boring teenagers with not a lot going on. It wasn’t scarier than R-rated but it was technically better. Then came The Ring and we began to see PG-13 gradually raise its game.
Last year alone the two best horror movies I saw were Devil (an underrated—unfairly dismissed because it was produced by M. Night Shymalan, the former Godfather of PG-13 horror in The Sixth Sense—gem you probably missed but should seek out) and The Last Exorcism, a deceptively simple movie that starts out on a clear Summer day as a non-believing preacher goes to do another “sham” exorcism but gradually winds up in a nightmare. Both of these movies dealt with the devil in subtle, twisty ways the straightforward, mindless gore of the Saw movies could never hope to.
Then take into account that just this month, we have the completely unnecessary, 600th slasher film that brings nothing new to the table in Scream 4, and it’s rated R, but I haven’t heard a single person say this movie scared them. They say they felt bored, and like they’d seen it all before (perhaps the reason PG-13 horror has caught on is because in an age of outrageous torture porn it’s the only thing people haven’t seen). Then I’ve heard some of the same people say how disturbing and unshakeable Insidious—you guessed it, PG-13 horror—was. And that movie was directed by the architect of torture porn, the original Saw director James Wan, whose conversion to moodier PG-13 horror maybe tells you all you need to know.
Speaking of Saw, it’s no coincidence last year was supposedly the final installment of that played-out franchise (opening every Halloween like clockwork for years, the Tyler Perry of horror films) and this year that Halloween slot will be taken over by Paranormal Activity, the new king franchise of horror. And yet the first Paranormal Activity was only R rated on a technicality: language. That’s right, the current most profitable film of all time didn’t have any violence onscreen and was only rated R for a few uses of the word fuck. The same could be said for the former most profitable film of all time: The Blair Witch Project.
I think the key to PG-13 horror’s success is because it can’t show the things R-rated horror can. By not having the freedom to shove blood and guts down your throat, it pushes the violence into the shadows…the place people fear it the worst.
You have a good point…never really thought about it before now