This last weekend the horror film IT, based on the best-selling novel by Stephen King, took the domestic box office by storm. Over the three-day weekend the horror film made almost $120 million dollars at the domestic box office. For a fall release, this is an incredible number that shattered the record for a horror movie opening, not to mention an R-rated horror film opening. The film is being praised for many things, the characters, the acting and its adherence to the source material are all being lauded as a great step forward in the horror film genre. However, another question must be asked, is this record-breaking domestic opening for IT actually a good thing? Or does the mammoth success of this film actually do more harm than help the horror genre?
A Less Than Scary Horror Film
For the record, I am not saying that the film itself is a bad movie or that it was poorly made. However, there appears to be room for an argument that it is not a real horror film but is in fact a mainstream psychological thriller. Take a look at the following photos, they are a collage of reviews from the aggregated review site, Rotten Tomatoes. I used reviews from critics rather than the overall aggregated score and it is of note that most of these reviews are positive and not negative.
Now did you see what flowed through these reviews, even the positive ones? It was that the film itself was not all that scary for a horror movie. In fact it seems people were enjoying the film more for its humor and coming-of-age story than for its horror. Johnny Mata, amateur horror film historian and major aficionado of old horror classics going way back to the 1930s, has been posting on his Facebook page that he felt like he was one of the only people who didn’t like the movie IT. I decided to ask him a few questions about what exactly it was about IT that he disliked. The following quote by Mr. Mata illustrates just what seems to be the problem with the film, a view that was shared by a lot of the critic reviews.
When we first see Pennywise he seemed like he is trying too hard to be menacing looking which to me gave it a cheesy vibe rather than a creepy vibe. It did nothing to make me feel scared of him. Then when the death scene or scenes of Pennywise doing his thing, were exaggerated to the point where I’m like is this supposed to be scary? So much cgi where it didn’t feel realistic in the movie. I found it to be more of a comedy as well since every five minutes there seemed to be a joke line in between the dialogue. More people were laughing in the theater I was in than being scared
He went on to say
The kid actors were awesome and the movie could have been just of those children learning about growing up, but then Pennywise just randomly pops up at times and does a scare and is gone. But none of the scares were scary. I was trying to think of one moment that really got me into it but nothing did. It felt like an episode of goosebumps. They didn’t build up the horror to feel like OMG ahhh. No scares just snooze
The Mainstreaming Of Horror
Looking at what Mr. Mata stated and seeing the reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, it is obvious that IT was a victim of “Mainstreaming”. That is where a popular sub-genre is taken and sanitized for mainstream audiences. This was seen in the late ‘80s and ‘90s with the Science-Fiction genre which used to be small and niche. That changed with films such as Jurassic Park and Independence Day which forever altered Science fiction cinema (Star Wars is left out due to it being widely considered as fantasy/space opera rather then science fiction). After those films came out, all sci-fi films were altered by studios to be “crowd pleasers” in order to bring in mega box office earnings. Another example of this is the Mummy franchise. Until the late ‘90s, The Mummy was strictly horror. Then came the Brendan Fraser edition of the film and it was changed into an action adventure with horror overtones. This brought in a large box office and mainstream crowds. The producers of the most recent iteration of The Mummy had expressed a desire to make a smaller horror film to take the mummy back to its roots, however, it was obvious they were overruled by the studio and we got the problematic film that arrived in theaters a few months ago.
When a genre like Horror is mainstreamed to reach a larger audience, it loses a part of itself. Some aspects are not allowed to be included due to it not having “mainstream appeal”. This was seen in the last two installments of the Alien Franchise (Prometheus, Covenant) that had been a medium success. The Horror series was retooled into a tent-pole crowd pleaser (with disastrous results). Another franchise that was was “mainstreamed” is the horror film Texas Chainsaw 3D which saw Leatherface as more of a dark antihero out for revenge rather than a deranged killer.
Will IT Destroy The Horror Genre?
IT may have been a well-constructed film but it was not a well-constructed Horror film. It felt like the studio decided to copy the best aspects of Stranger Things and throw in a few horror elements to make sure mainstream audiences got a “fright” from it. Now that IT has made almost three times its budget back in the first weekend, we can expect studios to make all horror films in the future like IT, throwing in humor, action, minor scares and nostalgia, while leaving out the truly horrifying which is a trademark of the genre. Hollywood studios are nothing if not predictable and now that IT has experienced mainstream crossover success, studios will be leery of green-lighting smaller horror films that don’t appeal to mass audiences. Similarly, George A. Romero, father of the zombie genre, complained a few years ago that The Walking Dead’s success had mainstreamed zombies so much that he had trouble getting any of his niche zombie films produced by studios since they did not have crossover appeal.
I hope this will not happen to Horror. I hope that studios will allow horror to flourish and be its ow thing. However, I fear that Pennywise, the Dancing Clown, may have danced on his own genre’s grave.
Do you agree? Was IT a landmark for the horror genre? Or its end?
