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vii inTroducTion They Don’t Make ’Em Like They Used To On the Rhetoric of Crisis and the Current State of American Horror Cinema —Steffen Hantke a decade of aMerican horror filM: The PeSSiMiST’S view Even though the horror genre has been fed by tributaries from many national literary traditions—from German Romanticism to French surrealism and South American magical realism—and even though horror cinema has prospered and developed its unique forms of expression in many film industries around the globe, it is in the United States and in the American film industry that horror, for as long as cinema itself has existed, has been a staple genre, a consistently profitable endeavor, an audience favorite, and a richly diverse form of artistic expression for writers and directors. More than any other film industry around the world, Hollywood—aided by intrepid and independently minded filmmakers around and beyond its margins—has created horror films that have come to define the genre.Its cinematic reinventions of characters from outside its own national culture—think of Dracula, courtesy of Bela Lugosi, or Frankenstein’s creature, brought to you by Boris Karloff—have supplanted their respective originals in the collective pool of pop-culture images. Up to the present day, horror film directors from around the world tend to end up—sooner or later in their careers, and either by choice or by economic necessity—on the American shores. For fans and critics of horror film, America looms large, a touchstone of the genre at its finest. Ask fans, however, and they will tell you that American horror film in the last decade—from roughly the mid-1990s, through the turn of the century, and far into the first decade of the new millennium—has fallen into a slump. While horror film is doing just fine elsewhere, American horror film is in crisis. Not that no more horror films are being made; on the contrary, as far as popularity and profitability go, the American horror film seems near the top of its game as Hollywood lavishes a steady stream of horror films upon its audience. With the exception of a few inTroducTion viii high-profile films of blockbuster proportion—one might think of the Will Smith vehicle I am Legend in 2007 or the films in the Resident Evil, Underworld, and Blade franchises—most of these films operate at mid-level budgets. They tend to perform below the top-fifty grossing films of each year but are reliably recouping their moderate production costs in foreign markets and through ancillary release via cable and DVD sales and rentals.1 These films never fail to find an audience, but most of them just aren’t any good—or so popular opinion has it.Apparently,even those who go to see them are not heading out to the Cineplex every weekend with high expectations. There is a sense of fatigue or outright dissatisfaction with Hollywood horror these days.Who is doing the complaining? And what exactly are the complaints? Do they have any substance? And even if they don’t, what do they mean? From a pessimist’s point of view, the last ten years have seen American horror film at its worst. As one subgeneric cycle followed another with ever-increasing rapidity, the genre on the whole was in decline. When exactly this slump began is a matter of opinion. The Wikipedia entry on horror film, which, while noting recent developments in the genre past 2005, pinpoints the “start of the 2000s” as the moment that “saw the horror genre going into a slump as movies dealing with the supernatural had mild but not memorable success”(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hor ror_film).2 The critic David Church reaches back even further, opening his survey of American horror film since The Silence of the Lambs with this statement:“As the 1980s came to a close, the American horror film seemed locked into an endless loop of formulaic repetition,” sounding a note of skepticism that would reverberate for many fans into the 1990s with its predominant subgenre of horror, the socalled neo-slasher (Offscreen.com 2006). Successful with mainstream audiences but received with apprehension by fans and critics, Wes Craven’s Scream, released in 1996, was—depending on who you asked—either the best or the worst thing to happen to American horror film. According to the critical voices, Scream’s recycling of “classic” precursors transformed the more politically attuned horror film of the previous generation...

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