Bloodbath and Beyond

Now for something completely different, instead of simply reviewing my latest watch (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 2003 version) I'm going to talk about the horror genre in general. My point of view is this, I love horror, I love having the living daylights scared out of me, one of my ambitions in life is to one day create a piece of cinema that is utterly terrifying.
The thing that irritates me is that not enough people actually bother to watch horror, simply because they don't want to be freaked out, not even a little bit. When I started watching horror, I was exactly the same, the first time I ever thought, right, I'm gonna sit down and watch a horror movie I put it off for days, I just would not watch it, granted the first genuinly scary film I ever watched was completely by accident, this was alien of course, it was on channel 4 late at night when I was about 13/14, but I'm not going to get into that. The first movie was Texas Chainsaw Massacre a few weeks later, eventually after staying up for a long while pondering I watched it at about oh, 3AM, and it scared the shit out of me. I lost sleep every god damn night after that for a week scared I was going to hear the gas powered cackle of the tooled up harbinger's weapon of choice, it is the single scariest film I have ever seen. I didn't watch another horror movie for a while after that.
What I did do was think about the genre all the time, I thought about the rush I got from watching it, and I thought, hey, I loved that rush, but is it really worth spending a weak withdrawn from the world because you're so freaked out, only just in my opinion. But I came to another conclusion, if you watch enough of it you can dissolve that factor, I mean, you can't spend a night totally freaked out by the thought of Michael Myers, Leatherface, Pinhead, The Blair Witch, Hannibal Lector and The Candyman all at the same fucking time can you? Eventually you become totally desensitized to the aftermath because you're used to it, but you still get the experience, so I did this, I had an entire month of one new horror movie per night, in March 2006, it broke down like this:
1st: The Blair Witch Project
2nd: The Hills Have Eyes
3rd: Psycho
4th: Candyman
5th: Scream
6th: When A Stranger Calls
7th: Halloween
8th: The Thing
9th: The Fog
10th: Carrie
11th: Misery
12th: The Shining
13th: Pet Semetary
14th: An American Werewolf in London
15th: Suspiria
16th: Deep Red
17th: Opera
18th: The Secret Window
19th: The Ring
20th: Ringu
21st: Audition
22nd: 28 Days Later
23rd: Night Of The Living Dead
24th: Dawn Of The Dead
25th: Dawn Of The Dead (the other one)
26th: The Evil Dead
27th: Hellraiser
28th: Se7en
29th: Pulse
30th: Peeping Tom
31st: The Innocents
I got all this information from the spreadsheet list I wrote that I still have, the only other times I was ever this organised where periods of coursework and exams, this was my deepest darkest secret, I have never told anybody I did this, I never spoke of it at school and I made sure my parents never new, I don't own most of the films I watched, I worked out a system of when they were on TV, borrowing and buying cheap videos in town markets because those people didn't give a fuck about age ratings, it is by a long way the strangest thing I've ever done, I don't like to brag about it, people think I'm a film nerd now but at the time I thought they'd think I was insane. You could call it some kind of conditioning treatment but I called it one of the greatest months ever, simple as that.
I did inform my cousin of this, him being the only person whose opinion of film I trusted at the time, he said it was an interesting idea but didn't seem to care all that much, not that this effected the little voice in my head, which was yelling 'YOU'RE A MOTHERFUCKING GCSE STUDENT WHO JUST FINISHED HIS MOCKS! WHY THE FUCK IS THE MOST ORGANISED THING IN YOUR LIFE A MONTH LONG HORROR MOVIE ROTA!?' I ignored it for the most part but I've been afraid to tell people about it since then none the less.
My method was very extreme but boy oh boy did it work, I can comfortably watch horror movies now any time I like, it also helped my understand that the classics are legendary and the remakes (of which there are many) are shit and should be avoided at all costs. Most of the time this is true, because most horror movies that are excellent touch on a new idea that creates tension, horror movies are some of the most original around, people say that action movies are appreciated not for plot but for the quality of action, in my humble opinion it is rare that an action movie achieves such a goal. Horror on the other hand often works from a deceptively simple plot line, I dunno about you but when I watched Die Hard I wasn't absorbed by it at all, it's great but action rarely sucks you into a movie. Fear does. Halloween had me glued to the screen for the whole thing, there's no experience quite like a decent horror movie, but to get the most out of them you have to time when you watch them, if you watch them on too frequent of a basis you start to get sick of them, too rarely and you'll always remain freaked out after as I said before.
So this is my advice, every now and again plan a day for it, just say 'I'm gonna watch Scream tonight' knowing you're going to be watching horror keeps you in the correct mind set all day and brings some basic level of excitment and build up, do it unexpectedly and you'll lose sleep. Even better is when you actively make an occasion of it, invite some people over, set the tone etc. Discussing how scared you were post film is great fun, a good one is when the girl/boy you were clinging to presents their hand to everyone else to show how hard you were squeezing it. Oh and make sure no big event that has you all nervey is nearby, I watched The Blair Witch Project 2 nights before GCSE results, bad move.
The garbled point I am trying to make here is that Horror movies, when watched correctly are an amzing experience, just make sure you follow the above advice to get the most out of them. Oh yeah and the remake of Chainsaw is excellent, the following remakes are of a good quality:

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The Hills Have Eyes

The Ring

Dawn Of The Dead

Thir13een Ghosts