The 2000s: Horrible Times, Wonderful Horror (Except for the Goddamned Zombies)

The Beginnings of My End-of-the-Decade McBloviations: The Internet as the Enemy, French Horror, Underground Atrocities, the Vagification of Vampires and the Death of the Living Dead.

Right about this time, ten years ago, my sphincter violently clenched shut at least a dozen times a day in response to one loathsome anti-wit after another who’d cock a phony grin and wonder aloud: “So this is the year 2000? What the heck, man? WHERE ARE THE FLYING CARS?”

And now, in retrospect, I wish I would have just let fly and exploded feces, right there on the spot, each and every time.

A knowing wink-wink and/or elbow nudge-nudge, implied or explicit, typically followed the “FLYING CARS” quip, and the specific punchline may have been “teleportation” on occasion, and numerous salty yuk-meisters substituted “fuck” for “heck” (prompting me, just this minute, to realize that that euphemism is actually an amalgam of “hell” and “fuck” and, therefore, our mightiest pseudo-obscenity).

But the infantile fluid-flinging was on the wall. Or more specifically, it was on the Internet, which meant it was everywhere, all the time, in everything. And then it was all anybody could talk—not talk about, mind you, just … talk.

The larger implication of the “FLYING CARS” idiocy crapping up everywhere on mass auto-repeat was the ultimate catastrophe of human communication that this miserable race has thus far devised: the internet “meme” and its attendant assaults on adult discourse, both spoken and written— e.g., “LOL!”, “WANT!”, “DO NOT WANT!”, “OM NOM NOM NOM!”, “OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA!”, and grown men punctuating sentences with smiley faces.

In keeping exactly with pronouncing the name of the department store Target as the fake en francais (and therefore fancy) “Tar-zhay”, the dribbling meme-goloid always, always presents his nugget as though he has just thought it up on the spot.

Consider phrases such as the prefix “SUCK IT, [whoever or whatever]!”, the suffix “['Go do something' or 'See you somewhere'], BITCHES!” and the grotesque incorrectness: “Glee really amazingly captures the American high-school experience.”

But … ah, Jesus Jim Caviezel Christ (there’s a timely outburst. Credit me). Who cares?

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When I sat down, I intended to write about stuff I liked in the 2000s. Inevitably, the path by which time marches on is plowed by stuff that irritates me to the point of obliteration. Onward, hard, and straight up my violently clenched-shut sphincter, forever and ever—there goes history and human evolution.

Alas…

Movies got better in the 2000s than they’d been since the early ’80s. I mean that in an overall sense and, specifically, genre by genre.

Clearly this was the Decade of the Documentary (my faves: Capturing the Friedmans, Crazy Love, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Mayor of the Sunset Strip) but, for me, I revel in this golden age of horror like none other I’ve ever lived through.

Much rage gets directed, and most times deservedly, toward Hollywood’s horror remake machine, but the big studios also gave us a better Freddy vs. Jason than could have ever been imagined.

And, mark my prognostication, this decade’s “torture porn” will be to tomorrow’s horror fans what vintage “slasher flicks” are to us: universally reviled on arrival, nostalgically beloved once they’re gone—and then reevaluated by all as evidence of “the good old days.”

I also believe that the original Hostel (2005) ripples fitfully with greatness and that the Saw series stands as one of horror’s most original and thought-provoking fright cycles. Saw III (2006), in and of itself, is a classic of the form.

(Want to fight about? Contact William Bennett of UK noise-abominators Whitehouse and tell him that he and I are wrong about Jigsaw’s implications/invocations of the  God of the Old Testament.)

Hollywood also opened distribution channels, perhaps fleetingly, to smaller and medium-sized productions, flooding fan sites with frequently admirable product to review and Netflix with myriad rental opportunities.

Cases in point: Dimension Extreme, the annual Afterdark Films to Die For festivals, Showtime’s Masters of Horror series and even NBC’s Fear Itself. 

As with everything, the misses outweighed even the bunts but, most importantly, horror had whole new ballparks in which to swing its various implements of destruction.

And the most home-run-producing of those venues, astonishingly, was France.

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Seemingly from nowhere, the country of Cahiers du Cinema revealed the demon horns beneath its beret with High Tension (2003), Frontiers (2007) and, ultimately, two of the greatest horror films ever made: Inside (2007) and Martyrs (2008).

The former, about a 10-months-pregnant gamine relentlessly ripped into by Beatrice Dalle (diabolically gorgeous as she’s all done up like a Dario Argento witch), is a visceral terror-fest that came as close as any entertainment ever has to actually making me throw up.

For real.

Hot vomit bubbled repeatedly at the top of my throat throughout Inside and, during a climactic sequence set on a staircase, my stomach sent forth a depth charge it took all my power to contain.

Martyrs, by contrast, is a heavy, heady downer. 

If Inside should never be watched by expectant mothers, then maybe Martyrs should never be watched by anyone. But don’t you miss it.

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As evidenced by my initial bloviations on how the Internet has destroyed inventive, or even grown-up, articulation, I have long called to task Karl Marx’s pronouncement: “There is only freedom of the press for those who own one.”

The supposition in that sentiment, of course, is that it would be a just a jim dandy thing if everyone owned his own press. Well, now we all do and let’s look at the results, O Lords of LOL, shall we?

Bleccch.

HOWEVER, I’ve also believed that Horror People are superior to the Great Om-Nom-Nom-Noms of Existence (which is to say, everyone else), and nowhere is that more borne out as truth than in the explosion of underground scare films made possible by handheld and online technology.

There are now nearly as many horror filmmakers as there are horror fans and, unlike rock music or indie movies or all the other art forms that have sprung up into do-it-yourself abundance, their output average for engaging, worthwhile productions is shockingly above the norm.

Much attention is grabbed by zero-budget horror’s most barbaric and (literally) appalling atrocities—savage spelunks along the lines of Murder-Set-Pieces (2004) and the August Underground movies. As exercises in pure repulsion, they do pack an unpleasant punch. There is something there.

But while any flip-cam goof cane simply fake rape and mutilation (most often happening simultaneously), only genuine talents can make it count for something—a message, an impact, even a memorable experience.

On that front, the St. Louis micro-studio Wicked Pixel has consistently trafficked in the outer fringes of unconscionable depravity while creating powerful work. 

Wicked Pixel’s standout accomplishment remains Scrapbook (2000), which features Emily Haack supplying the most fearless performance I’ve ever seen in a horror movie, and which comes drenched in the real-life tragedy of writer-star Tommy Biondo dying before the film reached the public.

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The handful of horror moments that did capture the mass imagination were not, let us say, my cup of used-tampon tea.

Sweden’s “bluude”-pudding Let the Right One In (2008) works for a while as lonely kid study and an impressive exercise in tone, but then it collapses into a stupid revenge blowout, being sure to get precious and predictable along the way.

Paranormal Activity (2009) is an utter con. “AIEEEEEEEEE!” is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, a legitimate reaction to the sight on a movie screen of a blanket moving three inches.

The height of subtlety and cleverness on HBO’s True Blood is a sign during the (disgusting, “dirty” delta-blues-driven) opening credits that reads “God Hates Fangs”. It’s all downhill from that groan-inducing low. Way, way, way downhill.

Twilight is simply a place I cannot even consider. Can you?

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Most emphatically, the 2000s is the before-and-after demarcation of when zombies, ironically, up and died as workable horror entities.

The Dawn of the Dead remake (2004), shockingly, was pretty good, but I’ve made a point (as with Juno) to never, ever see Shaun of the Dead (2004). It could be that I’m missing out on something I might enjoy. Who knows? Not me! 

And I never will.

This is because zombies are now simply … accessories.

Hungry, lumbering corpses once served as a chilling emblem of life (literally) out of balance. The modern zombie, by contrast, is a nonsense “undead” badge applied by the brain-dead in the endless non-conversation of mass blathering that circles like the polluted water of a toilet bowl that’s been flushed but which has no drain pipe in which to escape. The shit-and-piss stew just swirls and swirls and swirls, and only more waste ever gets added to the sickening mess.

What “I CAN HAZ” is to daily wordplay, zombies have become to horror: cute, store-bought, prepackaged identifiers as obnoxious and scorn-worthy as faux-hawks, American Apparel and the return of the popped collar.

And so unto ye 21st century zombie enthusiasts, I wish the final solution put into play in Return of the Living Dead (1985).

Do you wanna party?

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My single favorite movie of the 2000s and, thereby, one of my single favorite movies ever, is Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds which is a horror film, a war epic, a slapstick farce, and, in the grandest sense, the Once-and-For-All Movie About the Movies. Plus, there are Nazis. More on that mañana.

Also: Dexter. I love the show. I love him. I love Debster. I love it all.

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