I was recently talking to a young co-worker about In A Violent Nature. I described it as having everything I like in a good old-fashioned chop-n-hack flick, but oddly, I never felt connected to it.
If you haven't seen it, it's like an old school slasher wherein the focus is totally on the killer rather than the victims. By that I mean, we stay with the killer, from kill to kill, and follow him as he takes a nice slow walk from one end of the woods to the other, and back again.
There are moments where the killer confronts the person he once was, but it's mostly just walking. Walking, walking, walking. (The kills are pretty spectacular though.)
I know you're saying, "Doesn't Jason just teleport from one place to the other?" Sadly, my friends, that is not the case. Evidently he walks, slowly. (I'm guessing he's clocking somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000+ steps per day, if this film is any indication.)
My young co-worker said, "Oh, that sounds like you're just watching someone play a video game."
"What?!" My mind broke. This made no sense to me. Who watches someone play a video game?
Come to find out, a lot of people do, for numerous reasons. And they will watch someone playing a character, walking endlessly through a game, until they encounter whatever.
"Jesus Christ! They don't have to reinvent fricken' slasher movies!"
I mean, what's wrong with just someone chasing campers around with an ax? It worked the other 186 times I've watched it.
Well, maybe they do have to reinvent them. Maybe there's a whole generation of movie fans who prefer their movies to look like video games. (I don't know if this is happening in comedies and drama, but it's definitely been a part of action movies for a couple of decades.)
Another conversation with another young co-worker soon after took it to a different level. This co-worker said she hated slasher movies (and had seen her fair share because of an ex who loved them, so she was talking from experience) and preferred modern horror, the stuff A24 releases. Of course this sparked a conversation, because I love slasher films and have a very low tolerance for most of A24's output.
"What could you possibly get from those boring, slowly paced rip-offs of older movies?" I asked.
Her response surprised me. "I can watch one of them alone and then spend an hour on the couch just thinking about it and dissecting it."
Wait, what?
She asked, "What could you possibly like about slasher movies?"
"They're loud and crude and piss off old people and we used to go watch them in the theater on Friday night and scream our heads off having a good time. (Spoken like a true middle-aged teenager!)
Then a light bulb went off. Is this why I'm not connecting with modern horror? I wasn't simply aging out of them like I first thought. The way people watch movies has changed, and I just wasn't aware movies were changing to accommodate.
If the home video explosion of the late 70s/early 80s taught us anything, it's that people watch a whole hell of a lot more movies at home than they do in theaters. As the medium of home video has changed, there are new ways to watch movies. You can now stream movies on your computer or phone. I don't do that, but many people do. (Personally, the only time I think it is appropriate to watch a full movie on your laptop or phone is when you're at work and don't have access to a regular sized TV.)
During the pandemic, even if you were going to the drive-in, you were alone in your little space. We were no longer in a theater together, where everyone could react together. We were watching movies in our cars, or logging into streaming parties or just watching alone.
I grew up in a time when people reacted to what they saw on screen. People yelled at characters, screamed, laughed- audiences made noise. Movies were made with an audience reaction in mind. It was more than just watching, it was an experience.
(I don't want to mislead anyone and suggest that every movie was a Rocky Horror Picture Show experience, but I've shared many experiences from my moviegoing past and some of them were incredible. They were magic. I remember people getting up and cheering at the outcome of the scene from Missing In Action II- The Beginning when Chuck Norris was strung upside down and the bad guys tied a bag containing a hungry rat around his head. People were just screaming and cheering, up out of their seats, losing their damn minds.)
Movies I remember from my childhood were made mostly with an audience experience in mind, and their goal was to get a reaction. There was no internet, no streaming. Home video was new, cable was new. Producers had to get butts in seats and entertain them, give them something they couldn't get anywhere else, to earn their investment back.
Now, not so much. Now we know a film's theatrical release is just a commercial for its life streaming on whichever service picks it up. (Even a home video version is no longer a given.)
So if most movies are watched at home, on a computer, they have to look different and they have to do more than just stimulate a rowdy crowd for 90 minutes. It is a more intimate experience than taking a seat in a crowded theater and barking, "Thrill me!"
*I will also add that I think audiences have forgotten how to react to a movie, or even know they can react. I saw Terrifier 3 last night with a friend I "experienced" dozens of films with when I was a kid, and we noticed the crowd was mostly silent for the first hour. Why were they so quiet? Were they worried about laughing or reacting and bothering someone playing on their phone? Did they think it rude to scream or shout at the screen? Reacting to the action on screen is not like doing a MST3K. But by the second hour, the film finally won them over, goosing them with its brazen disregard for life and they began laughing and making noises, like the old days.
Another example, outside the horror genre, are films written by Sylvester Stallone. Sly was easily the biggest action star of the 80s, and he wrote many of those scripts. They were all the same, and they delivered the goods, and they were mostly hits.
Not so anymore. He's still writing action flicks the same way, but audiences don't want the instant gratification of gratuitous gun and knife violence like they once did. Modern audiences need that connection to their characters so they can decide if they like them or not. It is no longer enough to just use violence to keep villains from villaining. (I'm sure a quiet Expendables sequel, where Sly and Jason Statham's characters go off on a weekend retreat to explore their father/son-like bond would be a hit, but I don't think it's worth it, even after that horrible fourth film.)
I can stop being frustrated. So can you, if you're experiencing any of what I just described. Happily, for every flick I don't connect with, there are ten more I do. Sure, they may be from the 60s or 70s, but if it's a movie I haven't seen before, no matter when it was made, it's still a new movie.
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