Movie Theme Generalizations

[Dr. Satan]

I know it's been brought up before, but my curiosity as to why it happens has suddenly been sparked. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's some examples...

The Hallow/The Skoolhouse = Trick 'r Treat

Dungeon of Terror = House of 1000 Corpses

Run = Hostel

(does Cold Blind Terror count as a generalization of The Thing?)

They take the theme of a popular movie, and then make it generic. Personally, I like the concept of that.

But it happens really often. Sometimes multiple houses each year. Does anyone know why it happens so often? I'm just curious, thinking about rights and stuff like that. I mean, Universal is a movie studio. You would think they had all the rights they wanted.

Also, if you know of more examples to add to that list, feel free to post them. I had more, but then forgot them.

- Doc

Edited September 13, 2011 by Dr. Satan

[Fallow]

I know it's been brought up before, but my curiosity as to why it happens has suddenly been sparked. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's some examples...

The Hallow/The Skoolhouse = Trick 'r Treat

Dungeon of Terror = House of 1000 Corpses

Run = Hostel

(does Cold Blind Terror count as a generalization of The Thing?)

They take the theme of a popular movie, and then make it generic. Personally, I like the concept of that.

But it happens really often. Sometimes multiple houses each year. Does anyone know why it happens so often? I'm just curious, thinking about rights and stuff like that. I mean, Universal is a movie studio. You would think they had all the rights they wanted.

Also, if you know of more examples to add to that list, feel free to post them. I had more, but then forgot them.

- Doc

I prefer to think of them more like tributes. There are three issues with abandoning the "generalization" approach and using a license: one, it costs money. BIG money for the big licenses. Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, SAW, & even Bloody Mary cost a relative fortune to license. Two, fans balk at them - they want "originality," even if it is as generalized as you claim. Three, it's much more interesting and creatively challenging to let the designer create his/her own sets & characters (even if inspired in part by a film) rather than stick to the strict guidelines of a license owner. Apparently A&D had to have all of the NLC house designs approved by Newline again and again - while it leads to a lovely result, it does stifle creativity. The occasional "true" movie house can be great - it's a nice change of pace, it's often current, and they're typically beautifully designed as well as scary (Dead Silence, Wolfman, any of the NLC houses, The Thing [hopefully old&new], Doomsday, etc.).

So I guess I don't mind the generalizations, so to speak. After all, if A&D couldn't tackle any theme addressed in a movie - we wouldn't have a lot of horror themes left, would we?

[Creeper06]

I think Fallow is right. It all has to do with rights. Universal Studios parks are completely separate from the film studio portion of the company (very much like WDW vs. Walt Disney Pictures). They even have to license Universal properties, it's just much easier to do that. But licensing films from other studios gets very expensive fast, and isn't always worth it (Did anyone really mind that we got 'Run: Hostile Territory' instead of "Hostel"?). Also, as Fallow states, it makes things looser for intepretation and gives them more freedom to play with themes.

BTW- I always heard that Castle Vampyr was originally meant to be a Van Helsing house but, after the movie underperformed, they tweaked it and made it more generic. Can anyone confirm? Regardless, I'm glad it happened since that remains one of my favorite houses to this day.

[marchofprogress]

I know it's been brought up before, but my curiosity as to why it happens has suddenly been sparked. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's some examples...

The Hallow/The Skoolhouse = Trick 'r Treat

Dungeon of Terror = House of 1000 Corpses

Run = Hostel

(does Cold Blind Terror count as a generalization of The Thing?)

They take the theme of a popular movie, and then make it generic. Personally, I like the concept of that.

But it happens really often. Sometimes multiple houses each year. Does anyone know why it happens so often? I'm just curious, thinking about rights and stuff like that. I mean, Universal is a movie studio. You would think they had all the rights they wanted.

Also, if you know of more examples to add to that list, feel free to post them. I had more, but then forgot them.

- Doc

I've been waiting til I had time to bite this worm properly. Now here goes.

Thing is . . . I think you're looking at it backwards, doc. I think you're commenting on the frequency of "b=c" while ignoring the frequency of "a=b"

To put it in a more concrete way, those movies - and those houses - are playing on really primal, visceral, instinctual fears. The most successful horror films - by any measure - are all tapping into a Jungian fear-provoking archetype. They're called elemental fears. I could wax philosophical about Jung until my computer becomes obsolete, but just take your examples. You're talking about a fear of:

1- (Skoolhouse) the corruption/loss of innocence - especially when it comes to children

2- (House of 1000 Corpses) Helplessness in the face of a horrible and painful impending fate that seems entirely unavoidable because its inflicter is a juggernaut or a human being operating outside the capacity for reason. Also there's the fear of being overwhelmed and outnumbered (it's part of why RZ chose that title for the movie). In this case in particular (not so much in Hostel, which I'll get into in a second) there's also the fear of beings to whom human life means nothing (the opposite side of the "sanctity of life" belief most of us are supposedly born with)

3- (Hostel) Really the same as #2 except in this case the human being inflicting the torture is not totally Out To Lunch but motivated entirely by sadism, which looks like malice from the opposite end of the lens (ie, to the people trapped in the situation). It also has the 'outnumbered' fear but in a different way: if you tried to escape from the Hostel, you're likely to be stopped by customers and staff alike..So there's also that added element of fear of the Monolith - that there's this secret network you're entrenched in trying to fight out of and it's way bigger and stronger than you....

4- (the Thing) Sheesh, take your pick: invasion of the body, loss of control, loss of identity, fear of the Other, claustrophobia, fear that your friends/people you think you know and have come to rely upon are actually quite different than they seem and, in some cases, have extreme malice, and on and on.... oh, and PARANOIA.

I can list a million examples of all of those. . .

1- The Exorcist right back to the Garden of Eden (which was a terrifying story in its time). Children of the Corn. The Twilight Zone episode where the kid whisks people away to the corn field. There's actually Jungian connections between this fear and corn, but I won't get into that.

2 - Body Collectors, anyone? Chainsaw Drill Team (isn't it just so much scarier when there's several of them on you at once?) , Texas Chainsaw Massacre (remember the scene where the girl lands in the room full of bones?). This is the fear modern zombies touch on; it wasn't always like that (more on that in a second). Same goes for most 'modernized' horror creatures. There's this image of vampires as just bloodthirsty conscienceless creatures, same with werewolves and others - these used to be tragic figures made all the more tragic because of the horrific and shocking nature of their Evil Deeds. We've just become desensitized to it.

3- Sadism is really all you needed in a horror villain in the 80s. Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers, Leatherface, etc. all have motivations in their stories, but the motivation doesn't really matter and almost sounds like an afterthought in many cases. It's hard to compare any movies to Hostel because Hostel is on the edge of a newish trend in horror cinema: the so-called torture porn movies. Saw movies fit in there even though, again, there's some vague story involved. The interesting thing about the torture porn movies is how they turn it around: the twist is that the *audience* are the sadists in those films. As far as the fear of the monolith, that can be interpreted any number of ways. There's plenty of Paranoia thrillers out there... And that's a main fear HHN plays with. When you step into a house/scarezone you are not in your world any more. And They are out to Get You.

4- I could list a million examples of every one of those fears, but I'll stick with one: zombies. George Romero himself claimed that what scares him the most out of anything is "the neighbors" - that is what the original Night of the Living Dead was about (metaphorically, of course). Zombies have turned into something else entirely over the years and have taken on a lot of allegorical meanings, functioning as everything from a protest against consumerism (Dawn of the Dead) to an imagining of a viral outbreak (28 Days Later). The fear that people you've come to trust have turned into something or have been something else all along is common as well... It's always been one of the favorite topics to explore in zombie movies, all the way back to NotLD when the mother is attacked by her daughter with a trowel. Ditto all the other fears I listed and all the other ones present in The Thing.... Paranoia is an especially common one. How many movies are *just* about paranoia - nothing else? It's implemented on some level in nearly every horror/thriller film I can think of. NotLD hits on the bulk of all the fears I've mentioned (even outside of fears explored in The Thing), as does The Exorcist, The Shining, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc. etc. etc. etc.

The importance of elemental fears can't be overstated. What can easily be overstated is their diversity: these fears all boil down to the same basic fears, and they are evolutionary and biological. Fear of Pain is a great example. A lot of those fears fall under the umbrella of "Fear of Pain" - you could probably fit them all in that category if you define Pain broadly enough. Our biological fight-or-flight response is triggered when we're confronted by a situation where we feel we are in danger. Our autonomous nervous system changes our machinery. Blood moves around the body to prepare us. Our pupils change size. Our heart beats faster. All of these physiological responses are believed to be evolved characteristics, and it makes sense if you think about it for a moment. Of course natural selection is going to weed out the ones who aren't prepared to meet fear with a fight or a flight over the course of generations and generations. Believe it or not, human beings are actually pretty awesome hunters/survivors. . . It's because of elemental fears we've had forever.

Elemental fears are what makes horror effective. Without it, you have comedy. If you're posting on the HHN boards, there's a reasonable chance you're into watching crap horror movies for kicks - think of the last horror movie you saw that wasn't at all scary, but may actually have been funny. Odds are pretty good the lack of elemental fear (or poor execution thereof) is the reason. It's never *just* bad acting. It's never *just* a bad script. It's never *just* cheesy effects. In fact, you can handicap a horror movie with just about as many kisses of death you can think of that would destroy any other kind of film, but if the elemental fear is there it will survive.

Example: Paranormal Activity. I don't know about you but I think everything about this film was atrocious. The acting, writing, direction, pacing, plot, explanation, etc. - all horrible. If not horrible, at least not-Great. But still a *very* creepy movie.

Why?

Well, if you're like anybody else I've talked to about it, you're already thinking of the one scene that makes the movie:

the scene where the girl stands next to the bed while the guy sleeps and the clock on the camera just keeps going forward, for hours and hours, as she just stands there.

Now how low-tech is that? But how creepy? It plays off an elemental fear, and it makes a huge splash. So huge that it can afford to have bad Everything.

As one final point, I'd like to point out a fact to you: in the United States, the sale of ice cream and the homicide rate are positively correlated at a highly significant level. So significant, in fact, that if you analyzed the statistics thoroughly, the findings would be statistically significant enough that they'd be worthy of publication and would actually come almost as close as a correlation can get to causation.

Correlation, however, never means causation. There's reasons for that, and one of them is the reason for this strange factoid. It's called a spurious relationship - the sale of ice cream and the homicide rate are strongly correlated to each other, but in reality they are both *dependent variables* to an entirely different independent variable - outdoor temperatures, in this case. Ice cream sales and the homicide rate go up when the temperature goes up, but that doesn't mean they're related to each other at all.....

So, in short, you are half-right. While it is correct that HHN frequently includes houses that resemble movies, it is also correct to say that movies frequently resemble other movies, or even that houses resemble other houses, and so forth. Truth is that they're all playing off the same core set of fears. And it's actually a very small list. There are certainly an enormous number of phobias, but when you're talking about actual elemental, visceral fears, the list is short - if it weren't a short list, HHN would never work because there wouldn't be enough people who share the same fears. Just think of phobias. Billy Bob Thornton has a phobia that makes him respond to antique furniture with fear. A house full of antique furniture would terrify him . . . . But, uh, not me.

On the other hand, if you set up a house where there's people being brutally murdered, the walls are covered in blood, there are piles of bones everywhere, and there is a high frequency of confrontation by big scary guys with chainsaws . . . . You're playing off people's elemental fear; it's written in our DNA to have that provoke our fear response.

Does it really matter if it's the Texas Chainsaw house or the eponymous Hostel ?