Anger is a powerful thing. It gets a storyteller creative. Makes them think outside the box and makes them execute ideas in the genre in ways we’ve never seen before.
Where am I going with all of this? Today, I spent a good deal sitting in Los Angeles traffic listening to The Movie Crypt, a podcast hosted by those rock stars of the indie horror film/convention circuit scene Adam Green and Joe Lynch. Their podcast falls under GeekNation, the same company that houses The Bloodcast, a podcast I co-host with Clarke Wolfe. TMC is a solid listening experience for those who want to hear tales from the Hollywood trenches as Green and Lynch bring on colleagues, offer advice to filmmakers who are tuning in and more.
Recently, they had on Darren Lynn Bousman for an episode for a 3-hour discussion about his career to date while Green and Lynch sometimes offered similar tales of their journey through the film industry. I know them all. They’re good guys. But this is the angriest I’ve ever heard them.
As they exchanged anecdotes about troubled projects, development hell and film piracy, it made me think: What does ignite anger in today’s horror movie director in the way that perhaps Craven, Carpenter and Romero got fired up? Is it really just Hollywood and fighting the good fight to get a movie made?
If there are horror films today that simmer with the same energy and confrontational filmmaking we saw in the ‘60s and ‘70s, they’re few and far between.
It seems to me the Hollywood system has evolved into something so frustrating that filmmakers have become blinded to their own personal dissatisfactions with this country or societal issues – that could serve as inspiration for challenging films – leaving them to lose focus of horror’s rebellious counterculture roots. The system has ground them down. I hardly see the cynicism or anger about the world that I found in movies like The Last House on the Left or They Live in today’s climate of remakes, sequels or film’s laden with nostalgia (all of which are more or less entertaining, for sure).
Green, Lynch and Bousman are, of course, not alone in their frustration with the industry. (And, mind you, I’m generally speaking here not singling them out. They merely provided food for thought.) What they had to say I’ve heard countless time from filmmakers I’ve spoken to on the battle field. And if “Hollywood” is what is truly behind the anger of today’s horror filmmaker, I’d like to see that channeled into a film. If it’s piracy and the way fans freely bootleg a director’s work long before the film’s release, I’d love to see a director’s pent-up rage creatively shine through a cautionary tale of entitlement.
If it’s not Hollywood, then what are you filmmakers angry about? Surely Uwe Boll isn’t the only one who wants to tackle gun control and public shootings (with the 2009 film Rampage), right? Surely there’s something else in this increasingly screwed-up world that riles you up? Give me something scary, give me something unsettling and thought-provoking and give me something that made me say, “Holy shit, that director is so angry I’d be afraid to meet him.”
