Nightmare Movies: Horror on screen since the 1960s - Kim Newman

"Thanks to Tom Savini's developments in special effects make-up for Dawn Of The Dead, the genre made a come-back in the early 1980s"

Romero has been blamed in Newman's book for causing a downhill in horror with the sequel to Creepshow (Creepshow 2, 1987).

Gore movie declined when major productions like The Wild Bunch and Taxi Driver as they gave films like Bloodthirsty and The Wizard Of Gore some competition in the 'explicit violence' field (with rising stars and directors as part of the competition too).

"The early 1980s did see the mobilization of a pro-censorship lobby against the massacre movie. Friday the 13th slipped past the MPAA ratings board with its Tom Savini-engineered decapitations intact. Friday the 13th Part 2 originally contained a similar batch of atrocities created by Carl Fullerton, but had to be drastically pruned before its release, and most of the later entries in the series are almost tame in their butchery."

^ This shows how the collapse of the studio system in Hollywood in the 1970s led to poorly executed horror in the 1970s-80s where nearly no rules applied on the explicitness of the gore. Then as the film output of Hollywood began to gain better quality, standards and regulations were put in place leading to many films having to cut back on gore (including Friday the 13th) and then this began to relax toward the 90s, perhaps the horror films in the 90s created the perfect amount of balance, leading to their success??
"An ultimate incarnation of instruction-through-torture is John Kramer, aka Jigsaw, (Tobin Bell) of the Saw franchise, a terminally ill genius who constructs elaborate mechanical traps for victims who have shown disregard for their own or others' lives...Jigsaw's contraptions can be escaped at the cost of pain (and likely disfigurement) if the subject really wants to live. Later entries in the series blur things as less scrupulous disciples take over Jigsaw's work- usually to be punished from beyond the grave by a weirdly fastidious master who is instrumental in dozens of deaths but professes to despise murderers"
"The supernaturally inclined Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare On Elm Street films are oddly down to earth: proletarian murders of upper-middle-class youth are knitted up in ichnographically déclassé items like workman's overalls, hockey masks, stripy jerseys and porkpie hats"
"The buzzword in 1980s horror was 'franchise'... a sequel is the closest the movie can come to a sure thing. As the psycho-slasher of Halloween and Friday the 13th modified into Nightmare On Elm Street, it seemed the element of risk was eliminated from the equation."
^ The fear of risk maybe is due to the collapse of Hollywood in the 1970s and so to reduce the risk of there being another problem in Hollywood just as it was repairing itself, filmmakers built on what was already popular to have a 'guarantee'.
"Robert Englund reprised his schtick (surreal dream manipulations, one-liners, flourishes of finger-knives) through Freddy's Revenge, A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warrior, A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, the TV show Freddy's Nightmares, A Nightmare On Elm Street: The Dream Child, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, a punch line cameo in Jason Goes To Hell, past the side-track of Wes Craven's New Nightmare to the dead end of Freddy vs Jason. In the process, Freddy became less frightening."
"If not simply killing teenagers or pursuing shifting goals like trying to possess a new host, these bogeymen deliver harsh, Struwwelpeter-like moral lessons on the theme of be careful what you wish for"
"Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a rare film to come honestly by a possessory credit, proposes the existence of an ur-monster: an ancient, evil entity which preys on the innocent... but escapes to do further harm when the story is weakened by, for instance, a string of decreasingly effective sequels."
"Given the complicated mix of in-jokery, philosophy and by-now familiar Freddyisms, the major achievement is that Craven manages to make things scary again. Reprising Elm Street business (the phone sprouting, the girl gutted in mid-air, he stairs that become a mire), Craven does it more creepily the second time round. From unnerving touches like the earthquake which cracks the wall of Langenkamp's house, mimicking the scratches  of a Freddy glove, to major sequences like a sleep-walking child wandering into a heavy freeway traffic, Craven re-affirms his Nightmare slyly critiques the watering-down of '80s horror and engages debate with anti-horror factions."
"Ditching embarrassing frills like MOR metal music and bad one-liners, New Nightmare isn't even an Elm Street sequel, but an essay in metafiction a step beyond Ed Wood or Gods and Monsters. It ought to have buried its franchise and, indeed, the whole franchise system. As it turned out, mid-level box office relegated New Nightmare to the status of footnote... Craven would return to post-modernism in an easier-to-follow form and the face of horror would change, again"
(Opening scene in Scream) " Again, the trick isn't the self-awareness but the scariness. for all its banter, the scene is conceptually upsetting and efficiently terrifying. As a former editor, Craven times a shock the way great comedians can get laughs from even a poor joke. The first appearance of the costumed killer (even more of a caricature bogeyman than Michael Myers) elicited real screams from Scream's original audiences."
"Scream 2 understands the difference between a hit which inspires a lone sequel and an on-going cash-flow."
"Scream was defining horror film for a generation- not least because it was the first slasher movie to make extensive use of the most significant 1990s gadget, the mobile phone. Previously, prank callers were anchored to landlines"
"The Illinois and Ohio kids of Halloween and A Nightmare On Elm Street are Archie-type archetypes who could, with a few fashion modifications, come from any decade; the California teens of Scream are not just cine-literate, but post-ironically unfeeling as they treat real tragedy (or the nightly news) as if it were a trivial rerun of Terror Train. After several teenagers are murdered, idiots run around school dressed as the killer.. When Himbry is gutted and hung from the goal posts on the football fields, a horde of kids rushes off excitedly to get a look before the corpse is taken down - leaving only diehards involved in the plot around for the bloody finale."
"From the mid-1980s to the turn of the millennium, the classical ghost story was out of fashion. Ghosts frighten or disturb those they haunt. Occasionally, they persecute their murderers (or their murderers' descendants), coerce the living into clearing up unfinished business, or semi-benevolently watch over them to death. they rarely kill people, except by scaring them to death. And '80s/'90s horror was all about killing people, usually by mangling them too."
"In the '90s, audiences were more afraid of serial killers than spooks."
  Asian/US remakes: "Long-haired, pale-faced, black-eyed lady spooks dressed in white have long been a staple of Japanese cinema."
"These tragic, baleful wraiths are usually neglected or murdered wives, lingering where they died, pestering men who did them wrong. The traditional Japanese ghost story is melancholy rather than terrifying, and inherently conservative."
"Hideo Nakata's Ringu/Ring launched a new J-Hora boom. Gore was out; chills were in. The monster was a traditional yurei, but embodied in a technology associated with modern Japan's electronics industry."
"Verbinski winds up with a near-exact copy of Ringu's climax . Perhaps mindful of retaining a teen-friendly rating."
"The Ringu cycle was not the only Japanese ghost franchise. Takashi Shimizu's  modest direct-to-video release Ju-On earned a similarly scaled sequel, Ju-On 2, but a third film, also entitled Ju-On, relaunched the series as a cinema property. This prompted not only another Ju-On 2 but an 'American remake' The Grudge, set in Japan and carrying over the key ghosts from the original series to haunt American names."
"The Blair Witch Project was accused of excessive hype - through putting up a website and giving interviews about the unorthodox production technique is hardly on a par with Mcdonalds tie-in stick figures or Pokémon cards. Some audiences just didn't get it: the improve performances, deliberately awkward camerawork and sometimes hard-to-make-out soundtrack struck naysayers as offputtingly amateurish... When The Blair Witch Project became a hit, a lot of people who saw it hated it because it didn't conform to their idea of a 'proper movie'."
" Eli Roth's Hostel - which was, like it or not, the most significant horror film of 2005"
"Torture wasn't a recent invention in the cinema of physical horror. At the climax of Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat, Bela Lugosi ties the thoroughly evil Boris Karloff to a restraint frame by his wrists, strips him to the waist and announces that he intends to peel the skin from his body, bit by bit."
"Hostel applies this not to the sexual arena usual in the horror film - there are women victims but most of the featured torture, which has a homophobe edge, is man-on-man - but to international relations. In an era of Rendition, in which foreigners should worry about winding up at the mercy of Americans, Hostel is all about American's fear of the rest of the world"
"An undertone of all this is a difference between films of the 1970s and films of the 2000s:the horror movies of the American Nightmare suggested there was something wrong with society, but the message of the twenty-first century is that Other People are Shit."
"While Hostel was performing at the box office, news items ran about a hunger strike among detainees at Guantanamo Bay, which American military authorities broke by strapping recalcitrant prisoners into 'restraint chairs' for force-feeding. The chairs were manufactured in his garage by Iowan Sheriff Tom Hogan, who developed the design fifteen years earlier to deal with troublesome arrestees, and marketed them to jails, psychiatric hospitals and the US government. The original purpose was to prevent violent prisoners doing harm to peace officers or themselves. Technically, someone on hunger strike is attempting suicide, so it can be argued that force-feeding them is an act of mercy. It can also be called torture. These chairs are the key image of the cycle of films that came to be labelled 'torture porn'."
"Young girls are exclusively the targets in a sub-genre of abduction-restraint-and-torture"
"In contrast with other screen torturers, John Kramer (Tobin Bell) of the Saw series is almost a hero. Technically speaking, he's not quite a murderer. he puts his primary victims in situations where they are in dire danger but can escape by taking extreme (always painful) action. His traps do often involve secondary victims, when one person's escape is attainable only at the cost of another's life."
"Though Jigsaw is the most prominent franchise fiend of his generation, the pale, distinctive, soft-spoken Bell has only a tiny role in the first Saw. Jigsaw's traps... are those of an industrial gothic TV game-show host, but he is a man on a mission.. James Wan's Saw is significantly influenced by the strangers-wake-up-in-a-room cycle of Cube and the punishment-fits-the-crime murder devices in Se7en, but has its own tricks. The economic downturn underlies the Saw series, which even has footnotes about the decline of American craftsmanship: in Saw V, a copycat is suspected not only because his inescapable death-trap fails to meet Jigsaw's ethical standards but uses inferior material."