CREDIT: UNIVERSAL PICTURES
Universal’s Frankenstein from the 1930’s would have a hard time shocking an audience today, it still makes an excellent tale of humanity.

Even those of us who like to act out carrying delicate cinematic tastes have to admit being spoiled by modern filmmaking. The very best of cinema today is truly amazing from a technical and artistic standpoint, with auteurs taking a completely out-of-the-box approach to storytelling. Arguably, the horror genre is one that has seen rapid evolution since the slump of the ‘90s, with constant reinventions, self-references and self-parodies, and all manners of trying to be innovatively scary. With a genre that's so rapidly changing, the question of whether something old is still scary comes up a lot. And the results can be of course, mixed and subjective, as not everything is universally scary.

Horror films dating back to the very earliest of horror flicks (moving past Nosferatu and other isolated films), come by and large in the form of Universal's monster movies, which dominated the genre for a good chunk of the 1930's. And while Frankenstein is still quite excellent as a tale of humanity, and the Wolf Man is kind of cool from a special effects standpoint, it's hard to claim either of them as truly shocking or scary for audiences today. Even up to the 1950's and early ‘60s, ignoring the lurid giant monster films, some of the classics of the time, like The Haunting, are enjoyed in this day and age for their story content and interesting characters, rather than the movie's attempts at frightening the audience, innovative for its time but rather benign now.

It seems like censorship and conservatism within the Hollywood system before the mid- 60s is what makes these movies feel tame in comparison to what would later unfold. While the directors and writers of the era sought to work around the restrictions of censorship with their own ingenuity, in the end, the restrictions around showing anything too visually disturbing instead led to some truly interesting yarns that carried an air of mystery and suspense.

Even some of the later films past the ‘60s may lack a sense of frightinduction for veteran horror viewers. Horror truly is a strange genre of its own. Die Hard is enjoyable as an action movie both in 1988 and 2014, yet a classic like Poltergeist, considered one of the scariest films of 1982, can feel overproduced for a horror movie by those spoiled by the lo-fi guerrilla movie styling of Blair Witch Project and the Paranormal Activity series, with the aged special effects (the scene where Craig T. Nelson hallucinates peeling his face off, or rather, that of a stiffly animated rubber dummy comes to mind) breaking immersion. Slasher films as a genre have died off as a staple horror format, with occasional attempts at revival (Smiley Face) tanking quite hard.

So what do you do as a horror fan that feels nothing is scary anymore? Perhaps seeking films outside the western hemisphere is in order. Japanese horror is the first to come to mind. Really, any culture with an extensively superstitious set of beliefs is bound to conjure up something frightening in the minds of their filmmakers. Ignoring their Hollywood remakes, Ringu (The Ring) and Chakushin Ari (One Missed Call) are great introductions to Japanese horror, with some more oddball stuff like Marebito on the side. It's either read subtitles or maybe hope Paranormal Activity number