My Bloody Valentine

The Entertainment 10 in Leominster is a strange place. Not only has the heat been out in two auditoriums since December's ice storm, but they have some strange security rule involving credit card purchases.

I found this out while standing outside in the freezing cold after Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. I had decided to stick around for a second show, partly because I didn't want to get inside my frozen car yet. Moreover, Tuesday is bargain day in Leominster, when they charge matinee prices all day long.

Shivering, I asked for a ticket to My Bloody Valentine and pushed my debit card through the little hole in the glass. After about two minutes, the teenage cashier handed it back to me. "Sorry, I swiped it, and tried to punch the numbers in by hand, but it was declined."

Knowing there was no hope of arguing, I nevertheless protested, "But I just used it two hours ago her to buy another ticket."

It turns out that it pays to complain. "Oh," she said. "that explains it. We have a security rule that doesn't allow us to make the same charge in a certain amount of time. Don't ask me why." She had a remedy which she quickly engaged, charging me for a five dollar gift card instead, and comping me the extra twenty-five cents.

I would not have been too terribly disappointed to have missed the movie that evening, not because it's a horror movie remake, but because, as the sign on the glass announced, Leominster was showing the 2-D version of the film, rather the 3-D version.

After several 3-D movies last summer (Journey to the Center of the Earth and Fly Me to the Moon), I had come to conclusion that the technology was a waste of time. For the first twenty minutes, it mostly gave me a headache. Eventually I got used to the whole thing and barely noticed the effect. I had resolved to see the 2-D versions whenever possible.

But something about My Bloody Valentine called for the 3-D version. If you're going to pay to see a miner's pick axe hurled straight at the screen, why wouldn't you want it to be three-dimensional?

So it was with mixed feelings that I took a seat in a (nicely heated) auditorium for the flat version of the movie. By the end of the movie I was glad I had saved my money, since it felt 3-D enough for me without the glasses.

The main conclusion I drew from this movie was to buttress my impression of the bankruptcy of the American horror genre, which has been reduced to remaking Asian movies and its own crummy releases from two decades ago.

To my mind, the genre bottomed out with last year's remake, Prom Night, which was told with virtually no plot twists or decent red herrings. The story seemed to revert to the primitive level of early silent films, before the basic techniques of narrative were established. To wit, an escaped killer returns to his hometown and butchers some teens during a high school dance. That is virtually all there is to the movie. Given that it is assumed that all teens hook up, there was none of the lurid sexuality morality (sex equals death) upon which the slashers have always feasted for emotional impact. Even for a slasher movie, Prom Night felt more like the set-up to a movie than the actual plot.

For much of the story, My Bloody Valentine felt nearly on the same level. During the last act, however, it managed to scrape together the semblance of a red herring. Moreover, there was plenty of the "sex equals death" theme to give it the heft of morality horror to which we are familiar. There were also plenty of visual parlor tricks with the pick-axe, intended for 3-D effects, that kept my interest from wandering too much.

But it still felt bankrupt. The demise of American horror has been steep and sudden, and speaks intimately to the denialism of the Bush years. The 1990s was bookended by two horror movies winning the Best Picture Oscar (the horror revivalist The Silence of the Lambs and the mixed-genre American Beauty).

Now our horror is outsourced to Asia, or is served to us as prefabricated pablum stripped of its narrative (and thus cultural) impact. This makes perfect sense if one views horror as the outward manifestation of our shared cultural nightmares, a necessary airing of the dark parts of our common soul. When our newscasters openly cheer for the use of torture, we are living the horror directly, and thus our on-screen nightmares are used to put us further to sleep, rather than to wake us up.

I suspect true horror is going to make a comeback over the next couple years, as we start to become conscious of the nightmare we have been living through. Of course, some of us are already conscious of it, but big studio executives and their minions probably are not among this group. The horror revival will not come with fifty million dollar budgets, or even ten millon dollar budgets, but will come bubbling up from the masses, which are living the reality that is being denied by Hollywood as we speak.