Word: horror
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Gross-out horror movies are essentially facetious; the more artful films are dread serious. "For me," says M. Night Shyamalan, who revived the ghost-story trend with The Sixth Sense in 1999, "the challenge is taking a B-movie subject like ghosts or aliens or monsters in the woods and treating it with absolute respect and sincerity." And at their heart, they have an all-too-human sadness. "There may be a bit more acceptance of horror because of what's going on in the world today," says George Romero, director of the classic Night of the Living Dead. "When...
Just now, grown-up horror is frightfully chic. The Village, which Shyamalan describes as "a Grimm fairy tale--Little Red Riding Hood, but an adult, dark version of it," creeps into theaters this week, followed by Open Water. Ju-on has opened in New York City and Los Angeles and spreads to a dozen cities next month. Soon we'll see an assault of Hollywood remakes of Japanese horror films. The Ring 2, a sequel to the 2002 Naomi Watts thriller that grossed $230 million worldwide, is being directed by Hideo Nakata, who helmed the original Japanese film version...
...Psychological or atmospheric horror is what's attracting audiences these days," says Roy Lee, the Korean American who sold The Ring and Ju-on to Hollywood. It attracts producers too, since atmospherics cost less than computer legerdemain. But you don't have to be Japanese to scare people smartly. You need only a potent idea and $200,000. That was the budget for Open Water, based on the true story of an American couple who were left behind on Australia's Great Barrier Reef by a scuba boat...
...absolutely did not set out to make a shark movie," says writer-director Chris Kentis, who shot the film with his wife, producer Laura Lau. "And we didn't set out to make a horror film." But it couldn't have been fun for the two leads. Travis and Ryan had to spend two days dangling in water surrounded by dozens of gray reef and bull sharks (and a few shark experts, who threw chunks of bloody tuna to the sharks to keep them nearby but not hungry). The mix of emotional intimacy and shark verite in this well-crafted...
...have to credit M. Night Shyamalan for bringing horror back to the Hollywood mainstream," says Walter F. Parkes, the DreamWorks exec who produced the U.S. Ring movies and has optioned the Korean doomed-family epic The Tale of Two Sisters. "The Sixth Sense was beautifully shot, well written, with a mature approach to the genre." It also grossed $294 million at the North American box office. That number will scare up a lot of converts...