I was looking on Play.com to see if they had any good deals on John Carpenter related products and came across this 90s boxset.
The weirdest thing is that Vampires is the one DVD there that I wouldn’t be ashamed to own. Wolf may have Jack Nicholson, Michel Pfeiffer and James Spader. But it reeked of middle class smugness. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein might have had Kenneth Branagh, Helena Bonham Carter and Robert ‘greatest actor on earth’ DeNiro, but… just too, well, 90s horror. Not a bad film, but something slightly unclean about the ‘we’re decorated middle class thesps who’ll bestow glory upon the horror genre by making a thoroughly mediocre work’ spirit of the thing. Not merely horror films for people who don't like horror films, but either films made for a target audience that the makers looked down on or films made to destroy the target audience by widening the appeal. Trying to show you don't have to be a weirdo to appreciate horror.
But you do have to be a weirdo to appreciate horror, you dastards, and John Carpenter’s Vampires is glorious evidence of the fact! Most definitely a horror film made by someone who loves horror films as well as being pure cheese. James Woods as a tough loner who killed his own father (a joke about Freudianism?), one of the flabbier Baldwins (probably the one who’s an evangelical Republican) turns into a vampire , Maximillian Schell is a cross between Captain Hook and Cardinal Richelieu, there's even a climax in a monastery in the middle of the New Mexico Desert, utterly unmissable… and utterly awful actually, but in an enjoyable and sincere way. You'd probably need to be a horror fan to understand.
Somehow to me that sums up the weird heritage of the 90s. The critics gave a pass to those forgetable horror films which managed to buttress their own values, whilst the less mainstrream culture had a strong vitality and was (perhaps rightly) overlooked by them, whilst in its sincerity having a lingering appeal.
This view was later reinforced by my finding this guy on Youtube. 'They Live' uploaded by a conspiracy theorist.
Whilst I'm hoping that well-funded efforts to make mainstream horror films have failed to convince people that you don't need to be a weirdo to enjoy horror, I do not believe that obversely horror fans cannot have more mainstream interests. I read about a variety of things, and I suppose that my rather dour political outlook is to some extent influenced by horror films.
I suspect that for my generation so-called conspiracy theories are attractive for a number of reasons. I don't regard myself as a conspiracy theorist, but some things to me seem quite apparent: that AIDS and Alzheimers are man-made diseases, that the CIA considered launching a Fascist coup in Britain and then helped to assassinate the British politicians that were involved, that the bombing of Serbia had everything to do with economic liberalism and nothing to do with human rights, that there is a centralised effort to take civil liberties away from people, that the Freemasons are very real and have vast power, that TV presenters and musicians knowingly use hypnosis and many other weird things.
These are just my views; I don't want to convert anyone here. Yet people of my generation have never been exposed to politicians or a media that have really deserved our trust. I feel bemused by the eye rolling and sighing that mainstream journalists adopt when talking of conspiracy theorists, and their unconscious narcissism of doing so 'ah, these poor deluded fools who think we are too cowardly, stupid and lazy to want to investigate the rich and powerful that we generally praise in our writing, sigh'.
Maybe it seems I'm drifting from the point a bit here, yet I cannot imagine any conspiracy theorist really being attracted to any mainstream film. Even the film called Conspiracy Theory. Maybe as such this demonstrates how so many maverick, offbeat films (such as the 'it would be utterly crap if it wasn't genius' They Live) have a sub-cultural life of their own that many of their more well-funded contemporaries did not have.
No comments:
Post a Comment