Matt Haigh's Article On New Horror Movies

This article was very informing to me on how old school horror fans feel about new horror movies, their characters, and their villains. Matt Haigh wrote this article said that he loves horror movies, but he hates how they have been done in recent history of horror movies. He enlightened us on many different aspects of a horror movie and how they have been butchered in most horror movies that have come out recently. For the first page of this article I agree with Haigh completely, but the second and third pages of the article made me think about the aspects he talked about a little bit more. The beginning paragraphs of this article are extremely agreeable to me and the first point he talks about is agreeable as well. Although the rest of the

The beginning paragraphs even made some important points to support his own opinion of modern horror movies. I agreed with most of the points in these paragraphs because I thought that he was correct and was right about how good horror is great and how bad horror can be really bad. In the first one of the main points he decided to argue about, he talked about empty characters and how the characters in modern horror movies have no emotional ties with the audience. He goes so far as to say, “After all, why should we care if somebody gets killed when they're presented to us as being an empty vessel?” (Haigh 1). I totally agree with this statement because most of the modern horror movies I have seen are really bad at portraying a character and making the audience care about that person. In classics like Texas
Chainsaw, Friday the 13th, or Nightmare on Elmstreet, you feel very attached to the main character and you want her to live and survive through the movie. He says, “ Thus, our emotional response to their torture and ultimate demise proved greater for the time we had invested in getting to know them” (Haigh 1). I agree because nowadays the director doesn’t really set the characters up or give the audience a reason to love that specific

What he is saying is that in all the modern horror movies there is a “damsel in distress” and a male hero to come save her from the horrible monster that is the villain (Haigh 2). He says that these ideas in horror filmmaking come mainly from the fact that the directors are almost always male (Haigh 2). He also says that he wishes they would switch it up and have the girls be the heroes, monsters, or both (Haigh 2). He makes me disagree with him because I believe that it makes a better movie with the girl being saved and the monster being some huge plotting guy instead of a girl, mainly because I just don’t think that a girl running around with a knife is very scary for a horror movie’s