Generation Terror

Sarah Appleton and Philip Escott are seasoned filmmakers from features for DVD/Blu-ray releases to the longer form with The Found Footage Phenomenon.

The starting point here is Noughties horror though they are more than happy to dip into the 90s to set up a discussion or develop a point.

And there’s a lot to talk about with the millennium bug, J-Horror, the rise of the internet, torture porn, the French extreme and a few others.

With no chapter headings or real golden thread Generation Horror at times looks like a stream of consciousness punctuated with talking heads from all area’s directors, writers, journalists, academics so on and so forth.

As such there’s a deluge of information delivered that at times it becomes disorientating lacking any real sense of direction. There is clearly purpose though that gets muddled with the multitude of contributions.

The filmmakers do take a breather to focus on House of 1000 corpses for a touch longer. Then it’s back to the talking-head pinball.

The evolving social context of horror is well covered with the 9/11 attacks triggering a wave of paranoia while the internet could be used to further explore the extremes with relatively little bother from censors and the like.

Looking at the films discussed that turned into long running franchises e.g. Saw and Wrong Turn these are quite nasty disturbing pieces of work (Wrong Turn could be accused of demonising rural areas and folk) looking to push the mainstream. Final Destination is more a teen popcorn muncher series with inventive kills eschewing the lingering cruelty of Saw. With the European contingent of French extreme. Lars Von Trier and A Serbian Film the conclusion was that horror wasn’t worrying too much about playing safe at that time.

But the box office must be addressed, and the aforementioned US films made money on screen and via home entertainment. There were also a lot of remakes with varying degrees of success and integrity.

Generation Horror is an exhaustive examination of a very specific period of horror that could itself be debated as to its importance: this is a very subjective area and long may that remain so.

Generation Terror had its world premiere at London Pigeon Shrine FrightFest, 26 August 2024.