The horrors...

The quality of horror films seems to (in general) have an inverse relationship with the technology level of the time. Nowadays films rely heavily on CGI, quick-cuts, startling music, and other gimmicky techniques to achieve their aims. Previous to, say, the 80s, horror films used subtler techniques to create their disquieting atmosphere. They weren't heavily colourised and post-processed, they were shot on sets or on locations that actually looked the way they appeared on film. Monsters or possessed people were not created by Silicon Graphics farms but were real people skillfully made up to look scary and properly acting the part. In turn, the protagonists had visceral foils to react to. The whole thing was, to my mind at least, much more believable and in the end much creepier.

Compare films such as The Hole, Silent Hill, and The Fog to slightly older fare like Prince of Darkness, Halloween, or The Exorcist. And of course there is The Shining. Going back even further we have the original Dracula, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Nosferatu. These oldest films have an eerie quality that cannot be matched by today's films. It's possible to make a film just as good, perhaps (The Ring scared the bejesus out of me and The Sixth Sense was superbly crafted), but not the same. Nowadays directors tend to go over the top in some way - either with gore (though the heyday of that style has passed), kitsch, external movie references, or special effects. Older movies by contrast had a stately, theatre-esque pacing to them that many today find boring, but others appreciate as artful building of suspense. See: The Hunger.

There never has been a hermetically sealed platinum-iridium standard bar to measure horror flicks against, and there never will be. Too many subgenres exist, and each director's vision is equally valid. Fans of slasher films may not like monsters movies or supernatural thrillers, and teen-horror buffs may not go for gothic films or religious nightmares. And all that diversity is good. Still, there are opinions, and my opinion is that some of the artistry overall in this genre has been lost. Fortunately we have ways of preserving and enjoying the older films side-by-side with the new.