Just What Does a Horror Fan Want?

[old-boo-radley]

I gazed around the web, reading reviews of Renny Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning. A positive review was rare to find, but I was excited to see the film, a few people I know raved about it pretty highly. I bought it tonight and popped the sucker in. I would be lying if I said I didn't love what I saw. The film is definately the most beautiful looking film I've ever seen, I really dug Renny's direction. I found the film to be interesting throughout and apart from a couple scenes that came off as a bit silly (but, hey, what movie doesn't have these?), and I began to think...

What the fuck do we, as horror fans want?

Horror aficionados are the first people to bitch about studio intervention on films, bitching about the way a studio handled a DVD release, etc... Warner opted to fire Paul Schrader and bring in Renny Harlin because the film didn't have enough blood and guts and scares. Of course, for some reason a lot of fans seemed to believe their intelligence was insulted when this announcement was made. Why does Warner believe we're a bunch of bumbling idiots?

Well... maybe they don't. We bitch when a movie is released in a cut form on DVD. A hell of an uproar was recently raised when a string of horror movies suddenly went PG-13 instead of R. If a movie is too talky, we bitch about that. Well, when Schrader was fired... people began bashing the studio for apparantly (from what I've ever heard, anyways) being talky and tame. Yeah, the same people who were outraged that their precious R rated movies were getting cut to PG-13 bash a movie for upping the ante.

Warner couldn't have thought we were sheep or unintelligent or they wouldn't have got the great cinematographer and director that they did to put the movie together. I truly hope Schrader's version is great. I will buy it when it comes out, but to bash the blood and guts of this film is like when the snooty critics say "I don't know why anyone would ever want to watch a popcorn flick." You could argue that you don't want Exorcist movies into the popcorn flick realm (although I don't believe it is in that realm to begin with). I know another movie that lacked blood and guts, and it was called, "The Exorcist 2: The Heretic." Sad thing is with the backlash against the film, I truly believe people will say the Schrader cut is better no matter if it is or it isn't, just to give the studio a "fuck you" out of spite.

I don't mean to be a smart-ass, I've been guilty of this just like everyone else, but given these factors... how can we fans honestly expect studios to figure us out?

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Just to point out a thought on a couple sentences of Rhett's review of The Exorcist: The Beginning.

From the review:
"All of Reagan’s dirty cuss words have been recreated again in The Beginning, but they seem so much more forced and so much more empty. Compared to a quote like “shove your rotten cock up her juicy ass” from The Beginning, Reagan’s “Fuck me! Fuck me!” spiel in the original sounds surprisingly tasteful."

The original had a 12 year old girl masturbating with a crucifix while she said "Let Jesus fuck you, let Jesus fuck you. Let him fuck you." I don't think you can compare the two in vileness