It’s been heard before. Everyone’s a critic. You can hear it in any variety of contexts, from when your mother tells you to wear nicer clothes (Surely I’m not alone with that one) to when an artist has to defend his exhibition of dead bodies to the New York Times. Or as my friend on the right (Anton Ego, food critic extra-ordinaire of the film Ratatouille) shows, sometimes it takes real education to be a critic. I digress. We do often seem to think of a lot of people as critics. It says something about the times we live in that we find more and more sources and reasons to be critical, and that more and more of our ideals can come under fire. Personally I find it refreshing, but then I am a J.S. Mill reading University student. Who would I be if I didn’t believe in critical examination? These days, however, everyone has decided that they need to be a critic. Hell, sometimes it seems like unless you are critical you’re unintelligent and a poor cinema-goer. Horror movies surely have this problem to an extreme. How many people have expressed the trouble with remakes, or the general trends in modern horror. Or indeed, how many of us haven’t discussed to death the greatness, or lack thereof, of our favourite films. All of these things are us applying our critical eye to the world around us. It seems like perhaps we’re doing a bit too much of that, these days. I always wonder if this is a good thing, or a bad thing?

First of all, to set a bit of context, I’ve recently watched a couple Uwe Boll movies, and a few of the ‘banned’ greats from the late 70s and 80s with my girlfriends little brother. Also a keen horror enthusiast (sadly not an Uwe Boll fan like myself) it’s lead to quite some interesting discussions about the films we’ve seen, and of course the critical dissection of the films we’ve seen. We both noted that in fact Uwe Boll’s films can have some odd dialogue (I argue that it is creative and rather minor to the fun of the film, not all agree) but that a few of our oldest and most trusted horror films (such as Fulci’s Zombie) also are notable for some pretty shambolic dialogue. Yet it is strange that we take what Fulci was doing as such a fruitful attempt at greatness, and say that Uwe Boll is Satan himself trying to ruin movies. The standards have apparently become higher and higher, or rather, we as viewers have become more and more critical. We as horror fans in particular have probably upped our own standards, and for very obvious reasons.

For a start, as many of us will recognize, horror fans are pretty big fans of online forums, conventions, magazines, and discussion groups. We thrive on what would in any other context be considered education. Because of what we are, it tends to be known more as “Geekiness” or “being nerdy” rather than an educational exercise in broadening our knowledge base. Through our online forums and our continued interaction with fellow fans of the genre, we’re constantly forced to combat or create critical ideas and try to justify them. We often do so out of interest for the genre, sometimes out of personal amusement, or possibly even sheer boredom. But we all consider ourselves as at least having opinions worth voicing, or we wouldn’t be so actively involved in online communities and discussions. Equally true, we have all the world worth of resources to brush up on our facts and knowledge. From IMDb, to horror websites, to the many magazines, we can all read about how things were made, what the budget was, what their box-office figures are, and any number of random facts figures and anecdotes about all our films. The resources aren’t just there, they practically hit you in the face at every turn. And more often than not we are more than willing to read these articles and give our input. We love good discussions.

The upshot of this abundance of resources and enjoyment of discussion about it is of course that we learn a lot more and appreciate a lot more about our beloved horror movies. It is a lot more fun to talk about The Birds when you know that the female lead went near psychotic from having birds actually tied to her person and then excited. That is a creepy story that helps tell the tale of the film itself very well. Likewise, hearing a director tell us just why he did a certain take or a certain shot can make us appreciate it more. Our interview with Uwe Boll a fair while back (HMF Radio show 49, the legendary one) helped educate haters and fans alike as to what he tried to do, and what kind of fun things went on with his set, and much more. The educative benefits to fans is irreplacable.

There is however a downside to this excessive education. When did you last watch a film and just laugh/cry/scream along just for the fun of it? Usually when you start to read things and look at things critically, even though you may enjoy things on face value, you notice more flaws or problems, you criticise more aspect, and you are more likely to take note of things being done and shown. I know I have done this many a time, even with crap horror films, I take note of what effects they try to use, the kind of acting I’m seeing, and so on and so forth. I think it’s one of the deciding reasons why we’ve got such an abundance of horror fans who are critical of remakes and many of my fellow fans have told me that the 90s was terrible for horror. Even moreso, they repeatedly tell me that the good old days were the pinnacle of horror, the 70s and 80s with all the true greats emerging onto the scene. And yet watching them now, I can see more flaws than I am sure people gave them credit for back in the 70s. Personally I think that those who don’t recognize this are guilty of a bit of nostalgic bias, but I could be wrong. The point of this is that we do lose a bit of our naive innocense when watching films. We tend to struggle to get that back.

Now the benefits in this instance outweight the negatives for me. I think that we are always better off trying to learn and understand more about films. I am also usually more likely to enjoy something if I understand it more. To quote a man far more clever than I will ever even hope to pretend to be: ”Better to be man dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a man satisfied.” This is something that I really feel holds true here. As much fun as total naive watching may be, I tend to think it is better to be unhappy yet educated and reflective than to be ignorant and naive and guffawing at poor films. It is just in our nature to seek higher pleasures, more difficult challenges, and more complexity. For horror fans, this can be both positive and negative. It has problems and solutions at the same time.

For a start, horror movies are not always complex intellectual or cinematic fodder. They are famous for being B and C movies, average to poor budgets, lowbrow concepts, and overdone storylines. I know that as I type that sentence, sipping my Esprit de Courvoisier and enjoying some fine caviar, I could not be more of a snob. But it is true, notwithstanding. Most discerning fans can enjoy films of all calibers, but its hard to be totally satified once you know and learn more. It is easy to say you like films of all types, but sometimes we all agree that we can enjoy films without thinking they were good films. I’m a Jason X fan, I know all about the difference between enjoying a horror film and appreciating it for its technical merits. The latter is exclusively of the domain of the critic. The former can be both the critic and the inner child talking. Yet often, we don’t enjoy horror movies, critically or not. We seem to be fixated on finding faults.

I tend to think that most discussions about horror movies these days is a bit (if not exclusively) negative in tone, often critical. For every person who wishes to praise a film, two people want to be critical. This is to me symptomatic of the critical state we find ourselves in. Sometimes it pays to watch poor Pixar films, if only to learn a lesson in life. I come back now to the opening picture of this article, the deathly shape of Anton Ego, a food critic of impeccable credentials and taste, who is happy to tear into restaurants who make small mistakes with salt-dosages, and yet proclaims to love food. By the end of the fine film that is Ratatouille, Anton Ego has become a far more mild-mannered person. He’s realized that he can still know something, and yet love it for what it is, without discussing the failures of the ingredients, or the temperatures of their preparation. I don’t think that horror fans need to shed their critical skins and become juvenile fools in order to love their films, but I think that sometimes knowledge can be divorced from criticism, and that one does not need to try and make a show of our knowledge, or to make that knowledge a sledgehammer for discussion. Sometimes we can avoid being negative about something whilst still understanding it in its depth or lack thereof. We can, as it were, remember the reason why we love horror films, and watch them in that ethos. We can still understand more about them, and be more equipped to analyze them, but we can sometimes use that analysis to highlight positives in even the worst films, rather than to bring out negatives in the best films.

At least that’s what I would hope can be done. Otherwise the endless complaints about horror movies will doubltess continue until we all give up and become snobs, snobs like me.