There are a lot of great date movies this year. But if you're thinking of such romantic comedies as "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" or "Alex & Emma" or any other "chick flicks," you're stuck in the wrong genre.
The truth is, the best date movies are the current critically acclaimed, virus-infected zombie jamboree "28 Days Later"; the upcoming cannibal chiller "Jeepers Creepers 2"; and the cheeky, flesh-eating-disease shocker "Cabin Fever."
"People forget that horror movies are the best date movies," says Eli Roth, director of "Cabin Fever." "You don't take a girl to 'How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.' You take her to a horror movie because you have a great excuse to hold each other's hands. You are grabbing onto each other. She has her head buried in your chest. That is a fun experience. It's like going to an amusement park or riding a roller coaster. People like to be scared, but they don't like to be scared in real life."
"There has always been and always will be an audience for the horror movie because we want to be scared," says noted special effects artist Stan Winston ("The Terminator," "Aliens," "Jurassic Park"), who produced the early-summer horror flick "Wrong Turn" and created the film's insatiable, inbred mountain men-cannibals. "We all want to be scared."
Horror films as date movies are nothing new, especially when you think of the old drive-in movie experience. In the 1950s, couples snuggled to "Creature From the Black Lagoon"; in the 1960s it was "Night of the Living Dead"; and in the 1970s it was "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Last House on the Left."
But because studios have become obsessed with securing PG-13 ratings to broaden the age range of the youth audience, older moviegoers, Roth laments, haven't had the opportunity to experience "hard R, kind of grisly, stomach-turning adrenaline" horror films.
Not to worry. Low-budget, R-rated horror flicks are making a comeback. One can look to the R-rated 1999 phenomenon "The Blair Witch Project" for helping turn things around, although some observers would note that the film didn't get its R for visceral thrills. The Motion Picture Assn. Web site cites only "language" (it had an abundance of four-letter words). Shot on video with a no-name cast for a threadbare $60,000, the indie flick went on to gross $140.5 million in the U.S. It performed spectacularly on home video, making $53.4 million in video rentals and $15.7 million in DVD sales.
Two years ago, the $10-million cannibal horror movie "Jeepers Creepers" hit screens, bringing in $37.5 million, another $45.3 million in video rentals and $10.7 million in DVD sales. "It did great on video," says Peter Adee, head of marketing for MGM. "The fact that we did so well on video bodes well for the upcoming release."
In general, these horror films have a long shelf life. In the case of Tsui Hark's "Vampire Hunters," the film opened in May to good reviews as a midnight movie and came out on Columbia TriStar Home Video less than a month later. Michael Stadford, vice president of DVD content and programming for Columbia, says the window between theatrical and video release is decided on a film-by-film basis. "The strategy is designed given what we see as the real opportunity in terms of longevity in home video. We try to figure out a good theatrical window. The theatrical window is used to generate awareness and helps set up the DVD release."
This year alone has seen the release of rocker Rob Zombie's long-delayed gore fest, "House of 1000 Corpses," the vampire-kung fu thriller "Vampire Hunters," "Wrong Turn" and now the apocalyptic virus thriller "28 Days Later." On Aug. 15, New Line Cinema pits two indestructible '80s slashers against each other in "Freddie Vs. Jason"; two weeks later marks the arrival of "Jeepers Creepers 2." Lions Gate unveils "Cabin Fever," which has been a favorite on the festival circuit, on Sept. 12, and the following week, Screen Gems unleashes its vampires-versus-werewolves thriller "Underworld," with Kate Beckinsale, in which ferocious vampires are the good guys. Another remake of Tobe Hooper's 1974 blood-and-guts classic, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," hits theaters Oct. 17, and come Halloween, Ridley Scott's landmark 1979 horror thriller, "Alien," will be rereleased.
"When I was a kid, within a span of five years I saw 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers,' 'The Shining,' 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' and 'Evil Dead,' " Roth says. "It was kind of the golden era of horror. You had really good A-list directors like Philip Kaufman, Richard Donner and Stanley Kubrick stepping in and making horror movies. There was no stigma attached, and then you had this youth crop like Sam Raimi and John Carpenter who wanted to kick down the door of Hollywood. So there was this infusion of top-level directors and a young emerging wave."
But the era ended, Roth believes, after the release of Wes Craven's 1984 "Nightmare on Elm Street," which was extremely scary and gory but also occasionally wickedly funny.
