Horror Genre Takes the Midnight Meat Train to Its Final Demise
By Demon
It’s been a little over a year since Hostel II tanked at the box office and Hollywood pundits and horror haters gloriously declared the horror genre dead. Since that time, pretty much every horror film with the exception of Saw number whatever-they-are-up-to-now has performed miserably at the multiplex.
Now cometh the Midnight Meat Train to put horror back on the rails. Well, sorta. Looks like the train overshot the station where it was supposed arrive. Here’s the deal…
I see most theatrically released horror movies at what I would call a first-run horror theater. If the movie contains standard horror elements, including, but not limited to, chainsaw-wielding killers, demonic video tapes, cannibal mutants, zombies of all speeds, murderous dolls, or nightmare puppets, it plays at this theater. If the movie has been banned by the courts or damned by the church, it plays at this theater. If you see a recently released horror movie on DVD and wonder if it ever played in a real theater, this is the theater it played in if any theater at all. And if horror maestro Clive Barker’s name is attached to the movie, nothing short of a bomb scare will keep the film spools from unwinding.
But not this time. Despite the “coming soon” poster for Midnight Meat Train hanging on the wall outside the theater for the last eight months, the locomotive never stopped like it was supposed to. The poster vanished, the movie never appeared, and that’s when I realized the naysayers were right. After a year of wheezing and gasping, horror finally died.
I’m talking about the latest cycle in horror, of course. Call it “torture porn” if you must, but I think “American foreign policy as interpreted by the horror genre” is more insightful.
The reason? I’d like to think that a new political optimism represented by the rise of Barack Obama and farewell to George Bush has made the torture tropes of the last several years less compelling, and is at least part of the cause. Audiences want to see something different, both in the movie theater and the world stage.
Horror disciples should not despair. You will continue to be fed pieces of flesh out the back door of the restaurant in the form of DVD and the internet. And don’t expect the theatrical demise of horror to be permanent either. Eventually some other form of meat train will return to a shopping mall near you, probably around the time President Obama betrays our hopes like every politician before him and sinks his first drill into the Arctic. As the bit twists and digs into the virgin soil, a Chthonic terror will rise from the earth to wreak havoc on mankind, and new blood will reconfigure the genre once again.
For if any genre has shown its resilience not only in world cinema, but the entire history of artistic creation, it is this one. Like a slow but determined zombie, horror will crawl to its feet and creep behind you to tear the tendons from the back of your neck – right around the time the world starts making you nervous again.
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You are right horror will just go underground and come back with a vengeance. It was getting clouded up by too much pg-13 crap anyway.
Give Obama a chance haterz.
I have found that to keep my chainsaw running the right way I need to do a lot of maintenance. It is a good idea to always check the fluids, bar oil, and keep your chain sharp. This makes it easier to use and is safer as well. If anyone else has any tips I’d be happy to hear them.