New Respect for Old Genre

Horror films are no laughing matter to Clive Barker, who has written and directed such scary movies as “Hellraiser” and penned numerous spine-tingling novels like the current “Coldheart Canyon.” So when American Movie Classics approached him to host its annual MonsterFest Halloween celebration, he agreed but only if he could treat the films in the festival with the respect they deserved.

“They came to me with a list of movies and I said if you are actually going to show these movies, then I’ll do it,” says Barker in a recent interview. “It was a very cool list. What I liked about it was that there were some obvious titles and some less obvious titles. It felt like a fun thing to do.”

Barker notes that “very often when people who front [these movie festivals] have their tongues deeply in their cheeks. I don’t like that. I told the AMC people the only way I’ll really be comfortable doing this is if the introductions are respectful and informative. Obviously, it can’t be a college lecture but it can, at least, be that we can talk to some degree about the movies. They mean something to the culture at large.”

“MonsterFest 2001: You Don’t Know Jack About ... MonsterFest,” the fifth edition of the network’s annual festival, kicks off tonight and continues through Halloween. Also featured will be Carmen Electra and Schmitty, the wisecracking host of the popular CD-ROM game “You Don’t Know Jack,” offering fun facts.

The first three nights of the festival are dedicated to Frankenstein, his Bride, the Mummy and the Wolf Man. Movies include “The Bride,” “Frankenstein,” “The Bride of Frankenstein,” “The Mummy,” “The Mummy’s Hand,” “The Mummy’s Ghost,” “The Wolf Man,” “The Curse of the Werewolf” and “The Werewolf of London.”

Halloween eve is “The Devil’s Night,” which features a new 90-minute documentary, “The Omen Legacy,” and airings of “The Omen,” “The Omen II: Damien” and “The Omen III: The Final Conflict.”

Halloween features a 24-hour marathon of such Dracula movies as “Dracula,” “Son of Dracula” and “Dracula’s Daughter” and a “monster load” of trivia.

Barker finds it regrettable that contemporary audiences often laugh at these vintage horror films from the 1930s and ‘40s.

“Modern audiences, particularly young modern audiences, feel to some measure superior to horror movies in part because they have been taught to be,” says Barker, who also produced “Gods and Monsters,” the acclaimed 1998 film about James Whale, the openly gay director of “Frankenstein” and “Bride of Frankenstein.”

“The postmodern tradition of horror movies is you sort of take them apart limb by limb and make mock of their cliches. It has made people very disrespectful of the genre, which didn’t get much respect to start with.”

Barker says this attitude is a fallout from the disposability factor of modern movies, which are “packed with off-the-cuff references, which instantly date them.”

Horror Films Show Signs of Their Times

Though most of the classic horror films exist in what Barker calls the twilight zone of the imagination, there are many things that do date the films for modern audiences. “Fay Wray still looks like a creature of the ‘30s [in ‘King Kong’], and King Kong looks like a creature of myth. It tends to be the love interest in these movies where their age shows. It tends to be the heroines ... unfortunately, because ... the gowns they wear and their hair and to some extent their lines mark them as being creatures of a particular time and place. What we are doing with MonsterFest is giving [the audience] information about the pictures and [putting them in] context historically.”

Barker’s favorite film in the festival is 1935’s “The Bride of Frankenstein.”

“The great thing about ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ is that is a complete world [of its own],” Barker says. “This is a [movie] where the camp is intentional. The filmmakers, many of whom were gay, were having great fun at the expense of the straight audience. It is very fun to watch.”

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“MonsterFest 2001: You Don’t Know Jack About ... MonsterFest” kicks off tonight at 5 with “Fright Night,” followed by “Young Frankenstein” at 7 and 10:30 and “Frankenstein” at 9. The festival continues through Halloween.