Are we all watching Modern Exploitation?

Do you smell that in the air? At first, you may be confused as you take in an odiferous blend of bad scotch, tweed, and your high school music teacher’s jacket. Don’t panic however; you merely smell the pretention that gets awfully stuffy in and around award season. You see, this is the time of the year when it’s perceived that audiences are done with their summer popcorn movie phase and are ready to jump brain-first into a cornucopia of bio-pics, hard dramas, and painstaking slow paced acting seminars. Unfortunately for us mad sick genre dogs, this means that the mainstream horror releases are few and far between in November and December. So with this meditative break falling into our lap, it’s time to look back at one of the most celebrated subgenres in film. Obviously, I’m talking about the gloriously explosive modern exploitation film.

The exploitation film is a strange monster with an undefined origin. We all have different takes on the definition of exploitation as many different people will find different things that are over the line of common decency and perceived ideas of personal tastes. In the 70’s, Russ Meyer and Roger Corman made millions of dollars on low budget Grind house horror films that played in Drive-ins and dollar theatres, mostly as traveling prints. These films gave the viewer massive amounts of sex and violence with thinly veiled storylines. It was basically everything that they weren’t seeing in the mainstream. And they all did well.

Of course we still have some very good entries into the horror genre, but a majority of the box office grosses go to the studios that pump out homogenized, serialized horror films in order to make money off of the masses. I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense, I see those movies all the time, some of which I quite enjoy. The issue I have with this is the fact that big brother is now pumping out films that used to be shunned by the rest of the society and seen as taboo fish food for derelicts. It’s kind of like when you’re a teenager and you’re listening to your absolute favorite band ever when your parents bust into the room and start dancing. They get into the music and buy all the records and even go to the concerts without you. So in turn, you stop listening to it because anything that your parents like will never be cool. It’s hard to defy convention and make titillating social commentaries on the horrid political state that “the man” has created while “the man” is making the exact same movies. So where do we go from here? Do we take a look at what is now considered distasteful by perceived mainstream audience standards?

What can even be called distasteful nowadays? After seeing movies like Salo, Martyrs, Inside, and Cannibal Holocaust, what on earth can possibly go further than those movies and be more taboo? It’s now a contest of completely misguided one-up-manship at this point. Everyone is making horror movies that are intense and filled with gore, but lack any real character to put them at the top of horror cinema. Please, again don’t get me wrong, I love movies like Saw, the Midnight Meat Train, and Hostel but are they really anything different than anything else we’ve seen? No, they are modern incantations of exploitation.

Think about the fact that back in exploitation’s heyday, films like Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Switchblade Sisters, and Boxcar Bertha were made for next to nothing and aimed at a very specific audience. They were designed to give the viewer something new that they had never seen before. We’re way past that now, and I would not hesitate to say that we’ve seen damn near everything. There are still movies today that make me squirm with specific gags and special effects, but they are so few and far between. I’m not saying any of these films are bad, I’m just saying that they are nothing new.

Just like when exploitation films were at their most popular, most horror films today are following the same formula as their peers. We have more and more films that champion the extreme rather than focusing on the artistic boundaries of the medium. There is nothing wrong with that because that is exactly what exploitation films aim to be.

Exploitation films aren’t concerned with the finer aspects of the film medium. They solely exist to give you some entertainment and to help you forget about your daily lives for a while. Maybe today you’re interested in seeing some hot nuns take on the mafia? Maybe you want to see some good old fashioned vigilante justice? Maybe you want to see some hot young thing get torn up all over the place? Then exploitation is your game. Movies today like Saw and Hostel have their place in society as a piece of entertainment and that is exactly what they aim for. That isn’t a bad thing at all it’s just been done over and over again into repetition. I believe that sometime in the near future, there will be a horror revolution that will match in historic significance what the genre encountered in the late 60s and early 70s. Now, we’re just looking for who is going to lead the charge.

So what do you think? Are you in the same boat as me when you believe that we are in some kind of second coming for exploitation films? Do you think that the most extreme horror movies are yet to come? Do you think that there is going to be a new horror revolution that completely redefines the genre into something that as of right now is completely unfathomable? Let’s talk it out!`

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