OK, I’ve stewed long enough. Time to vent. The recent American Film Institute special — call it “Contrived Movie Rankings Part XXXVII” — wasn’t so special, and here’s why: While brandishing 10 top movie genres and the top 10 films in each, it kinda sorta forgot one genre that’s kinda sorta important in film history, and certainly more so than, say, “sports” or “courtroom dramas,” which each got their own forum to show off on this show, and that grossly underserved and overlooked genre is horror.
I mean, come on, AFI. You have clearly declared yourselves officially to be snobs. And this is AFI’s fault, not its body of several hundred voters. As a film critic at the Houston Chronicle, I voted in those lists for years, and I can tell you that critics, film historians and others are sent books detailing several hundred potential films, and you can write in a few, but basically you’re endorsing AFI’s own pre-sorted list, and just narrowing it down. In this case, critics and others didn’t get a chance to choose the genres, just the films within a genre. So when horror went missing, there was nothing anyone could do — except howl like a wolfman, which is what I’m doing now.
Why, pray tell, should horror go missing? It’s one of the oldest, most durable, most impactful and most successful genres in movie history, certainly in terms of box office clout and audience appeal, if not always critical acclaim. But on that topic, I guess 10-time Oscar nominee The Exorcist wasn’t worthy of AFI’s most recent top 100, unlike, say, Caddyshack.
No, there was no room for horror, not when smaller niche genres such as sports and courtroom dramas had to be served, as well as overlapping genres such as fantasy, science fiction and animation.
Some things never change, and one is that horror, as a genre, gets no respect, at least not compared to the alleged aesthetic glories of a simple coming-of-age film like Breaking Away, a creaky silent movie like The Thief of Bagdad or the overrated coming-of-age film Big. (AFI probably would have squeezed in a separate “Coming-of-Age” genre before adding — the horror! — horror.)
At any rate, you know what great horror films could have made a horror Top 10, and could have made this show, so make your own list if you want. In protest of AFI’s foolish, silly snobbery, I’m not even going to bother. It goes without saying that a horror Top 10 would have been worth celebrating, and that horror is a highly prominent and vital genre in Hollywood history. And if the AFI can’t respect that, I have no use for them.
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August 1st, 2008 at 1:32 pm
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