5 Classic Movies That Spawned Terrible Hollywood Trends

Remember that opening POV shot of Halloween, in which young Michael Myers goes to kill his sister? The opening murder in Friday The 13th is mostly done from the killer's POV, and The Funhouse starts with the POV of a little kid scaring his sister. The Halloween plot about someone returning to kill after being away for a while? You'll find that also in Friday The 13th, The Burning, My Bloody Valentine, and a ton of others. The ending wherein the killer survives something like gunshots or stabbing or a watermelon to the head in order to obviously return in the sequel? I would start listing movies that copied that, but I'm sure that we'd all like to wrap this column up before Christmas.

It's all of the beats to remind you of the original, along with upping the gore and nudity (as if that's what it was missing), but with none of the atmosphere or slow building dread. And even the magic of the original is diminished, because any kid who stumbles across it just sees a bunch of cliches they've seen a million times, only on a lower budget. This movie made those cliches mainstream, you little bastard!

And while we're on the subject of copycat horror ...

Long before the Paranormal Activity clones would set Hollywood records for the most profit on the least amount of effort possible, and even longer before movies like M. Night Shayamalan's The Visit would tack on a "found footage" gimmick for no reason whatsoever, The Blair Witch Project existed as one of the weirdest, most brazen ideas in modern Hollywood history.

The directors spent five years developing the project. There would be no script, no effects, no known actors. The cast would be thrown into the woods for over a week with their own cameras and told to shoot their experience, with no idea whatsoever of what was coming. They would be cold, exhausted, hungry and miserable ... and then in the middle of the night, the crew would scare the fuck out of them.

It was the last somewhat convincing "found footage" movie ever made, purely because the reactions were genuine. The stars didn't stroll out of a warm trailer after having rehearsed how to act like they'd been stretched to the breaking point -- that's just where they were at mentally. The result was performances so authentic that it's genuinely alarming.

The story structure is weird and draggy, it ends abruptly -- all things that make sense in that context. All of that is why the "found footage" gimmick worked, right up to successfully marketing the movie with "Missing" posters for the film's leads. It's a little surprising they didn't go ahead and just have them murdered in order to really sell it.

Artisan Entertainment

The movie cost $60,000 to make and grossed $248 million worldwide. And from then on, seemingly 75 percent of all horror movies were pretty actors on Hollywood sets pretending to be scared before a jiggling "video camera" while a CG monster loomed over their shoulder.

Sure, not all of the copycats were garbage. The first Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, and The Last Exorcism are fine movies, but ultimately they're structured and acted like traditional, predictable horror films. The Blair Witch Project, on the other hand, is exactly what you'd expect if three film students set out to make a boring documentary, only to have it go horribly wrong. Well, aside from the fact that it doesn't feature heated discussions about Stanley Kubrick that are borderline friendship-ending, or at least one awkward hookup that no one ever mentions again.

Let me put it this way: It's a weird state of affairs when, out of the many directors who have tried to copy the Tarantino "formula" of joke-making criminals committing horrendous acts to hip music, the only one who can nail it down is a guy whose legal name is Rob Zombie. Let that sink in.

Because at the end of these movies about how, on a desirability scale, superheroism is somewhere between gonorrhea and that face that babies make before they start crying, they all end up portraying it as pretty awesome by the time the credits roll. The Dark Knight, though, ends with Batman tackling one of the four friends that he has in the whole world and then saying, "You know what? I'll take the blame for my shitty friend's murders, and then NO ONE will like me OR my sweet bike, because no one is supposed to like me, and that's just how it goes for me always." Just like with Pulp Fiction, the distinctive style turns out to actually be in service of something more.

Meanwhile, Amazing Spider-Man ends with someone telling Spider-Man to not get too close to people because they'll get hurt, but Spider-Man brushes it off and swings back into Emma Stone's heart. Even Batman v. Superman, where Batman is so dark that he brands people with his logo on the off chance that it might get them brutally killed in prison, ends with Batman suddenly wanting to be the boy scout leader of the Justice League.

Only The Dark Knight leaves you thinking, "Ya know, I'd rather be Alfred."

The Matrix also augmented its stunts with some (now extremely dated and rubbery) CGI techniques, because the actual human body isn't rad enough to fight Hugo Weaving effectively. The side effect of this practice is that it brings a certain sense of weightlessness, which can backfire on filmmakers who kind of need their characters to seem badass and, you know, real. For example, Blade II is full of awesome combat, including Wesley Snipes giving a delayed suplex to a guy just because he can. However, it also awkwardly switches to Matrix-esque CGI, and the results aren't exactly seamless.

New Line Cinema

It's a problem that has spilled into every Spider-Man film, too. No matter how good the special effects are, we've never been able to properly make CG Spider-Man match up to live-action Spider-Man. They seem like two different people -- which, now that I consider it, is probably what Spider-Man WANTS us to think. The early Raimi films are especially bad with this, and it's only when there's good action choreography (like the train fight sequence) that we can ignore it.

That said, the train fight and Spider-Man 2 are perfect, so it's unfair to compare anything to them. Sorry, every other movie.

Daniel Dockery's Twitter is a wonderland of Pokemon references and 3 AM drunk thoughts about Batman Returns. It's a good time.

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For more, check out 5 Movie Adaptations That Completely Missed The Point and 6 Movie Remakes That Missed The Point.

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