6 Once-Popular Movies Genres Hollywood Doesn't Make Anymore

Don't be mistaken, since this genre has dwindled, there are a lot of detective thrillers you might confuse for the same thing. Movies and TV shows like Se7en, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, True Detective, and The Killing are all wonderful, but often conclude with the killer being some background Waldo from a single scene we long forgot about. Other times, we get movies like Shutter Island, which start promising but end up betraying their genre for some crazy Fight Club ending.

See, the classic whodunnit, while having some twists and turns, doesn't need an outlandish narrative u-turn to be enjoyable. The appeal lies in the characters and tension of the environment. But as filmmakers kept making these movies, there was a weird pressure to force various third-act gimmicks to keep the premise fresh. A good example has to be Scream, which I would argue is a horror version of a whodunnit (complete with a mustache from Dewey). As they kept making sequels, the writers kept trying to make the final reveals more and more elaborate and twisty, making the killer impossible to determine ahead of time due to a lack of necessary information being given to the audience.

Of course! It was the lady we saw once in a previous scene, who it turns out is the mother of the killer from the first movie! It's so obvious now!

Even when we broaden our scope to the detective or murder mystery genre, there seems to be a real struggle to maintain momentum. Shows like True Detective and The Killing can't produce a good mystery beyond one season, despite having a formula that couldn't be more repeatable and entertaining. It's as if the writers are afraid that we'll get bored of simply having to solve a different mystery each time, and then psych themselves into steering the show off the rails and into whatever genre you'd call watching Vince Vaughn slowly die in the desert. Comedy, I guess?

And speaking of rails, there's hope in the form of the aforementioned new adaptation of Murder On The Orient Express, provided that the film doesn't end with the revelation that they're all in a dream or aliens or that the killer is secretly Kenneth Branagh's mustache.

Alien Covenant and the new Mummy failed to invoke a single moment of fear or excitement from most audiences, and your typical monster falls in the category of either "giant beast" or "rehashed folklore". In other words, it's either Godzilla ...

Paramount Pictures

... or a zombie ...

Universal Pictures

... even if those names aren't specifically used.

I refuse to accept that we've run out of ideas. A company like Universal spent nearly 100 years creating unspeakable monsters with the early Frankenstein and Wolfman films, right on through Jaws, The Thing, They Live, Tremors, Ghost Dad, Jurassic Park, Pitch Black, Slither ... only to start redoing those all over again in the 2010s.

What the shit, guys? This isn't to say that I don't enjoy seeing my childhood horrors come back in modern iterations, but most of the new films seem to have no idea what made the originals so appealing. The Thing was a favorite for its practical effects, so they made a dull CGI-filled version. The Terminator and Alien were beloved for their cat and mouse suspense, but the sequels inexplicably became obsessed with mythologies that no one asked for or wanted. The entire point of what made the Alien aliens scary is that we had no idea where they came from. So while it's powerfully erotic in a way that transcends sexuality, there's nothing scary or gripping or narratively satisfying about watching Michael Fassbender make out with himself. Save that for an arthouse film about twins or one of my confusing dreams.

It kind of sucks, right? For a lot of us, love is one of the most intense life experiences you can have (next to sweet, sweet meth). You throw a fancy party and get to have all sorts of gross sex. But movies can rarely sustain themselves on romance unless you throw in vampires or handcuffs.

It's especially weird that the closest modern examples we have -- Titanic and Avatar -- were made by James Cameron, a man with all the understanding of human emotion of the Terminators he so iconically created (or ripped off from Harlan Ellison, whatever). The future director of Avatar 5 is truly our era's Lord Byron.

While I get that Hollywood doesn't want to take the risk of dumping millions into love stories, it's kind of baffling when you consider that some of the highest-grossing movies ever, like Gone With The Wind, were all exactly that. I mean, shit, Lady And The Tramp was the second-biggest moneymaker of the 1950s, and that film is about dogs giving fuck-me eyes over a plate of trash spaghetti.

The lack is especially frustrating considering that Satan the ultimate horror movie villain, because he gives zero wiggle room in which to escape. You can't go hide in a closet from omnipotent evil. You can't put a banana in the tailpipe of his Honda Fit and giggle when he tries to drive after you. In the universes of stories like The Exorcist or The Omen, the Dark Lord is an absolute. He's a force of nature that's inescapable and all-encompassing, like the air we breathe or the Beyhive. If Satan wants to pull a Final Destination-style hit, you best believe it'll happen.

But at least he has an awesome sense of humor about it.

It's not so much about religion as it is the fear and powerlessness of dealing with the inevitable. The '70s and '80s seemed to realize this, and happily used Catholicism for source material. These days, we still get really good horror movies, but featuring B-list demons like "Bughuul" or "Valak." And instead of an unstoppable dark aura, the evil entities look like they play bass for high-concept goth bands:

Gramercy Pictures

This is why I liked the films Devil and The Witch. Neither were popular, but at least they portrayed evil like a natural presence as opposed to a walking, talking boogeyman. Because who needs a dolled-up demon when Satan can haunt you through the vile gaze of an adorable bunny rabbit? That's what fucking hardcore looks like.

But for some reason, we kept seeing this as the decade went on. And the joke was the same each time: "Look how old these guys are!"

They even redid The Hangover with even older guys.

What the fuck is happening, Hollywood? Do teenagers not party anymore? Was there some marketing study which concluded that males 18-24 responded favorably to watching Kevin Kline go balls-deep? Since when did we trade the extremely entertaining act of watching young'uns get hammered with the extremely tiring joke that old folk can get down? It's as if the generation of young stoner actors died out after Jonah Hill, and all we have left are films made by those once-supple potheads about the perils of getting older.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have movies that deal with aging slackers (I really liked Clerks II, you guys), but rather that there needs to be another generation to carry that bong mantle behind them. Where are my millennial slacker comedies featuring people in their late teens and early 20s going around not buying things and getting blamed for ruining the economy? Have millennials killed the stoner comedy genre?

It's fucking terrible, you guys. And us chucklefucks who once enjoyed a good lowbrow spoof deserve better. A film like Austin Powers didn't just repeat James Bond scenes with funny voices; it created original jokes framed around a Bond setting (well, the first one did). Airplane! Isn't one long retelling of Zero Hour!, but rather a spoof of the disaster genre as a whole. They are all undoubtedly stupid movies, but surely we can demand that even our stupidest of movies be stupid in a competent way that makes us proud of liking stupid things. Surely we can at least come up with creative names for these comedic travesties beyond a Mad Libs title or humor-punching pun. Right?

20th Century Fox

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