Having its world premiere at this year’s FrightFest was Generation Terror, a documentary directed by horror doc maestro Sarah Appleton (J-Horror Virus, The Found Footage Phenomenon) and producer Phillip Escott (The Legacy of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Exploring the horror cinema that hit screens at the turn of the millennium, Generation Terror is an extensive study into why films like James Wan’s Saw (2004) and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) were so popular at the beginning of the 21st century.
Featuring talking heads of filmmakers of the era such as Rob and Sheri Moon Zombie (House of a 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects), Neil Marshall (The Descent), Christopher Smith (Creep), and James Wong (Final Destination), as well as fans of the decade such as author Ariel Powers-Schaub, queen of the extreme Zoe Rose Smith, and film critic Amber T, Generation Terror examines the build-up and causation as to why the “torture porn” genre of horror gained such momentum in the early 2000s. After leaving behind the naive nineties, the documentary hears first hand how events such as Y2K, the terrorist attacks on both America and the UK and the further development of the internet affected both filmmakers and consumers of horror movies in the explosion of cinema that was meaner, grimmer and more visceral than the shiny slick slashers that preceded it in the nineties.
The only downfall of Generation Terror is its gender imbalance when it comes to the amount of air time given to the interviewees. Even though it is a fact that the majority of successful films released in the early 2000s were made by male filmmakers, it feels like the female talking heads are very much there to fill up a quota, instead of using that fact as a discussion point of the misogyny seen in the majority of “torture porn” films, or the lack of diversity in the 2000s when it came to filmmaking.
Despite this oversight, Generation Terror is a great starting point for those who are curious about this particular decade in horror, or for those how have perhaps dismissed it in the past who are now rightfully recognising this era of horror as an important stepping stone in the history of the genre
4 Screams out of 5
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