Your Franchise Sucks Cocks In Hell.

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What's the hottest trend in horror these days? Vampires, perhaps? Reboots of familiar slasher franchises, a la Freddy and Jason? Low budget chillers set primarily in one contained location?

Nope. None of these. The answer is simple:

Horses.

Dead ones, that is.

And how, pray tell, were these poor equines killed?

Beaten.

To.

Death.

(And then beaten some more. Just for the hell of it.)

It doesn't matter who the villain is: vampires, ghosts, an invincible serial killer. They're all being milked for everything they've got, long after the teat runs dry.

The most blatant offender at the moment is vampires. It would be exhausting to even try and name all the vampires franchises on the market, aimed at just about every demographic. For virginal teen girls and older women who still think like them, there's Twilight. For gay men and more promiscuous women, there's True Blood. For people with more highbrow taste, there's the excellent Swedish film Let the Right One In and for people too lazy to read subtitles there's this fall's remake Let Me In. And for kids, I'm pretty sure that purple fanged puppet is still finding counting hilarious on Sesame Street. Ah, ah, ah!

It's not that vampires are suddenly more popular than ever before. Vampires have always been popular. It's just that Hollywood is not content to leave well enough alone anymore. If something works, they need to do it again. And again. And again. Immediately. They're like chronic masturbators, and their cum rag is our money. $100 million...$200 million...$300 million...ah, ah, ah! (Okay, I'll stop.)



Eclipse has grossed almost $700 million worldwide, this the last Twilight novel has been split in two, presumably to prolong non-Twihards' suffering even further. (Does that make me Twi-soft, or does that still imply that I have at least a mild affinity for Twilight? Perhaps I am Twi-antimatter.) Meanwhile, True Blood's third season is currently underway; it grabbed attention this week with a salacious Rolling Stone cover featuring its three leads buck naked and covered in blood, a totally accurate depiction of what the show is about. Does the Rolling Stone cover go too far? Is it gross? Well, yes. But that's the whole point.

True Blood is only marginally more sophisticated than Twilight. There's an allegory to gay rights in there somewhere, but mostly, there's biting and fucking. If you like gore and nudity, you will like True Blood. If you don't, you won't. And you probably will not enjoy this week's issue of Rolling Stone either. Most fans of Alan Ball's salacious supernatural soap opera will readily admit that it's just Twilight for people who want to see vampires do more than play patty-cake. Think about it: the similarities are striking. In both properties, the guileless heroine's first reaction is not fear, but attraction.

It basically goes like this:

"Oh my gosh! Vampires are real? And hot! Wow, he's so broody...and as a woman in the 21st century, I hate to say it, but the fact that he's a vicious, soulless killer is really making me moist down there. OMG - he's looking over here with that cold supernatural gaze! I know he's a sociopath, but I just can't help myself! Hmm...I wonder how long it will take me to get into his heart (Twilight) / pants (True Blood)?" After a prolonged period of hemming and hawing, Bella/Sookie cops to her feelings and the noble vampire becomes her protector and boyfriend.

But wait! There is still conflict. No - not from the evil forces threatening to take over the world, even though that sort of thing happens too. But the main dilemma for a girl when she discovers there are supernatural beings in the world is deciding which one is the hottest.

"I don't know what to do! Edward/Bill has been such a loyal protector and is really dreamy, but Jacob/Eric is cute too! Plus - I'm ashamed to admit this because I've always considered myself a feminist - but the way he suddenly sprouts hair / puts his dick in my mouth is just so manly. Who wants some moody dreamboat when you can have a hunk like that? Well...maybe I do. Unless I can sync my period with the full moon cycle / break my blood bond with Bill, there are going to be some major obstacles getting in the way of us holding hands / fucking. And Edward/Bill is way more emo, and we all know deep down girls are suckers for that - no pun intended. Plus, I just love the way he sparkles / fucks me!"

Susan B. Anthony must be rolling over in her grave.

Or, if she's feeling trendy, rising from it.

That being said, I enjoy True Blood for what it is. I do my best to ignore Twilight given that I'm not quite the target demographic. Where were all these Twihards when Buffy did the teenage-girl-falls-in-love-with-a-vampire-several-centuries-her-senior thing? Well, in a crib, I guess. But where were the True Blood-hards, then? The thing I can't get into about this whole current bloodsucker craze is that, for me, it's soooo ten years ago. And it was fresher and better then. You can have your Sookie-Edward-Bella-Eric-Jacob-Bill fang-and-titty/promise ring sandwich all you want, but I know the truth: Buffy got there first.

Well, no - I guess it was Bram Stoker.

The upcoming parody Vampires Suck will most likely fail to highlight the stupidity of this fanged phenomenon because these parody movies are somehow even stupider than the movies they're making fun of. I mean, I know they're trying to be stupid, but they do it so stupidly. They're too stupid to even do stupid right. Meanwhile, Saw XXXVI will be released in 3D, which is like a dead horse putting 3D glasses over another dead horse's eyes, and then beating both that horse and itself.

And in the newest of the new horror trends that are already getting old, The Last Exorcism trailer is trying really, really hard to look scary.

And failing spectacularly.



This trailer depicts basically nothing at all happening, but with jump cuts and loud bursts of sound that are meant to frighten you. You could cut a trailer for Driving Miss Daisy doing the same thing and it would be equally terrifying. There's something to be said for quiet dread and slow-building suspense, and maybe The Last Exorcism will be creepy in that way. But something tells me Lionsgate isn't just playing coy and saving all the awesome stuff for when you actually see the movie. Something tells me this is all they had to work with, so the genius who was cutting the trailer thought, "What if we make it red??" Because...the color red...is...petrifying.

She sits! She walks! And (shiver!) she looks at us!! The creepiest thing in this trailer is that she cracks her neck, and not in a cool, backward, Linda Blair kind of way, but in a way that I could probably do myself without much trouble - and I, for the record, am not possessed by the Devil. It's also possible that she crawls along the ceiling, though I'm skeptical about this. It's more likely the editor just turned a shot of her crawling on the floor upside-down. Spooky!

I will not be seeing The Last Exorcism, and you probably won't either, because here's another trend: once something becomes a trend, it quickly becomes not a trend. This is clearly a rip-off in the vein of Paranormal Activity, which gave studio executives the brilliant idea that they could shoot essentially nothing happening on a shitty (aka "realistic") camera in one location and then sell it as a horror movie.

Sure, it worked. Once. And once upon a time, that horse was alive, too. But unless that filly was bitten by a vampire sometime prior to its demise, no amount of beating will make it undead.

With that, I leave you with a much better marketing ploy for The Last Exorcism than the actual trailer:



Pretty brilliant, right?

Compelled by the power of Christ,

X.