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9.2. Ante el debate que se ha abierto sobre el sistema de pensiones, considera que el mismo debe recaer en:
One of the strongest voices against The Gate and similar horror films aimed at young audiences, prolific in the late 1980s, came from critic Kim Newman:
104 With children, adolescents or childish young men in the leads, and with one scene of
knockabout looning for every dose of effects-dripping monstrousness, [films like The Lost Boys and The Gate] provide the MTV generation with something to watch every three minutes but are unable to get seriously scary, or even seriously funny. All they prove is nobody needs a safe horror picture.255
Newman’s outrage at children’s horror and other films mixing horror and humour is a result of his attitude toward the horror genre. According to his personal definition of horror, shaped by the films of the late 1960s and 1970s, true horror does not mix with “knockabout looning” or child
protagonists. Not only that, their presence in horror is shameful, vastly diminishing the quality and the appeal of the genre as a whole by making it “safe.” But Newman’s assumptions are not restricted to the contents and edge of horror but also to its audience. The films he critiques are aimed at “the MTV generation,” a fact he considers to be another perversion of the genre. The subtext in his comment is that this “MTV generation,” unlike himself and others like him, has a diminutive attention span and intellectual inability to appreciate “seriously scary” horror; their presence, therefore, is also disgraceful to the genre. What Newman does not consider is the contradiction of critiquing a film aimed at a group of which he is not a part (that is, children, teenagers and young adults) with reference to the values and judgments of the social group he belong to (that is, the adult viewer of a certain age and generation). In so doing, Newman works from the assumption that his demographic is the correct audience for horror and therefore the one that should be pleased, and that by catering to the desires and needs of a different group, horror filmmakers are sinking the genre’s standards.
Similar thoughts are expressed by Andrew Dowler in his review of The Gate. Like Newman, Dowler seems to have a very strict idea about what is and is not horror, even opening his piece with a lengthy distinction between “extreme horror” and the mainstream (that is, in his words, “horror for
105 people who don’t like horror”). Classifying The Gate as mainstream, Dowler had the following to say: “At worst, [The Gate is] flat and pointless. At best, though, there’s nothing great, nothing to give any but the least experienced viewer a rush of real pleasure or thrill.”256 The idea of different kinds of horror for different kinds of audiences beyond the extreme/ mainstream divide seems to evade Dowler; this preconception of a default or correct demographic for (“real”) horror impedes him of questioning if those “least experienced viewers” (that is, children) could perhaps be the very audience targeted by The Gate — much like Newman failed to consider that what is “safe” for an adult might indeed be “seriously scary” (or even “seriously funny”) for a child.
These remarks, however, are more than simple displays of ageism and scorn for young people as valid audiences; they are part of a larger effort to defend the horror genre during this period. The notion might seem absurd at first; the 1980s were, after all, a decade of great proliferation for horror, which was often tied to commercial success, as evidenced by the many franchises. The type of horror being made, however, was a big departure from the films of the 1960s and 1970s, the main change being the target audience, which now emphasised teenagers and children as opposed to adults only. Although it could be argued that the R rating had always been appealing to teenagers, the introduction of PG-13 opened the door for horror to decrease its intensity and target children, pre-teens and teenagers more directly. While this was a commercially liberating shift, and a key factor in the developing of the children’s horror trend, it also had phenomenal impact on the wider cultural perceptions of horror: a genre that had, since 1968, been almost exclusively associated with the R rating and a certain kind of counter-cultural ideology had now become unrestricted, open to children.
The problem with this association was, of course, that children’s entertainment was seen to be, as noted by Newman in the passage quoted above, “safe:” unchallenging and unquestioning. And sure enough, it did not take long for these associations to be brought to light in critical and academic
106 work as, for example, in James B. Twitchell’s book Dreadful Pleasures, where the author argues that horror is in essence a juvenile genre, fit not for adults but for children and teenagers.257 Until 1984, the rating system had provided some protection against these criticisms through the R rating: any horror film under this classification had been reviewed by a panel of experts (in this case, the MPAA) and declared to be unsuitable for children. After PG-13, however — especially given the abundance of children’s horror and teen horror —, the same was not true. For horror aficionados like Newman, Dowler and others of their generation, this “juvenilization” of horror was thus perceived as a threat to the integrity of the genre.
Their rejection of this change in horror was often manifested precisely through conflicting thoughts on ratings and horror. Andrew Dowler, for instance, illustrated The Gate’s inferior position through a comparison of its characterisation with that of extreme (“real”) horror. His example of a good extreme horror film was Evil Dead II (Sam Raimi, 1987), an adult-oriented film rated X in the United States and R in Canada.258 This sort of comparison seems both unfair and out of place but it was not uncommon. “I remember at the time,” Tibor Takács has said in interview, “people were always comparing The Gate to A Nightmare On Elm Street [Wes Craven, 1984] or something where to me the films had a completely different type of audience.”259 The comparisons with horror for older audiences carried on to this day and are visible in how modern viewers remember and interpret The Gate. In the DVD feature commentary, for instance, Takács commented on the disappointment felt by some viewers at the film’s ending, which some describe as “a cop out.”260 “Sometimes people forget it’s a PG-13 movie for kids and try to match it for gore and intensity against R-rated 80s horror classics,” the director noted in an interview. “It’s really a different animal.”261
257 Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. 258 Dowler, "The Gate."
259 Robert Saucedo, "Badass Interview: The Gate's Tibor Takacs,"
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2012/02/09/badass-interview-the-gates-tibor-takacs.
260 Michael Nankin and Randall William Cook Tibor Takács, "Audio Commentary," in The Gate (Lionsgate, 2009).
107 Elsewhere, Takács has also described the film as “a creature feature […] a sort of enchanting movie and not a hard-edged slasher film,” and lamented that not everyone respected this difference and did not see that “the movie was always intended for tweens.”262 But, in light of some of the reactions to The Gate, it strikes me that what Takács interprets as confusion about the film’s target audience might instead be confusion about the film’s genre, caused by clashing expectations. Indeed, these comparisons with R-rated films of the same period seem to come from the disbelief that any horror film, even one rated PG-13, could be aimed at anyone other than teenagers or adults. Two conclusions can be drawn here. First, that the idea of a horror film for children was still foreign for horror fans and critics, despite the quick multiplication of children’s horror titles. And second, that the PG-13 classification had not yet established a strong identity, allowing genre to trump it when it came to defining audience expectations.
The ambiguity around PG-13, and the notion that R was the more appropriate rating for all horror was visible throughout The Gate’s production process. “Some people wanted it to be an R,” revealed Takács; but for the director, PG-13 was the only option “or it wouldn’t make any sense.” In the director’s view, the concept of children digging up a hole to hell was “strictly the fantasy of an eleven-year-old. I don’t think many fifteen or sixteen-year-old were going to be thinking about that.”263 For Takács, therefore, the rating to aim for must match the film’s content and target audience rather than match what is expected of a certain genre. Furthermore, the director’s
comment suggests very clear demographics for each rating — pre-teens for PG-13 and teenagers for R —, as well as their different thematic trends: for example, adventure, family and personal
empowerment in PG-13 films like The Gate, and romance and sexuality in R-rated franchises such as Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980).
Collective agreement was never reached on the right classification for The Gate franchise. When plans for The Gate 2: The Trespassers (Tibor Takács, 1990) were made, the filmmakers were
262 Saucedo, "Badass Interview: The Gate's Tibor Takacs". 263 Tibor Takács, "Audio Commentary."
108 instructed by producers to aim for an R, despite the sequel remaining very close in spirit to the original. On the topic of ratings and expectations of horror, it is useful to mention the case of The Lost Boys, another youth-oriented horror released on the same year as The Gate. Originally, Lost Boys was conceived as a children’s horror film: the script took the Frog brothers, “two chubby eight- year-old cub scouts” as main characters and pitched them against 5th grade (11 year-old)
vampires.264 The film had been inspired by the children’s classic Peter Pan, and developed the idea of the lost boys as creatures of the night since they could fly, did not age and wandered the night. The production was set to be headed by Richard Donner who had directed The Goonies in 1985 but, due to circumstance, ended up in Joel Schumacher’s hands, who promptly made drastic changes to the script: he “hated the idea”265of children fighting vampires and so decided to age up all the characters, make the story sexier and gorier and aim for an older teenage audience. Schumacher described Donner’s original vision for the film as “sort of a cutesy, G-rated movie aimed at young kids.”266 This is a strange statement, however, since not only had the G rating long fell out of favour
at the box office (see chapter one), Donner’s intention was to make The Lost Boys as a companion piece to Goonies,267 itself a PG-rated film with an even heavier television rating of PG-14. It is likely
that Schumacher meant his remark to denote not the film’s actual intended rating or tone, but as a reflection of his own personal opinions on the script’s intensity, as well as his expectations from a vampire story (not “cutesy”) and a horror film (restricted, not “aimed at kids”).
What these examples demonstrate is a resistance to change. Not only is there an implicit rejection of the notion that genres might be fluid concepts, there is also an attempt to champion a very specific definition of horror through the rejection of children’s horror as real horror. This denial was expressed through a chain of assumptions: that children are not a legitimate audience for horror, and that to scale down horror’s intensity, both through the PG-13 rating and through an attention to
264 Anon, "The Story Behind the Lost Boys," http://www.gamesradar.com/the-story-behind-the-lost-boys/. 265 Ibid.
266 Ibid. 267 Ibid.
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children, is to lower its quality and appeal. Both of these strongly imply an adult-dominated cultural environment suddenly threatened by the inclusion of children.