Twilight and Avatar: Isn't anything scary anymore?

Whatever happened to those things that went bump in the night and scared the bejeezus out of us? You know, when we were young every kid had a big fury monster under their bed, a pumpkin-headed snow monster tapping outside their window and a sibling whose head would spin 360 degrees just before he/she projectile vomited green demon sludge at the nearest iconic symbol of religious significance. Like, when we were kids things that were supposed to be scary were actually scary, and when we were meant to be scared we were ‘wet your pants and cry for your momma’ scared.

Anyway, I don’t know if it’s a result of all this political correctness bollocks or just some passive tiredness in the minds and imaginations of our authors and film makers, but everything that was ever scary when I was a kid is so mundane and ‘blousy’ today.

Take vampires for instance. I remember as a kid watching the Friday night scare-fests. I remember seeing Christopher Lee in The Satanic Rites of Dracula and thinking ‘Crikey, that’s bloody scary!’ Then there was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, followed much later by Interview with a Vampire, the Blade and Underworld films, Van Helsing and 30 Days of Night. Even the teenie vamp films Fright Night and The Lost Boys, with their irreverent attempts to satirise the genre, had an air of eerie about them.

So what’s all this mind-numbing senseless tripe they call the Twilight saga? Like these vampires aren’t very scary are they? For a start, they’re all vegans!!! Who ever heard of a vegan vampire? Even Wesley Snipes (who, let's face it, has always been a wisdom tooth short of a full bite) had the common sense not to go there. But it’s worse than that, because Twilight vampires are also mostly angst-riddled and depressed teenage vampires – so they mope about and complain a lot just like Emos – only the Twilight vamps don’t cut themselves like Emos do because that would be ‘sooo eeeyeeew!!’ Like, there’d be blood and pain and stuff involved and Twilight vampires don’t really like blood and pain and stuff, they only like hair products and playing baseball.

Apparently they're already making the fourth film in the series; Breaking Dawn. Previously we’ve had Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse. Now I can see a bit of a cyclic pattern here…

… and an opportunity to rescue the series – they should entitle the fifth film Mid-Morning Brunch and all will be saved (except for maybe poor Bella – she’d likely be the brunch). But until then, the only thing that’s really scary about a Twilight movie is that it’s rated PG 13 but there’s never any more than three pubic hairs in the whole cinema while it’s screening.

Now that we’ve suggested a way to save the ailing vampire reputation, what’s happening to aliens? I mean, again when I was a kid the master aliens were always so God-damned shut-your-eyes-and-pull-the-blanket-over-your-head scary. Like, Doctor Who’s Daleks were the scariest thing I ever saw – I had nightmares about them. Daleks were scarier than when Grandma would lick a tissue and wipe food from your face in public – and that was really scary. And then there was Darth Vader from the Star Wars franchise, the Klingons and Borgs from Star Trek, Stargate’s Goa'uld, Ming the Merciless (Flash Gordon), Arnie’s Predator and Terminator (although technically the Terminator is not an Alien but a future human technology) and Sigourney’s Aliens. And they all had those famously scary one liner’s: “Exterminate”, “Welcome to the Dark Side”, “I’ll be Back” and “Glik! Glik! Gurrrrrrgle! Screeeeeeeeech!!!”

"Danger Will Robinson, Danger..." (and yes, I heard you doing the voice)

Anyway, Steven Spielberg was the first to undermine the scariness of Aliens by creating something akin to the yellow and green Teletubby. He called his little hamburger patty look-alike ET the Extraterrestrial. “Phone home, phone home, phone home…” ET would say. I’ll give you phone home Mr. Spielberg!!! Go phone your Creative Imagination Consultant and book an appointment for a triple lobotomy you thrill-stifling bubblegum retailer!

But since Spielberg gnaffed the fun out of Aliens we’ve had all manner of cutsie-wootsie star hoppers invading our screen-space (what the hell was Men In Black and District 9 all about for crying out loud?). And the latest of these has to be the most farcical of them all: Avatar. I mean, here we have a bunch of pretty smurf-coloured nature loving hippy critters living in a giant tree house for God’s sake. And the hero, their ultimate leader, isn’t even an alien as it turns out. Rather, he’s a miserable winey ex-army grunt in a wheelchair with a colostomy bag full of Jack Daniels who’s out to stifle progress and save a planet by lying in a sunbed and playing on his Xbox 360. And the worst thing is that he achieves victory by mirroring the plot from Kevin Costner’s Dancing with Wolves while dedicating the final scene to a re-enactment of Custer’s last stand at Wounded Knee.

"Them there ain't no Aliens God darn it! Them there is Injuns!!!"

So a crippled alcoholic blue-faced tree-hugging hippie-cowboy is our current representation of an extraterrestrial life form? Oh pleeeee-aaaase!!! Beam me up Scotty!

I could go on – poltergeists have been Casper-cised, monsters have been Pixared, and everything else that had even a vague hint of scariness in my childhood has since been Harry Potterfied. The point is that thanks to films like Twilight and Avatar, everything that’s fun has now been sapped out of my favourite scary things. So where will I go to now to get my thrills and spills? What can I turn to that will make me want to cower behind the couch and cry like a little girl whose ginger kitten Fluffy was just eaten by the neighbour’s Rottweiler? What am I to do?

I wonder when I’m next due for a trip to the Dentist?

That’s what I think… And usually I’m right.