Hey! It's Ash (Williams) Wednesday! What are YOU giving up?

Yeah well, so this article is about to make me more hated by touchy religious people than Kevin Smith is hated by the Westboro Baptist Church, but I'm not letting that stop me! This is a horror column so what did you expect? 

Now I ask you, Philadelphia, seeing that it's Ash (Williams) Wednesday, what are YOU giving up?

I'm giving up. Plain and simple. Well actually, I'm giving up hope. I'm giving up all hope of the big Hollyweird studios ever really caring about the horror genre again!

Sure, they're always fast to pay for, and produce, horror movies, or what they will tell you is meant to be horror, but they're not in it for the love of the genre. Not anymore, anyway.

At one time, the Hollywood studios latched on to horror like a baby on his mother's teet. Sure, they needed it to survive, but they suckled on horror's big bloody boob out of love too.

Universal Studios once dominated the horror scene beginning in the early 1930s, and continued to do so for decades, with films such as Dracula, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man and Creature From The Black Lagoon. All you need to do is sit back and watch any  one of the afore mentioned classic horror films to see that Universal once loved horror. 

But that's no longer the case! Now they are nothing more than typical Hollywood users. Using and abusing the genre that we love!

Case in point: 2010's remake of The Wolfman. What an atrocity that was! No heart. No love. All they saw were dollar signs. And sadly fans, myself included, slapped down their ten bucks at the box office hoping and praying that we were about to embark on the second leg of the Univeral Monsters Magical Mystery Tour. That's not what we got though.

Sure, there was preying going on, but the only preying that went on is Universal preying on the fans of the horror genre, knowing full well that we wanted to believe that they (Universal) once again gave a damn for horror. They do not!

Universal showed their proverbial cards, deflating our hopes and dreams of a second Golden Age of the Universal Monsters, New Line, who never really gave a damn to begin with, is basically a non-existent company, having been consumed by Time-Warner as though it were hundreds of thousands of screaming Japanese, and Time-Warner was Godzilla, and Lionsgate, the company whom I once believed was the last hope for studio horror, churning out more trash than treasure, the studios are essentially dead in the blood-red waters. 

With the studios doing nothing for horror other than to rape and pillage the stories of old with endless pathetic remakes and unwarranted sequels, where can a horror fiend turn?

The indies! The underground! That's where the best of horror is laying in wait, hoping that you, Joe and Jane Consumer, will stumble upon the treasures that await you in their films. 

Without question, the best horror films in recent years have come from the independent, or underground, filmmakers. 

Films such as Dead Hooker In A Trunk, Booley, Kodie, The Super, Sella Turcica and even the controversial films such as August Underground's Mordum, Martyrs, Pig, The Human Centipede and A Serbian Film, have served as a reminder to anyone who has seen them that horror is not dead. It's very alive. But it's being held down, quite against it's will, kept a secret, by the studios who spend millions, if not billions, of dollars marketing the souless garbage  they call horror films to genre fans in an attempt to keep themselves in the spotlight, and the indie and underground films hidden away in the dark. 

Filmmakers like Christian Grillo, the Soska sisters, Adam Mason, Abel Berry, Alex Lugones, Ace Jordan, Tom Six, Fred Vogel, Andrew Rose, Srđan Spasojević, Evan Makrogiannis and Brian Weaver, to name only a few, are the names that should be known to each and every horror fan out there, not the likes of Michael Bay, Marcus Nispel, Todd Farmer, Patrick Lussier, and Joe Johnson. Hell, I'll even, at risk of being killed by his many fans, of whom I am one, throw Rob Zombie into the list of Hollywood filmmakers who have either lost their way, or never even bothered down the path of righteousness, but rather took the path the lead directly to the bank! (I will state that I don't believe all is lost for Mr. Zombie. He is very talented and gifted but he needs to get back to basics, back where he was mentally when he made House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects, and as far away as possible from where he was when he made the Halloween films, especially Halloween 2!)

Now you know what I'm giving up for Ash (Williams) Wednesday, and why, so I ask you, Philadelphia horror fans, and fans all over the world, it's the season to throw in the towl and give something up, what are YOU going to give up? (Other than this column now!)

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