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The early noughts or aughts (for my fellow North Americans) were a fantastic time for me as far as horror cinema goes. I was on the cusp of graduating college, I was a young mother and I had a lot of time to think….about the horrors of the world and how far reaching everything was about to get. If the permeation of The Blair Witch Project was teaching me anything, it was that we were headed for decade that couldn’t say enough about the current state of affairs.

I couldn’t be more excited to see what Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escott, the team behind The Found Footage Phenomenon and The J-Horror Virus (charting the origins of Japanese horror films at the turn of the millennium), had in store with their newest doc that traverses such a rich time in horror cinema and I sat down with them this week to grab some insight.

Mo Moshaty: What initially drew you to explore this era of horror films and its turning point in horror culture?

Sarah Appleton: For me, all the films that I grew up watching that made me love horror like Wrong Turn and Final Destination and all the Japanese films of that time. So it’s also an era. I don’t think it’s very covered extensively yet. So I think we’re hopefully getting in there.

Phillip Escott: For me it was the first period that I was of age for, so I was able to, you know, go to the cinema to watch Final Destination and the SAW movies and stuff like that. So very much a period I was active in as opposed to the Golden era of like the 70s and 80s, which I had to catch retrospectively. So for me it was a chance to actually document a period I was alive for.

MM: Having the cultural and societal aspect or the buzz that’s going on during that time is so helpful, and it’s something you don’t get in retrospect. What breadth did that give you to enrich the film?

PE: Yeah, it was interesting because at the time it always felt like quite a a niche thing, like go to the cinema and watch Tale of Two Sisters or High Tension. Not many people were there for those screenings. So it was very much a small movement at the time, but it’s gained traction over the years. To go back and show how they all came to be, because it’s a period that, as Sarah has said, hasn’t been as throughly documented just yet, so it was good to actually shine a bit of a light on a movement that we were there for in real time.

SA: I think you know, we’re literally like 30 years since where we start in the documentary and that’s a long time. And I think people are really trapped sort of in the 80s still, so much has happened in the last 30 years that it’s really hard to navigate. Obviously, we talked about in the documentary with the war, with the terror attacks and everything, that had a huge impact. It’s good because that’s something we all shared globally and we wanted to shine a light on lots of like different countries and what they were doing during this time. And that’s what links us as well in that era.

MM: Man, living through that, I was 24 at the time, watching 9/11 happen on my TV in real time was just horrific and I don’t think we really understood that we needed to kind of exorcise that trauma, and we saw it kind of again happen in 2021 where the viewership of horror spiked during the pandemic. I mean, we were all globally going through something. I feel like horror is such great thing that everybody turns to, to kind of see that things can be much, much worse. What’s your take on that?

PE: I agree 100% that Horror is very much escapist at times. I mean it’s such a broad genre, so it can deal with societal issues, or can deal with just being entertainment. So when you have a genre that’s as flexible as that, it can literally cater for anything that is needed from it. So if people are looking to vent their frustrations after something terrible they can go to a horror movie and think Well, yeah. Shit really could be worse. But at the same time, if they’ve been affected by it, they just want to escape reality for a bit. They can watch some fantastical supernatural horror film that, you know, so devoid and and attached from reality that they can just disappeared For an hour and a half.

SA: I also really feel like it’s like part of our survival instincts to like, in a weird sort of modern way, if we watch Horror, we’re learning. We’re sort of giving our brains a lesson almost in how to respond to a bad situation. I do think that that’s part of it. But it’s like, really subconscious part.

MM: Can you speak to any films that you saw that were indicative of this time period in the horror genre?

SA: Personally, I am quite a big fan of Fear.com because I watched it when I was really young and when it came out, it was like manifesting the the fear of the Internet, but in a kind of horror filmy way. I remember seeing the poster or something and just thinking, “this looks so scary”. I was probably like 10 or something and I just wanted to watch the scariest things. I think the Internet is obviously one of the main catalysts for the huge boom. So, so much came from here, like J-Horror is so focused on the Internet and technology and so is found footage.

PE: How the home entertainment market sort of boomed in the early 90s was a big deal for me really to, like, tie that in with the Internet as well, so you’re able to get films that previously been banned in the UK just like that all of a sudden, all these movies that were really hard to find, they’re literally just at the end of a keyboard. You could order them, and they’d be with you in like a week. So then you see hand-held cameras and stuff like that coming into the found footage phenomenon. When you start in ’99 with The Blair Witch Project, you’ve got the high camera footage and then jump to 2007 with Paranormal Activity, the leap in quality is crazy. I used to be on forums myself and like I was a big The Ring fan, so I was on the Ring forum non-stop. I think you have so many films through those forums that were released in the UK or in America where you could import them or download them. So yeah, very much was a crazy time.

SA: The global thing like Film Festival genre, film festivals sort of started to come up in the late 90s. I think. I think we’ve got Fantasia was like the first festival, I think to bring over The Ring and that’s how it got out over here. And so, and they’ve continued ever since. All through that era. So I think that is a huge part of why certain films from different countries, from all over the world, get a sort of global platform. And then if they’re really good, they obviously get released in US or UK And that didn’t happen before and that’s why finding them on a forum was the only way.

PE: Yeah, the forums faded out and Social Media became the new hub and you just see a huge group of horror fans rallying behind movies that frankly, wouldn’t have had a hope in hell like Paranormal Activity wouldn’t be the success it was 10 years before it’s release. If the fans hadn’t gathered online, built up this big community behind the film and actually got the film shown in as many theatres as possible purely through demand. It definitely helped to create what we know is the horror community today, because previously we’ve been home with movie magazines. So ,when the Internet kind of came around and community started to build, that’s when you you actually get a real community.

MM: I feel like we’re always kind of reaching back and pulling forward, which is why we have so many film festivals that show restorations, or 30th anniversaries of what do you think as a filmmaker, as an audience member, as documentarians, that you can learn from those generations or those decades into now?

PE: Time is your friend. I was there for Urban Legend when that came out and I loved it. But you know, critics at the time hated it. Same with Halloween H2O. Not many people were a fan of that, but I loved it. When we started this, I wanted to call it new horror, but Sarah very clearly and correctly said, “what?”. These films are like 20-30 years and older. But in my head, these films are still so new because they’ve been so little discussed in a broad sense. It is actually insane that these films are quarter of a century old at times, and I still consider them new.

SA: At least when we started, I, even though I’m really well versed in the whole era from watching them, I was racking my brain for months about where the social context comes into a lot of them because I truly believe that most films come from whatever is going on in the world, right? Even horror, I mean, Neil Marshall doesn’t believe this, he just makes horror films, there’s no reason, apparently. But like most of the other people that we interviewed were saying it’s so interesting to reflect on the context of the time. Now from the future, because it’s really hard to do at the time, some people are kind of in tune with it. But most people I think saw their creativity come from the zeitgeist and what is going on around them, and so to look back then, you get to see it for what it really is. I think that is why like looking back because you see something in a wider context, that it has a place in the world, rather than just being like this thing.

MM: Oh, that’s a really beautiful way to think about it. And I think that’s why we have so much nostalgia in in this genre is because I feel like so much has gone on to inspire us to make, outside of Neil,–

SA: He just like to make horror films, It’s just his thing!

MM: But you know into 2001 post 9/11, there was a lot of grief horror being made, a lot of like J-Horror being made. And I think that it takes us to remove ourselves a little bit and look back in order to maybe further appreciate the films that we’ve already grown to love and why we continue to share them with new audiences and younger audiences to kind of collectively bring it together. Because your audiences are going to be incredibly diverse over this next festival year, what are you hoping that people take away from from the doc?

SA: I definitely hope that they will see the naughties as a proper decade for horror and very interesting, eclectic, different and global. I don’t think people think of it as horror era, but hopefully they will come out thinking of it so.

PE: Its a golden period. It was literally in the wake of the 90s where, you know, horror was a bit of a dirty word in comparison to what came before it in the 70s and 80s. But post 9/11, that sort of collective trauma kind of revitalised the genre in a huge way, and not just in America, but around the world.

GENERATION TERROR – DOCUMENTARY – WORLD PREMIERE
FRIGHT FEST – DISCOVERY SCREEN 2, MONDAY 26 AUGUST – 3.15 PM
Directors: Phillip Escott, Sarah Appleton.
With: Adam Wingard, James Wong, Joe Lynch, Rob Zombie. Simon Barrett, Thomas Fenton, Xavier Gens, Jim Gillespie, Prince Jackson, Alice Lowe, Joe Lynch, William Malone, Neil Marshall, Glen Morgan, Vincenzo Natali, Ariel Powers-Schaub, Jeffrey Reddick,
Kôji Shiraishi, Christopher Smith, Zoe Rose Smith, Srdjan Spasojevic, Amber T, Adam Wingard, James Wong, Rob Zombie, Sheri Moon Zombie

Horror bleeds into the 21st Century in an incisive documentary looking back at the late 1990s film industry on a global scale to find out what happened at the turn of the millennium to allow for the huge wealth of horror films flooding out from all corners of the globe. From SCREAM (1996), THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) and FINAL DESTINATION (2000), to WRONG TURN (2003), HOSTEL (2005) and SAW (2004), with insight from Joe Lynch, Xavier Gens and Bill Malone who track the technology, the industry and the societal changes behind the next generation of horror films.