Man, if everybody doesn’t have a list, right? I’d guess, if I took the time to look, somebody’s already got one like this, I mean: things they’re tired enough of in horror to make a public plea that those things stop, lest the whole genre cave in or something. Or, really, those things we get tired of in our chosen reading areas (assuming we use the marketing terms [Western, Horror, Romance, Thriller, Mystery, Erotica, Historical, ‘Literary,’ etc] instead of just ‘Quality’ and ‘Not Quality’), without them how could the genre ever be parodied, right? And parodies, aside from being this big extended in-jokes that make us feel clever, they also tend to purge the genre of a lot of what’s become extra. SCREAM did this in 1996, say, BLAZING SADDLES in 1974, etc, though, stuff like DATE MOVIE or SCARY MOVIE, I don’t know: they’re parody, sure, but I suspect that, like with its cousin satire, there’s generative parody and destructive parody. The reason SCREAM and BLAZING SADDLES worked, I think–ie, added to the genre by critiquing it–was that, beneath the laughs, they were a horror movie and a western. Just funny, self-aware ones. This isn’t to say NAKED GUN was necessarily a parody of the police procedural, however; I’d say it’s more like just a comedy with cops in it.
None of which is what I mean to be introducing here. I guess I got the idea for a list like this, first, from just reading horror for so many years, but, too, stuff like floating around, it makes my thoughts organize themselves into bullet points, it seems. Like I’m Marty in BACK TO THE FUTURE, yeah, and somebody’s calling me chicken.
Anyway, let’s see if I really have twelve, here. And, already I can tell this is less about complaints and more about warning signs: