Poor quality of scary films is frightening

There's nothing like a good horror movie.

No, really. These days, there's nothing like one.

"Quarantine"? "Blindness"? "Baghead"? "The Strangers"? No thanks.

The only horror film that paid off this year was "The Orphanage" back in January — and that was a foreign-language picture that had opened elsewhere in '07.

The other two my wife and I were suckered into turned out to be the usual gross-out gore for gore's sake: "The Happening" because we still had hope for director M. Night Shyamalan, despite his recent downhill slide, and "Mirrors" because we like Kiefer Sutherland.

All I can say is it's going to take more than Shyamalan's name to get us into his next effort. And the next "24" had better be good.

In fact, although we stuck it out with "The Happening," by the 30-minute mark in "Mirrors" we were out of there.

So I was kind of hoping for something scary and fun to come along for Halloween. But "Saw V" ain't it. And I have my doubts about "The Haunting of Molly Hartley" (though, with its PG-13 rating, at least the emphasis won't be on repellent imagery).

Actually, I haven't seen any of the "Saw" films — or, for that matter, any other of the so-called "torture porn" that includes the "Hostel" and "Hills Have Eyes" franchises.

But, of course, we did have a form of torture porn when I was a film critic from the late 1970s through the late '90s — we called them "splatter" or "slasher" or "creative killing" movies. (I had to sit all the way through all of them.)

Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic "Psycho" is often blamed as the inspiration for these films, although the level of violence and gore owes more to such '70s drive-in fodder as "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," "The Last House on the Left" and the original "The Hills Have Eyes."

But they really kicked into gear after 1978's "Halloween," which remains the benchmark that none of those that followed could ever reach. And that includes the "Halloween" sequels and such other series as "Friday the 13th" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street," along with myriad one-shots.

Why do modern horror fans allow gore and goo and stomach-churning carnage to pass for fright? None of that is scary. Shocking, yes. Disturbing, yes. Scary, no.