Is PG-13 the New Horror Trend?
The news about Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins being released as a PG-13 movie has really got us thinking. Just how many more horror/adventure/genre pieces are going to go to the soft side? And how do these films register on the spectrum of the rating? Terminator certainly isn?t the first to aim younger. Prom Night recently scored well at the box office due to its targeting of young girls, the TRL crowd, as the main demographic. (We recently talked with the star of Prom Night, Brittany Snow, about her role and experience in the film.) Some films have decided to totally ignore the impact of ratings, such as the upcoming Frontier(s) which is going into theaters with an NC-17, and coming out in an unrated DVD cut. A PG-13 rating doesn?t spell disaster for every movie it touches, however, as exhibited by this weekend?s smash hit Iron Man (check out our review of the film). A lot of people thought that Iron Man would skirt the kid friendly side of the rating, leaning almost toward PG like Spider-Man, but the film was full of hard action, subversive dialogue, and could at times get pretty dark. It wouldn?t be hard to imagine the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull following the same path. In fact, earlier this year we saw two of the better horror films to come out in a long time get tagged with a PG-13, 1408 and Cloverfield. (Check out our review of the 'Cloverfield' DVD.) These films seemed way too intense and frightening to hold the rating, but with a little gore and a focus on the disturbing instead of the gory, they did what films like The Grudge and The Ring series have been trying to do?appeal to the mass/younger audience while still maintaining their integrity as horror films. The trend of PG-13 horror will likely continue for a fair amount of time, with Eli Roth having recently announced that he wants his next film to be a PG-13 monster movie! So while there will always be R-rated horror, one has to wonder how edited the future of fright will be.
