This Friday, Nicholas Cage and Martin Scorsese team up in the chilling movie "Bringing out the Dead" about a paramedic who is haunted by the ghosts of people he couldn聮t save. The film is just one in a number of so called "supernatural thrillers" that have been spooking the competition at the movie theaters this fall.
Besides the fact that Halloween is drawing near, CU-Boulder Film Studies and English Professor Bruce Kawin believes these movies are making it big because they play on millennium anxiety and tug at people聮s uncertainties about life after death.
"The movies answer to that kind of anxiety is 'party till you drop,' rather than 'meditate until you聮re enlightened,'" said Kawin. "Stir of Echoes" and "Stigmata" and "Sixth Sense" are about 'meditate until you聮re enlightened.'"
Kawin says that although these supernatural thrillers are taking a different approach from the typical "slasher" films of the past, they still have the same concept.
"The horror film will continue to be doing the same thing it always does," explains Kawin. "It always goes for what people are upset about, and it has a choice between making them more upset or leading them through the upset into a kind of better feeling by the end."
As audiences grow more anxious about the new millennium, Kawin believes the trend of scaring moviegoers with what they are already frightened about will continue in the near term.