Last Updated on July 27, 2021
PG-13. A community that can watch limbs cut off, innards pulled out and monster rape without blinking an eye still gets a collective chill when that hated rating is mentioned. The wailing and gnashing of teeth that can ensue often becomes the stuff of legends and biblical stories.
IT’S GONNA BE PG-13?! ARE YOU F*CKING KIDDING ME?! JUST KILL ME NOW!
In a quiet moment I think we can all admit that the world has never come close to ending because of a PG-13 rating. That said, there are also a lot of uppity pricks out there who like to chirp about why the genre community is stupid for caring about a rating. We’ll give those naysayers the benefit of the doubt and just call them woefully uninformed.
The reason we care is simple – PG-13 horror movies blow ropey goat chunks. Let’s get into why. Then Spit Bullets ’cause I know ya’ll have some opinions on this shite!
Half the fun of a lot of genre pics are the creative deaths. It may not be high art, but it can be a helluva good time. In flicks where the point is more strictly to terrify than to entertain, well used gore can really drive the fear and discomfort home. There have certainly been horror movies with little or no gore that were effective, but PG-13 horror movies try to be bloodless slashers and goreless ghost stories. Lame and ill-conceived on every level.
If I’m being chased down by whatever stalker, monster, supernatural terror that happens to be gunning for me, my language is going to be along the lines of “F*ck this f*cking shite, oh my f*cking God I’m going to f*cking die!” It’s certainly not going to be “Oh gosh, shoot. This darn situation is a bummer. Fiddlesticks!” Some times you gotta let the colorful lingo fly. Almost every horror movie revolves around one of those times.
If you’re hiring someone to write for you, do you want their best, most amazing ideas, or just something that’s marginally good enough to get produced. The clear answer based on PG-13 projects is the latter. Telling someone from the outset that you want a horror script with no blood, no significant cursing and no nudity or interesting sex is the same as telling them you want to make a crappy film. Just like making a porno without any sex scenes, no matter how good the rest of it may be, you’re still missing crucial elements.
Can you imagine the uproar if someone suddenly started making sanitized pornos so that teens could go see them unaccompanied? So why is no one bothered by these thinly veiled “adult” movies that are catering to teens. Sure they suck, but that doesn’t change the fact that the situations, fear, and violence that any genre pic tries to exploit is inherently adult subject matter. There are plenty of kids across a wide range of ages who would do fine seeing whatever today’s filmmakers can come up with, but it doesn’t mean a completely unrestricted rating is responsible. BTW, what is wrong with our culture that we’re more comfortable with kids seeing gunshot wounds and severed limbs than naked bodies?
Do you think Julia Roberts had a chance to land Richard Gere in PRETTY WOMAN if she was a gold digger trying to get him? Hell no, she had to stumble into it. Debatable whether that could ever happen in real life, but for now we’ll say it’s possible, if not likely. In the same fashion you could certainly make a horror film, and then find that the tone and subject matter naturally lend themselves to a rating less than R and end up with a great PG-13 genre pic. But you can’t do it on purpose. Because if you set out to make a PG-13 horror movie your goal is not to make a horror movie, it’s to make a PG-13 movie. Those goals do not support each other. There have been a few good PG-13 horror movies, but there have been no great, destined to be classic PG-13 horror movies. And there never will be. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never understood working on something, that from the beginning, you know has no chance of being great.
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