HORROR TEN SPOT: Top 10 Reasons PG-13 Horror Sucks

Last Updated on August 3, 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!

1. You Cannot Make A Great PG-13 Horror Movie

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.

2. Morally Suspect

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?

3. Stifles Creativity

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.

4. No Swearing

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.

5. Weak Gore

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.

6. No Nudity

Some folks feel that the insistence on nudity in horror is silly. I agree that it is not always appropriate, but for the vast majority of genre pics, a little well placed nakedness is just what the doctor ordered. Why? Because sex and horror go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Both feature a little teasing, some nervous excitement, slowly building tension and an eventual release. If people insisted on a unicorn, or a buffet scene in every flick then it’d be gratuitous, but sex and jublies? That shite belongs, my friends!

7. Choppy Editing

What do you do when you have an inherently violent premise yet you’re artificially restricted in what you can show? Why you go to the shaky-cam quick cut editing room. There you can create such a senseless jumble of images that the only thing more obtuse than what’s going on is why you even bothered.

8. Bad Casts

Am I really going to bitch about casting in this genre famous for bad scripts and worse performances? You bet your ass. PG-13 horror never has a creative idea going for it, so to sell that shite to teens the producers go out to grab whatever One Tree Creekville starlet they can find to run around looking drunk but not stoned, cute but not sexy, scared but not terrified. Give me Tiffany Shepis or Melantha Blackthorne, hell give me a stripper who just gives her all to the role of Makeout Girl #2, but don’t give me some teen diva who cares more about her Q score than making a good movie.

9. It Hurts The Genre

Every time a PG-13 horror movie tanks at the box office you start to hear whispers that horror is dead. Which is stupid because horror is not a blockbuster genre in the first place. You keep your costs low, rely heavily on DVD interest, and occasionally see a superbly creative flick take off in a SAW or BLAIR WITCH PROJECT kind of way. What you do not do is plan to make $100 million profits off a moderately budgeted studio horror pic. Doesn’t work that way. Never has, never will. Each time some bean counter looks at the receipts of the last WB flavor of the week starring scare flick, it makes it harder than ever for an interesting, legit fright film to get green lit.

10. The Rating Itself

Right at the outset we have to deal with the fact that PG-13 is a seriously flawed rating. It was originally created because of movies like INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM and GREMLINS which parents felt were too violent for kids. They were right, and guess what, that’s what an R-rating is for. No offense to Mr. Spielberg, but if you want to have a dude pulling peeps hearts out of their chest then a parent should probably be involved when and if a teen or tweener sees the damn thing. There was never a need for the PG-13 rating, and today it continues in the role it has always had – the Studio’s favorite loophole.