Which One’s Better: Ghosthouse or After Dark
When it comes to independent horror films, it’s hard to find a film or films that stick out; films that make you sit back a minute because you were utterly scared. Of course the budgets are small and many of the writers and directors are fairly new in the craft. Every year, Ghosthouse pictures and After Dark release movies that are are marketed as either “too scary to show in theaters” or something along those lines. Scary marketing and scary movies, too…not in the I-scared-myself-silly kind of way. Scary as in the movies, cinematically, are pretty bad. However, there are a fair share of good ones, which leads to the debate: who has the better movies, Ghosthouse or After Dark.
After Dark, sporting movies like Gravedancers, Frontiers, Dark Ride and the Hamiltons, had a decent run of horror and a good dose of scifi. Many of After Dark’s movies rely too heavily on gore and more gore to achieve an effect that is worthy of being “too scary to show in theaters”. Bombarded with blood and the like, does that make a movie good? Probably not. Some After Dark movies were thought provoking and genuinely chilling like the Hamiltons, Perkins 14 and Broken.
Ghosthouse, a lower-budget production house produced movies like Dark Floors, Brotherhood of Blood and Dance of the Dead. Some of the movies were well representative of classic horror mixing genres of old school horror with old school B-style films. Creative, yes, but good…half the time. That’s not to say After Dark didn’t have their fair share of movies that were abominable like Crazy Eights or Lake Dead.
As a careful observer of horror and scifi movies, the edge must certainly go to Ghosthouse, though not by a wide margin. Ghosthouse movies lend viewers more story arc, not just violent acts that end in gore. Movies are more than that. There has to be story, albeit in some cases not a serious one, but a story nonetheless. A movie is contingent upon the development of the main ideas, and the actions and reactions of those characters. Ghousthouse did a pretty good job on that with some of their movies such as Brotherhood of Blood and Rise of Seeker.
They both have good movies, but they both have bad ones too, but ultimately, we’ll let the public sort it out. What are your thoughts?
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