Please Hollywood, Make More Movies Like “Van Helsing”

It’s fascinating how there’s often a dissonance between what we enjoy, and what we know to be genuinely good.

There’s an idea of objectivity in art, particularly film, that is established in screenwriting classes where they use words like “need” and “must” to describe how someone is supposed to shuffle sand around their own personal sandbox. Hopefully we can learn to take elements of these “rules” with a grain of salt, but some rules genuinely have a point. In most films, you want a level of cohesion and understanding. If a person's life is at stake, it’s probably in the best interests of the filmmaker that we’ve grown fond of them, or that we can feel how their demise would have a devastating effect on this storyline which we’ve hopefully become quite invested in. Then there are elements of general logic and reasoning, visual cohesion and immersion, etc etc. But… to what extent do these things ultimately matter if we’re having a good time?

If you’re a person like me, you may find genuine value in silently sitting for 160 minutes to watch a methodical Andrei Tarkovski film, or you may appreciate the satire and introspection of a Federico Fellini film. That’s what we considered high-brow cinema. However, it can’t be denied that there are plenty of intelligent and interesting people who simply find these movies boring, or in some cases, upsetting in a rather unconstructive way. Even in my own experience, sometimes the film which inspires me the most, and brings me the most joy, are not the films that I’ll see in a criterion closet video. In a recent case, it was Stephen Sommers's 2004 fantasy film Van Helsing.

I’ll say from the outset that this is not going to be a deep dive analysis of that film; because what interests me more than unpacking one specific film is how I will watch a movie like Van Helsing, Blade 2, or Underworld, and feel so excited by the gothic atmosphere and the uncynical sense of thrill-seeking adventure, that I’ll be far more likely to rewatch one of those films than plenty of movies which are labelled as far objectively better.

Van Helsing had numerous plot contrivances, pacing issues, and special effects that, to put it kindly, remind you of how far we’ve come. But despite all of those things, the film embodies the exact atmosphere that I wanted in that particular moment in a way that no other film could have. This made me realise, the well of blockbuster genre films is running seriously dry.

Though I’m using the example of gothic blockbusters, this same thought process applies to a lot of genres. Mid-2000s fantasy films like The Chronicles of Narnia or The Spiderwick Chronicles, 90s period adventure movies like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves or The Mask of Zoro, it’s all the same. These are films that aren’t well regarded by critics but are widely beloved by audiences, yet they all seem to have totally disappeared in the last decade.

What scares me is that in this age of extreme awareness towards plot holes and screenwriting rules, the attention towards any sense of atmosphere has gotten lost in favour of making sure that a film can’t be picked apart. For example, I’ve found myself walking out of numerous blockbusters in the last 5 years with this hollow feeling of not being able to pinpoint anything that’s specifically terrible about a film, but I’m equally as incapable of finding a single trait that’s even remotely remarkable. So perhaps these films will have a higher critics score, but it’s in exchange of taking any soul from the film. Perhaps this makes more financial sense for studios. From a monetary standpoint, it makes more sense to have a large, apathetic audience who are going to see a film in order to kill 2 hours, rather than a smaller group whose chaotic enthusiasm drives away all opposing demographics.

While I do think that these genre films can be executed well while maintaining a vibrant atmosphere (look no further than Hellboy 1 and 2), it’s not always going to be the case. Emotions don’t run on a perfectly calibrated circuit board, and the things which elicit them most strongly aren’t always necessarily going to line up with the conventions associated with high-brow cinema. So when a film primarily focuses on the feeling it exudes (like all the aforementioned films), we often don’t care if we can recognise inconsistent storytelling or a terrible accent.

I recognise the importance of commerce in Hollywood, and how without DVD sales films aren’t able to have the second wind that they did in the 90s and 00s. However, it doesn’t take a great deal of research to see that people are desperate for atmospheric cinema. Social media is filled with “aesthetics” and “mood boards”, and some of the most successful mid-budget films of recent years were primarily popular because of their aesthetic relevance. Last years Saltburn both glorified and criticised old money, Top Gun: Maverick brought back sincerity and patriotism seldom found in modern films, and The Batman was honestly the closet thing I’ve seen in years to a movie which genuinely drenches itself within a gothic mise en scène.

So the audiences have spoken. They want to see filmmakers swing for the fences. We want to see something new, and we also want to see new explorations of older ideas that haven’t been given justice in a long time. The gothic blockbuster has some very charming entries, but there’s a tremendous amount of space to tell stories that are just as raucous and thrilling as they are gloomy and leather-coated. Not since The Crow have we had a film of that ilk united both critics and audiences, so maybe it’s time we took another shot. Some won’t succeed, but I have a feeling that they’ll be incredibly entertaining regardless.

There’s no such thing as films you’re supposed to like or dislike. Whatever makes us happy or fulfilled is inherently valuable, and by that metric, it succeeds as a piece of art. For some it might be Ponyo, or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but for me in this particular case, it was Van Helsing.