Teen dreams turn to screams

It seems you can't scare teenagers these days. But it's not for want of trying. Scary movies, up to and including the tongue-in-cheek Scary Movie, are as popular as ever and more gory - and teens, in particular, have a seemingly insatiable appetite for them.

However, it's just possible that the genre is getting tired: there's only one big horror movie due in Irish cinemas this Hallowe'en weekend. And, already this year, Scary Movie pretty much declared horror's conventions to be as decayed as last year's corpses, by parodying them so effectively. It even parodied Wes Craven's brilliant Scream films, which themselves were knowing, satirical comments on other horror movies and then, as the trilogy went on, on the Scream movies . . . And so on, and so on, and so on. And as for this weekend's scary movie: well, it's a sequel. (Quick, run and hide! No, not in the cellar!) And it's not just any sequel, but it's the sequel to the scary movie that was supposed to change forever the way we looked at scary movies, The Blair Witch Project. Talk about last year's corpses: only a year ago the hype and "buzz" around Blair Witch seemed to mark it out as a landmark in cinema - perhaps, with its "reality" trappings both in the film itself and in support media such as the Internet, marking the end-point of where horror could take audiences. From this distance, it looks like, well, a fad.

In case you haven't heard or, more likely, in case you've forgotten: Blair Witch pretended to be the remnants, on video and film, of a student project investigating a local legend adjacent to the small American town of Burkittsville, Maryland. The college students, we gathered from the Internet and a phoney documentary that circulated at the time, had disappeared, and their final movements could only be pieced together from this visual evidence, found in the woods. That footage - amateurish to the point of being nauseating, what with the camera shaking - had an unsettling air of reality, and this $35,000 film, actually made by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, became an enormous hit.

Now, all over the world and just in time for Hallowe'en, comes Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. The director of Book of Shadows is Joe Berlinger, previously a documentary-maker who, creepily enough, made his name doing a film about real Satanic murders of children.

For anyone who thinks, looking at the Scream and Scary Movie phenomena, that horror movies are disappearing up their own backsides, Book of Shadows will be another example. Instead of telling us "what really happened" (for that, wait for the prequel . . .), the new movie is Screamishly based on the hype that surrounded the first film, as Blair Witch tourists descend on Burkittsville, in spite of local assurances that it was only a movie . . . Otherwise, it's apparently standard slasher fare (low on gore like the first one, but with nudity and sex added), and early reviews are not good.

That should all be academic for teenage viewers in Ireland. The film censor here is particularly sensitive about violence and young audiences, and Book of Shadows has earned an 18 cert. For one teen's comment on this sort of rating, see `Over to You', above left. Media Scope spoke to another teenager, a 14-year-old who says the film censor is "ruining my life". At her age she can only, legally, go to films which are rated 12s or PG. But she and her friends usually go to 15s and sometimes watch 18 movies on video.

They are particularly annoyed that they can't see Scary Movie and Hollow Man. But, for Hallowe'en are planning to take out the scariest film they can get. "No, we don't get scared. We laugh. We're desensitised."