Have you ever read about a film that has been lauded over by so many people, or had someone of a generation above you recommend you watch a ‘classic’, but when you sit down to view it, you just don’t get it? Sometimes, this is just down to personal tastes, but a lot of the time it comes down to a film ‘aging’, or new generations changing so much that they are past the point that they can connect with it. I’m not talking about the weird aversion that a lot of people have to watching ‘old’ (read: any that were released before their memory) films, or about the fact that filmmaking has changed and the style of older films may not sit as well with a younger audience (because it is not what they are used to). Instead, I mean the films (primarily those designed to elicit laughs or scares) where the love of them simply doesn’t make sense to a new generation.

I find that this most often happens with comedies and horrors, as jokes can really have a timestamp, and scares come relative to what people are already exposed to. There may be a cult comedy that your parents’ generation quote back and forth all the time, but when you put it on, you barely laugh. Or a horror film that frequently tops ‘scariest movies’ lists, but when you put it on, it comes across as a bit lame or even laughable at times. These films may have aged in the sense that time has moved on, and new generations that have grown up in a different world and thus find different things funny and different things scary.

The reason I think this is less likely to happen with films such as dramas, is they tend to tap into a deeper part of the human experience in that what is considered to be ‘sad’ doesn’t change over time, and isn’t shaped by culture or events. Yes, perhaps timeliness can place an emphasis on certain things, but there are things that will never not be sad. With comedy, it seems more often to be much more punctuated by a time period. A lot of what we find funny comes from what we can relate to, thus what was hilarious thirty years ago may not even be able to crack a smile today. To a certain extent this is true with scares, but only very specific types.

Similarly, exposure plays a big part in it. Perhaps the cult comedy recommended to you was ground-breaking at the time, and thus set in motion a number of imitators. You, now decades on from its release, may have seen all of the films influenced by this one and thus are now overly familiar with the concepts that were once fresh and made this film so loved. Exposure also plays a part in affecting what scares an audience. With the advent of the internet, people are being exposed to more and more images and news stories that may almost normalise certain things, or make the pretense of them less scary in film due to their existence in reality. On top of this, films seem to have become more violent and the advent of realistic videogames may also, arguably, desensitize us to certain things. Plus, with the increased development of practical and computer-generated effects, there are arguably more graphic scenes shown on screen, thus ones featuring lesser effects may not longer scare. Think about how when Psycho was released in 1960, warnings were put out about how terrifying it was; nowadays, the ‘graphic’ scenes back then would probably make it into a 12A rating. However, the suspense is still intense, and the craftsmanship of these types of films is no less, it is just perhaps that as they don’t go as far as some more modern ones do, we find ourselves less scared overall.

On the opposite side, some films seem to find more fans and acclaim with age. Perhaps this means they were literally ‘ahead of their time’ and captured something that didn’t quite connect in their time of release, but instead have grown more as the world has progressed. Arguably, this could be what happened with Blade Runner, in the sense that it found its audience gradually over the years after its release. Alternately, in some cases it is simply luck or marketing that played a role in a slow success, or even a need for a film to gestate, and people to come and appreciate it better. So in some cases, a film needed to ‘age’ in order to be better appreciated.

There are certain films that get stuck in time, and it is no insult to them or their craftsmanship, but merely a symptom of a changing world. There are also so many that are timeless and are carried over generations with the same love. There will always be exceptions, but perhaps some films so expertly tapped into the zeitgeist of their era that for those who didn’t experience it, the film cannot quite reach them in the same way.