A pickax lands in a front-row lap in a poster for the film “My Bloody Valentine 3D.”/LIONSGATE

By BROOKS BARNES


LOS ANGELES -Goodbye, torture porn; hello, 3-D?

Horror movies have been one of Hollywood’s most enduring genres, with filmmakers and studio executives regularly coming up with new ways to scare audiences. It was the occult in the 1970s (“The Exorcist”) and psychotic slashers in the 1980s (“Friday the 13th”). More recently, sickening torture (“Hostel”) dominated.

Now, in a shift to make fans of highbrow horror cheer, studios are starting to concede that torture as entertainment has run its course.“Saw,”the franchise built around a killer named Jigsaw, is still going strong, but a glut of torturethemed movies has left horror audiences with been-there, seen-that syndrome. The tiring has been visible for over a year in the form of monetary losses from poorly performing releases like“I Know Who Killed Me,”but studios have been reluctant to move on.

Lionsgate, a studio that has plowed the torture terrain more than anyone, thinks it has come up with a way to breathe life into the struggling horror genre. It involves an old trick. On January 16 the studio will release“My Bloody Valentine 3D,”a remake of the 1981 Canadian cult hit about a bloodthirsty coal miner with a pickax fetish. Lionsgate believes it will be the first three-dimensional horror film to be released theatrically in the United States in more than 20 years.

If“My Bloody Valentine 3D”is a success - and with a modest budget of about $20 million, success is easily within reach - the next big thing in horror could be at hand, said Joe Drake, the co-chief operating officer of Lionsgate and the president of the studio’s motion picture group.“We see 3-D horror as financially lucrative and creatively exciting,”he said.“We want to break some new ground here in R-rated fare.”

When 3-D first entered the mass movie market in the 1950s, horror was one of its first stops.“House of Wax”and“Creature From the Black Lagoon”rode the technology to success, but audiences grew weary of those headache-inducing glasses, and studios balked at the high costs and technical challenges. Movies in 3-D became a cinema footnote.

Advances in digital technology and more comfortable glasses - not to mention a young adult audience that doesn’t remember the 3-D horror movies of the past - have studios jumping back on the 3-D bandwagon. Family entertainment is leading the charge, with DreamWorks Animation and the Walt Disney Company set to unleash a blizzard of 3-D pictures over the next year. But the broader market is following fast.

“If there was ever a moment when horror needed to be reinvented, this is it,”said Jeanine Basinger, chairwoman of film studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.“You can only work one side of the horror street for so long.”

For studios like Lionsgate that focus almost exclusively on young moviegoers, the rush to 3-D technology is an attempt to adapt to the demands of the texting- while-driving-while-eating crowd. Teenagers and young adults, crucial to the health of movie exhibition, are increasingly unaccustomed to sitting still for two hours in a theater, studio executives say.

“I was excited to pursue the 3-D element because it feels really fresh and unique,”Patrick Lussier, who directed the“My Bloody Valentine”remake, said.“It’s visually stunning and a new way for this audience to experience a film but isn’t painful in the way some of the old 3-D films were, where they just rammed stuff in the audience’s face.”

Lussier and Lionsgate insist that they aren’t using 3-D as a gimmick. Instead, they say the technology is a way to enhance the story. That doesn’t mean audience members won’t have to dodge a few pickaxes, however.