Are you still scared by horror movies/do you enjoy HM's?

Gonzalez

Gonzalez

Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
In my case, scarcely, but every now and then... I find a good one.

I post this because surprisingly I found out a lot of my friends wich whom I thought I had a lot in common expressed to me that they are not interested in horror movies and that at most they made them laugh.

I remember I used to be scared shitless of some movies when I was a kid, and yet had a fascination to stay up late against my parents orders and watch them anyways... alone in the dark night, no lights, and volume not too high so my parents wouldn't find out.

Today I find it increasingly hard to find stuff that provokes the feelings of those days, but just every now and then, I find something that's worth it. And my god is such a good feeling.

However most of my friends and a lot of other people dimiss horror movies as childlish, because, of course, they cannot be scared by stuff they know to be fiction, like monsters or ghosts and deamons.

And I really pitty them, that they lost all hability to enjoy one of my favorite generes of all.

In my oppinion the reason why they can't be bothered by a horror film and the reason why I still hunt for something that will make me feel just like those nights when I was an 8 y/o watching "forbidden" scary stuff is best explained in an actual clip from one of my all time favorite horror films.



So... do you read Sutter C... do you like horror movies?
 
Depends on the horror movie really.
Jump scares are easy.

But horror, actual horror? Uneasiness? Strong discomfort? Disgust? Dread?
That takes skill to bring out of me.

But it can definitely be done.

Most of the time I don't really enjoy them. A bunch of uninteresting characters lining up to be slaughtered, here's some titties oh wait they got chopped off, oh well, anticlimactic conclusion and we're done here.

But slasher flicks? I enjoy those greatly. I just love seeing a horror icon have fun slicing people up and seeing what dastardly plan the scooby gang will cook up to defeat this the villain of the day. They're cartoonish and over the top, cheesy, corny and campy. I love 'em. But they don't inflict the slightest sense of "horror" within me. They're fun snack foods but no gourmet meal.

I have no idea what the last film was that filled me with horror though. Probably The Dead. A zombie film set in Africa. The depiction of the zombies and the way that they are 'always' in the background freaked me the fuck out.
 
Sure things are more frightening to us when we are children, when we know we shouldn't be watching an "adult" movie, yet I think a lot of why newer horror movies don't work all that well is due to an over-reliance of CGI [Stuff looks like cartoon characters] and a lack of craft. Too many American horror movies eventually felt tongue in cheek, corny, and mostly ended with a typical happy ending; the evil vanquished, the survivors prevailed.

Around the end of the '90s, I found myself utterly bored with American horror movies, and moved on to Asian horror films around the early '00s. In Asian horror movies, they took it pretty damn seriously, very much the stuff of nightmares. Films like Ringu, Pulse, Ju-on, and others creeped me out. I literally felt a chill down my spine, with these up-dated versions of ghost stories. Gone were the typical gothic tones, and instead the threat of invading spectral things took place in modern homes, through television and cell phones. They were more about mood and mounting dread than showcasing new ways for people to die. Death feels inescapable in these kinds of movies, and I like that.

As the '00s crept along, a couple of great Canadian horror movies came out: Ginger Snaps and Pontypool. Ginger Snaps' not so much scary, as darkly funny and morbid. An interesting take on werewolves as a metaphor for burgeoning sexuality and womanhood. Pontypool on the other hand's a great stab at quiet horror. Very little is shown to the viewer. Only snippets are fed, small glimpses obtained; for our main characters are held up inside a radio station as something spreads through town. It's a fresh take on zombie movies, in that's it not really a zombie movie.

And just recently we've had Babadook and It Follows, both throwbacks to older styles of horror films. I had a lot of fun watching both, and thinking about the work that went into each movie. In fact, there's signs that we might be seeing more of a resurgence in a few genres, what with the love that went to Mad Max Fury Road. People clearly want movies made in a way that's been lost. They want a higher level of quality to the filmmaking, not just a bunch of cynical junk.

I think every now and then we'll get a few good to great horror films. It's just where we're at right now. The '70s and '80s had so many gems, mainly because more were being churned out. So many wanted to have the next Exorcist or Halloween, so tons of similar moves were spat out in order to cash-in. Some good, but mostly terrible. A cheapening, a misguided sense of what made a good horror movie. Why bother with mounting dread, when we can just go for a body count?
 
I have never been much of a horror movie fan but pretty much what the two other posters said before me regarding both the type and quality of the horror movie, and what horror it tries to be.
I find horror that mostly focuses on killing and maiming more disgusting than scary where as horror that tries to get you on a more psychological level, really having making you uncomfortable as it feels much closer to reality and deals with subjects that are strange and disturbing to be much more effective as it tends to stay a lot longer on my mind.

I think that movies that play on your fear, suggesting that there is something while at the same time showing as little as possible are much more effective.
You are the mercy and whims of whatever there might be in the dark and there is little to nothing you can do.
 
I'm a big fan of horror but it is hard to scare me. The closest thing is usually some super high sound that doesn't scare me but still makes me react.

The latest scare for me was actually in a non horror game.. I found a certain thing in Firewatch that i did not expect in an old burn out house :P That one kinda got me.

I don't really get people like this guy.. Around 7:20 he is playing Outlast.
 
I can't think of many good examples, but I always consider jump-scares cheap and annoying - sure I jump, but it's too easy to do that, you can do that even to your friends, just sneak behind them and pop a balloon or something

A nice, slow scare - a truly frightening development, that is difficult to achieve, and that's where I cannot really think of any good examples where a movie has truly scared me, except for some of these Japanese horrors back when I was younger. Now I expect the formula for them, so they have less of an effect :I
 
I haven't been scared by a horror movie since I was a kid, which sucks because I love to be scared, which may have desensitized me to the whole experience. Best I can do these days is tension and/or creepy, and most recently the first 2 V/H/S movies have done that pretty well.
 
Spacemunkey said:
I haven't been scared by a horror movie since I was a kid, which sucks because I love to be scared, which may have desensitized me to the whole experience. Best I can do these days is tension and/or creepy, and most recently the first 2 V/H/S movies have done that pretty well.
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IMO the second V/H/S was so bad i actually raged.. Loved the first one!
 
There are good horror movies, but 95% of them are derivative trash, they do seem geared towards teeny-boppers, or just played out genres overly reliant on gore or cheap scares.

Try some David Cronenberg - Videodrome, Scanners, The Brood, Existenz etc. Or John Carpenter.

I will say, there are two movies scenes that little 80s me saw back in the day that scared me to my core, just some kind of deep primordial horror

Khan and his little Ceti Alpha V mind controlling ear bugs

And Baron Harkonen and his heart plugs

Throw The Elephant Man in there too.
Of course, none of those are horror movies.
 
Horror movies these days tend to make me laugh at how shitty they are. The only movie in recent history that legitimately creeped me out was Sinister. I literally lost sleep from that movie, haha.
 
In The Mouth Of Madness, great.

The Thing

Dead Birds

Afterdark Horror Films

Ofcourse the VHS series

From Beyond

Romeros Dead films

Fulcis dead films

Cannibal Holocaust

All the J Horror
 
Makta said:
IMO the second V/H/S was so bad i actually raged.. Loved the first one!
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Couldn't be bothered to watch the second one, because I hated the first one so much. It had maybe one and a half good shorts, and the rest were pretty shoddy to terrible. It didn't help that most of the characters were pretty unlikable.
 
Anyone seen the Conjuring 2 yet?

Possible SPOILER

The CGI croocked man thing really killed what could have been a decent movie. The nun was pretty awesome though.

I watched the first one and really liked it, but only when I saw it on cinema for the first time, on TV is boring even. I think the fact a teenage kid that went to see the movie with his mom and was sitting next to me got scared shitless and even hyperventilated a lot in the scares really made the experience all that more "fun" XD

V/H/S was like... seriously? More found footage stuff? I kinda think it is a largely over-abused gimmick.

I really do love movies that kinda fuck with your mind, or play it mores psychological, like "In the Mouth of Madness".
 
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Most horror movies made now are so generic and rely so much on cheap jump scares and the traditional ghosts that they might as well be called "Boo: haunted house". The last movie to use ghosts that I thought was creative was the unborn... And before that was pulse. And guess what? They were both remakes of J-horror.
 
I don't like HMs, most of them are pretty weak moves and you can't get rid of them easily despite HMs being infinite use since Generation 1, they should make them overwrittable like any move, they do offer a nice way of implementing envirormental barriers in the game but the implementation is still pretty archaic.

Or if you mean HM as in horror movie, I don't think have ever been scared of a horror movie for like 15 years now, specially now that I make a habit of reading aout really fucked up real life cases that make most horror movies silly and childish in comparison, the only "Horror Movies" I enjoy are the ones that are just "Horror Themed" but belong to other genres. Most Horror Movies also go for the Found Footage thing, and to be honest I find that format super lame, I almost fell aslep watching Paranormal Activity....And I was by myself, on my house at night.
 
I don't care for many modern horror movies that have been leaching off the Paranormal Activity trope of jumpscares, but I love anything from schlock to "proper" horror. (mainly schlock though)

The Shining
Ringu
Ju-On series
Night of the Living Dead
Dawn of the Dead
Day of the Dead
Zombi 2
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Halloween
The Thing
Nightmare on Elm Street
Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors
Friday the 13th series
Scream
Hellraiser
28 Days Later
Dead Alive
Let The Right One In

These are all classics. I can also recommend more B-grade stuff but it's a long list now anyway.
 
I think what really makes a horror/scary movie good is the use of audiovisual elements to create a mood, an atmosphere of dread, something that keeps you in the edge of your seat. I really don't care for slasher films of relentless killers going after a group of annoying teenagers I cannot possibly relate to if I tried. I want to feel I care for the person in peril.

I remember watching "The People Under The Stairs" when I was a kid, both main protagonists were kids around my age (the movie is 1991), and I felt related to them because of this, so when they were in danger it kept me on edge. Of course the movie today as an adult looks completely cheesy, but this is now and that was then.

I also really enjoy being ghost/paranormal experiences from people. Worldly mistaken with outworldly or not, especially when they really believe in what they seen, there is something so compelling about it, perhaps from generations of our ancestor cave men sitting around a bonfire telling stories.

Someone told me not long ago, after seeing the nun in the trailer of The Conjuring, that he found it particularly scary because he once saw the apparition of a nun in his bedroom, and that the apparition floated from one corner of the bedroom to the other. This of course for me could be easely explained as an episode of sleep paralysis, especially since he was half sleep when this happened, but it wasn't my experience, it was his, and for him it really happened, and it wasn't his imagination. I personally find these kind of personal stories amazing.
 
Not really. A lot of "horror" movies these days are not scary, they are just disgusting.
No I dont really enjoy HMs, I am more of an action/adventure film kind of guy.
 
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