Poll: Horror - Do you actually LIKE it?

[MonsterCrit]

Horror is much like comedy. It can be a very difficult thing to nail down mostly because it requires subtlety.

To that extent it's more difficult because fear is an insanely personal thing. We have fears we don't know about, fears we don't acknowledge even to ourselves and then there are things that invoke fright but not fear.

There's a key difference between fright and fear. One is a momentary thing, felt for an instant and fading very quickly. Fear...lingers. It sticks with you. AS good example is the popular game Five Nights at freddy's. Now many say it's just jumpscare cheapshot. But you can bet those are the people who don't suffer from a fear of dolls and animatronics, or the dark or claustrophobia.

If you don't have issues with either of those things then FNAF is nothing but quickk jump scare frights. If you have one of the above issues though.. the game jumps from frights to out right fear inducing. If you have all 3... well let's put it this way...you will need to launder your chair.

So you see why horror is a difficult thing. What may induce fear in some may only induce momentrary fright in others. Fright needn't even be linked to fear. It's a simple reflexive acytion. You body and brain basically are jolted into high level alert status. Usually by a sudden loud sound, thunder, a crash, an explosion, a scream, the sudden appearance of something or sudden movement.

 

[AVATAR_RAGE]

As a genre no, not really.Yet I may dabble into gothic or eldrich horror every now and then.

 

[kasperbbs]

Can't say that i enjoy it all that much, perhaps it's because i don't find any of it scary or tense, without that watching a horror movie simply bores me, unless it actually has a decent plot, which is pretty hard to find burried in all of these silly slashers.
It's a bit different with games. I found amnesia to be pretty tense and the last alien game was poretty good, but even that didn't last long, that damned alien started to be more annoying than scary pretty damn fast.

 

[the December King]

I love horror in my readings, but I usually don't seek out horror rooted in the depths of human evil/sociopaths- these more psychological kinds of horror usually leave me feeling empty, like I wasted my time. My favorite horror in film is the kind that involves the supernatural or sci-fi- from ghosts and demons to the simply unexplained. Found footage movies had me hooked at The Blair Witch.

I used to include vampires and werewolves, until films like Blade, Underworld and Twilight made them either meat bags to beat up or weird fetishes. I'll say I still like the older takes on those monsters best. Zombies, for some reason, I still have a fondness for, even after being inundated with them in media- I reckon it's the fact that though they may have gotten faster, it's a nightmare based loosely both on the ravages of an unknown disease, and the mundane (crowds of people) made terrifying... somehow it still sells. Getting a little sick of scary possessed little girls, though- the taboo of children being subjected to violence and the inevitable hesitation in dealing with the threat I find grating... but I'll still watch it, if it's in a found footage flick.

Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R are my favourite- enough firepower to feel like I can hold my own... but that illusion gets shattered fast enough!

 

[stroopwafel]

I love moody, atmospheric horror like RE Remake, Silent Hill 2 and Bloodborne. The horror is there but it's never really too 'in your face' when I think horror loses its effect. Horror needs to leave something up to the imagination. As far as movies go I really have to dig deep. My absolute all-time favorite horror movie is the original Hellraiser. The plot isn't really about monsters or demons but at its core its just a romance gone bad. The supernatural in this movie is really restrained and always functional to the almost hypnotic story. I don't know, but I have never seen another horror movie that made such an impression on me before or since.

 

[Terminal Blue]

I think the term "horror" has picked up some somewhat pejorative associations over the years, mostly driven by hollywood genre conventions. The thing is, horror isn't really a genre, it's a type of engagement which is common to many kinds of media, and in this regard horror is far more integral to the experience of enjoying media than I think we tend to assume. People who say "I don't like horror" very seldom actually don't like horror, what they probably don't like is genre horror.

I find the problem with genre horror is that it often doesn't really have anything to say (it's the same reason why I don't generally like genre fantasy). I mean, horror is one of the most universal and visceral human emotions, if you can't use it to tell us something or to provoke some kind of response beyond "eek!" it raises the question of why you would base a whole film or book or game around it.

 

[verdant monkai]

Yeah I do.

I just played the evil within. I thought it was pretty good the storytelling was a bit of a mess but it was scary. A bit.

I just backed Bloodstained ritual of the night. Thats kind of horror.

 

[Darks63]

You ask about the horror genre but failed to say if you meant movies, games, or literature. I know you said works of fiction but that can apply to more than just books.

Since you weren't specific I'll answer for all of the above.


In regards to movies it is a genre which I have both liked and hated during certain "fad" periods. I really liked the slasher genre of the 80's and 90's due to many films like NoES having a dark sense of humor to go with the gore and death. On the other hand I hate this whole shot-on-shitteo fad that Paranormal Actshitty restarted and I wasn't at all impressed by its predecessor which originated that fad Blair witch Project and the films spawned from that. Jump scares aren't scary to me they are as cheep as startling a person unawares. I love Japanese horror alot since it is all about building the atmosphere and less about cheap scares. i love the Ju-on films since they are compendium stories where nobody has a happy ending and nobody gets out alive.

In games you have excellent psychological horror like silent hill 1-4, corpse Party, and P.T. which create a world that can make you afraid to go on due to it just getting too scary or fucked up. Once again though gaming has its own version of shot-on-shitteo jump scares with games like Slender and Five Nights at Freddies.


Finally when it comes to Literature I love the horror genre in Lit. My current favorite in Brian Keene and his books which even if they are separate stories they often share a scary as shit common universe or multiverse. another great aspect of Keenes work is that it often doesn't follow the same arcs that alot of stories do where the hero's win in the end, in fact in alot of his books everyone loses most of the time and lose big too. I also like the world of Lovecraft even though I hate the journal style of writing and prefer to get expose to his work though other means.