The Decline of horror

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Bambi On Toast

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Sep 9, 2011
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I agree that the horror genre as a whole has always been cheap and bad. Bad horror movies are still being made and are possibly worse than ever, it comes with the genre. More worrying, for me, is the lack of any good ones at all.

Like someone said earlier, there are great horror films to be found but they are buried beneath a mountain of mediocre trash. Well, I say trash... I'd rather watch a bad horror film than no horror film. I actually quite love bad horror films too, hence the Troll 2 avatar!

I also thought Saw was tense, original, and brilliant. I must have watched the first Saw film 10-15 times. It's such a shame that it was so horrifically raped by sequels. The second one was god awful and #3 was the final nail in the coffin. It's tragic that audiences are willing to pay for the same movie over and over with slightly different locations and characters with a new number on the end of the name.

And what's with this "Found footage" subgenre? For me it's a completely impenetrable format which has become bizzarely popular. I can sit through the most boring dramas and maintain complete concentration, but I couldn't watch Paranormal Activity for more than 10 minutes. It must be because gullible idiots think the events on film actually took place and are actually watching the actual footage of paranormal events. Seriously, my friends tried to convince me to watch it claiming that it was real footage of ghosts or whatever.

It would be nice to hear some opinions on the Found footage genre. I was counting on this new moon film (Apollo I think it's called) to convert me. It's presented in "found footage" style and takes place on the moon. Obviously anything set in space is 2x more likely to be badass, so I might just give it a go. Reading the terrible reviews hasn't helped though...
 

VaudevillianVeteran

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nikki191 said:
i loved the thing as well it had such amazing tension and wow what an oppressive atmosphere. i was concerned and annoyed when i heard they were remaking it but it turns out its not a remake thank goodness, its a prequel
Ah, I completely forgot it was a prequel. I'm still not sure on how I feel about it, but I'll probably watch it just to see what they do.
 

electric_warrior

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There is still lots of good horror

examples
The Devil's Backbone
The Orphanage
REC
Let the Right One In (is a horror film)
The Descent
Drag Me To Hell
The Mist (i thought it was very good, except for the overly bleak ending)
Eden Lake- which is both terrifying and disturbing


That's just from the second half of the decade, so we're not doing too badly
 

Casual Shinji

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For me it's CGI; It's just not scary.

The old horror movies had a "smell" and a tangability to them because they used practical effects.

All the new horror movies feel too digital and synthetic.
 

weker

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Modern horror films bad? not so much I think nostalgia is getting the better of many people. As long as there are films like REC I will be happy with the horror genre.

Slashers I have found to be always a more dominant type of "horror" film, but really slashers are a different genre on their own, so some might be polluting what the consider horror with slashers films.
 

Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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electric_warrior said:
Let the Right One In (is a horror film)
I would say it's a horror movie in the same sense that Cronenberg's The Fly is a science fiction film; It isn't really.

It has elements of horror in it, but in the end it's a drama.
 

Deverfro

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I'd say its becuase now people confuse horror with action films/games with flickery lights and lots of blood. Take Dead Space, I personally would not call that a horro game. This also demonstrates the point that most horror doesnt scare me (or anyone I talk too) It just startles every now and again.

Films like The Grudge make me wet my pants with terror, and games like Silent Hill 2 did the same. Thats becuase the understand horror is about building to a point where the terror is just too much and your hoping that something will just jump out and scare you. But it never does and your getting more and more scared. Those horror games understand the idea of pacing and atmosphere, and silent hill hides behind fog and darkness so your imagination fills in the blanks.

Dead Space (and most modern horro films) show us absolutly bloody everything, every cut, dismembered limb and chunk of flesh, so after the mild *gasp* you just get used to it. And there isnt any change in tone, its all jumpy all the time.

Frankly if you want great horror, you have too look away from America (and closely at Japan). Films like The Grudge, REC, The Descent are great, and American films like Let Me In, Donnie Darko and Event Horizon are all good, if a little goofy.

I seem to have gone completely off point here, but the basic is, good horror builds atmosphere and have pacing and juxtaposition. It uses a variety of techniques to make the viewer/player uncomfortable. Not just throw lots of body parts at the camera.
 

electric_warrior

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Casual Shinji said:
electric_warrior said:
Let the Right One In (is a horror film)
I would say it's a horror movie in the same sense that Cronenberg's The Fly is a science fiction film; It isn't really.

It has elements of horror in it, but in the end it's a drama.
I'd say that The Fly is a horror/sci-fi hybrid, in much the same way as The Thing and Alien, and that Let the Right One In is a hybrid between drama and horror. I certainly found it horrifying/scary, even if it doesn't have many individual moments that are horrifying, its the atmosphere that does it.
 

SammiYin

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Horror has always been shit. Horror is a label used to describe any film that will make you either go "Ah" or "Urgh" "LOL", one is scary, another is grim, the third is 90% of the "horror" franchise.
From where I'm looking [an extremely high horse], there's been 1 or 2 decent to incredible horror films every year or so, followed up by about 30 shitty knock offs of the good one, gradually diluting the suspense and immunising ourselves to it because of cliche.
 

benihanaman

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Horror movies are shit now - have been for the past ten years or so. Most horror movies these days should be classified as "Gore-er" not horror. These movies don't even take place in the dark anymore, which of course dimiishes the tension that horrer movies need to create. The genre was destroyed by tools like Eli Roth, who make movies like hostel - which is nothing more then masochistic antihumanism. Those movies aren't scary, they are just off-putting. Not only are they off-putting, but I think that they are killing the minds of youth with this proliferation of senseless and gruesome violence that is essentially presented as entertainment. Movies like Freddy and jason may be old and outdated, but they were some kind of cautinary tale to babysitters and campgoers about the dangers of sex and alcohol. The story's may have been rudimentary and usually predictable, but there was a narrative along the way that kept you involved. Movies like hostel ruin a genre and Eli Roth should be banned from directing anything other then traffic. I'll say it again. ELI ROTH IS A TOOL.
 

GuyUWishUWere

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Something truly terifying has to have context, the slaughter in most horror movies does not. People are truly terrified of ideas(losing someone you love, having the unbarable urge to do something, but not being able to "I have no mouth and I must scream"). It's not dessensetization to feel nothing for the death of someone with the personality of a plank of wood. When that happens I can't say to myself "this is a real person, I hope there ok".
 

chiefohara

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Special effects and gore have replaced tension and fear, If we don't see the monster our imagination makes it 10 times worse than it actually is.

The others was a great horror film and 90% of that was just Niole kidman acting.
 

jumjalalabash

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Lack of suspense and likable characters, along with over used CGI gore ruined horror. All we get for scares are jumps whenever the music turns off. Also you can't really be scared for a group of people being chased by a killer when they are inhuman douchebags. And no one can take CGI blood seriously and its just silly of how they show the human body taking damage. (see Final Destination movies where the slightest trauma sends arms and legs falling off and human joints suddenly turn to jello at death.)
 

Dogstile

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The_root_of_all_evil said:
dogstile said:
I'm assuming its just we've all gotten older. The older I get the less scared I get of everything.
*points to Tax Returns*

Quite the reverse my friend. ;)
Every time I see you post you crush my hopes and dreams :(

*is terrified*
 

Hosker

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There's the occasional horror I like. As someone said before, it has always been pretty rubbish overall. I think horror literature is scarier, albeit I am not well versed in it.
 

demalo

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A good horror story needs drama. Without the drama we can't relate to the characters or the story and in turn have no attachment to the plot and can't be scared. Saw was a good horror movie because of the drama that drove the plot.

Some of the newer Saw movies have lost the connection to the drama and we're just not as concerned with the characters anymore. Same with Friday and Nightmare. Eventually horror movies turn into comedies because we start to laugh at the gore level or death scenes or the behavior of the characters in the film.

Horror is the sign of the times too. A horror movie must have a psychological affect on the viewer that has a lasting impression. Poltergeist, The Shinning, Misery, Omen, The Exorcist, Alien, The Wizard of Oz... All considered horror movies, but none of them have an extreme amount of gore (or any). Even Jaws could be considered a horror movie because of the psychological affect it had on the audience of that time. But someone seeing those movies for the first time now may laugh or be desensitized to the horror. However that may be because they've already watched a similar film that presented these similar types of horror aspects which the viewer has become desensitized to. Also, the viewer may have associated those horror aspects on another film in which case they're no longer affected by the current films horror aspects. Another surprising horror film may be Disney's 101 Datamations - it scared the shit out of my 5 year old brother (back in 2000).
 

BloatedGuppy

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Bambi On Toast said:
It would be nice to hear some opinions on the Found footage genre. I was counting on this new moon film (Apollo I think it's called) to convert me. It's presented in "found footage" style and takes place on the moon. Obviously anything set in space is 2x more likely to be badass, so I might just give it a go. Reading the terrible reviews hasn't helped though...
Speaking ONLY of the original Blair Witch and original Paranormal Activity, I can say without reservation that the "found footage" sub genre of horror is pretty much the only thing even coming close to doing horror the way I think it needs to be done.

You know what's not scary? Blood soaked mutants. Cackling torturers. Rubbery aliens. Jittery ghosts flickering all over the screen. Wan faced youngsters with spooky voices. Howling axe murderers. Unkillable demons. Etc, etc, etc. Watching special effects and questionable actors in rubber suits chase virginal teenagers across suburban lawns has never been very compelling.

You know what is scary? The things that live in the dark corners of your imagination. And that's why a movie like, say, the Blair Witch Project works for me. I don't need to see a hairy witch on a broomstick shooting fireballs. The Blair Witch is whatever I want it to be. It's whatever terrifies me about being lost in the woods, separated from my friends, alone and in the dark. It's specific to me, and my imagination is 1000 times better at freaking the crap out of me than any filmmaker could ever be.

I could care less about handycam footage and amateur actors and 10K budgets hamming up the works. My vote will ALWAYS go to the film that shows the least and implies the most. The Descent, for instance, was brilliant right up until the point where a bunch of goofy monsters start lurching around. Being stuck underground in the dark, not being able to see, not knowing if you can get out, thousands of tons of crushing rock looming overhead...the claustrophobia, the fear of what's ahead...that's scary! Goofy monsters? Less scary. Silly, even.