Why Isn't the "Nothing Is Scarier" Trope Being Used More?

[beastro]

The short answer is because it's hard to pull off well, while jump-scares and gruesome messes are easy to get a "frightened" reaction with.

It requires a lot of patience on the part of the director and a lot of faith that people will get into it.

It's sadly a given these days that those behind films constantly fear no one will get what they're trying to convey and ruin it by being heavy handed or shove things in our face too much.

There's also always the patron saint of found footage movies, Cannibal Holocaust. It's an Italian 1980 movie that isn't very scary but by god it's gory. There's some story about the director being sent to jail because people thought it was an actual snuff film, don't know if it's true or it was just a stunt.

Horror actually has two branches of it, one being to scare you, the other is gorn, gore porn you watch because it's sick and to see who can endure it the longest.

Things that play on your squeamish side I don't consider horror unless they do it well. To take an example, it's the difference between a Japanese film I saw with a friend where a women shoved needles into a guys eyes that I couldn't watch because I've always had a phobia of things around my eyes. The thing is, as a horror film, it wasn't good because it played 100% on the squeamishness - had it gotten me scared for the guy in the situation or made me think of how terrifying it would be to be helpless and have that done to my eyes it would have been completely different, but it wasn't because it was gorn.

I don't really play any sort of horror games, but STALKER: Call of Pripyat did it pretty well when you got to Pripyat. The silence, the emptiness, the thick fog, the oppressively tall and decaying buildings staring down at you, the knowledge that some hideous mutant could leap at you from behind any moment, it all built toward a pretty uncomfortable experience. Unfortunately, it becomes much less scary when you actually get into combat, since you remember you have dozens of medkits, an armored exoskeleton and a PKM with 200 bullets.

I haven't played much of the latter two game,s but one thing the first did was it kept the really scary monsters few and far between and powerful when you did meet them. It always stood out for me jumping into the underground of Agroprom looking around for a safe place to protect myself from, finding a corner and then seeing a pack of soldiers move in chasing me only to see and hear them get killed one by one around me in the darkness and scant light from a few anomalies until the games first bloodsucker came at me, which I was only prepared for because of the light just ahead of me showing its flicker and being able to face it without looking over my shoulder because of the corner I was in.

It was all the more amusing too because said friend I watched that Japanese film was playing the game parallel to me quit the game refusing to play it once he got to that part.

 

[lacktheknack]

Because it's boring.

If nothing is happening, then it's unnerving. If nothing continues to happen, then you settle down.

Settling down is not something a viewer should be doing in horror media.

There's a reason Silent Hill 2 is my least favourite of the first four Silent Hills. Because despite what Yahtzee says, I am NOT afraid at any given moment that I'm going to turn around and there will be something there. I'm NOT afraid that things are going to jump out at me. I'm NOT tensed up at every sound.

Because if you rely on "Nothing is Scarier", then nothing is going to happen.

Hell, even the other Silent Hills are guilty of this, but at least Silent Hill 4 DELIVERED on that tension (ghosts that can come through walls at semi-random intervals), and Silent Hill 3 had unnerving stuff going on DURING the nothing sections (blood running up the walls may be cliche, but I'll be damned if I didn't flip out when it happened). Silent Hill 2 had... marginally dirtier rooms. WooOOOoooOOOooooOOOoo.

 

[rdaleric]

In my opinion you also need a good actor to pull it off. True Detective had a couple of very well done scenes

 

[Thaluikhain]

There's also always the patron saint of found footage movies, Cannibal Holocaust. It's an Italian 1980 movie that isn't very scary but by god it's gory. There's some story about the director being sent to jail because people thought it was an actual snuff film, don't know if it's true or it was just a stunt.

I thought it was just that the US Congress had an inquiry into it being real. Whether or not that should mean anything depends on how seriously you took the US Congress during the 80s.