I re-watched the Exorcist recently. I found it scary, but in a different way from how people try to sell it.
The head turning, the vomit, the spider walking, that was all shocking (and cool) but not scary.
What I did find scary was all the science/medicine stuff. Doctors telling the mother that Reagan is faking it, or keeping her under sedation, or subjecting her to endless invasive tests. The real horror is the mother’s realization that the material world cannot save her daughter. The horror of putting Reagan’s life in the hands of faith.
So I’d say that it works on several levels, where for some people, scary is “OMG, a monster face!” and for others scary is the incomprehensible.
I’m sorry, I just have the kind of autism where scary movies are either cringe or hilarious.
Who out there claiming old things aren’t scary?
‘Scary movies’ aren’t scary.
Horror is a meme of a genre.
People conflate being startled with being scared
God I fucking hate jump scares. It’s such a cheap/lame way to do it. A good horror movie has 0 jump scares.
One thing I loved about Longlegs is you’d give yourself mild jumpscares if you were paying attention.
You need HDR to see the contrast between shadows, but you’ll see demons hiding in plain sight.
Seven has 1 jump scare, and it is brilliant. But yes, a whole movie of them is just lazy.
They’re cinematic Cup O’ Noodles
I have no idea what this meme is trying to convey
Old scary movies aren’t scary
Oh so it’s a stupid generalization
Hard disagree about horror films and ‘scary movies’ needing to be ‘scary’. That’s an extremely subjective measure that just starts useless arguments.
Just like any other film, what it actually needs is good writing, good acting, and good cinematography, parts which are more concrete than whether something’s scary. The horror part is essentially just an aesthetic which a movie can sit within.
Also, quite often the view that ‘scary movies should be scary’ just leads to directors creating films that are hard to watch, period - full of vapid jumpscares, scenes made to just gross out the audience, and often just torture fetish content. It’s a terrible metric to aspire to that generally degrades the entire genre imo.
If you think about it, one scary movie but not in the “normal” way is Schindler’s list.
And a scary movie is a hunting movie seen from the POV of the prey.
A movie being scary should naturally emerge from a story being well told.
You do you. Alien aren’t scary but it’s intense and well made, and i only watched it recently. The Thing too. They both excel without relying on cheap jumpscare.
Counterpoint: cinematography and story is more important to whether a movie is good than if it makes you jump
The shining is not a particularly scary film by modern standards, it’s still rightly regarded as one of the best films of all time despite that
It isn’t scary
But it’s a good movie
You can just say that some horror movie simply isn’t your cup of tea.
It’s not enviable if you can only enjoy horror movies if you’re surprised, but it’s valid to have that kind of taste.
But Psycho and Alien are masterworks of tension in filmmaking (although Psycho is technically speaking a Thriller). And Evil Dead 2 is simply the perfect movie, so, this is my verdict on the meme:
Alien isn’t scary
It’s also not a horror movie.
You’re entitled to your opinion. I can accept you not being able to enjoy a movie that many people can (still) enjoy. Don’t expect me to be happy about it, though.
House isn’t scary at all, though it is scary that the director thought Hugh Laurie was more American than most Americans.
The subject in question is George Wendt’s 1985 classic vietnam war flashback horror film. I can only assume.
I assumed it was this one:
It’s a failure of imagination on your part in some cases. In others the studio produced a confusing mess that might be scary if anyone could understand it.
Counterpoint, Begotten is unsettling enough to be kinda scary.
But actually I like “scary movies” not because “scary” but because “Monsters, Magick, Aliens, Kaiju, and Slashers are fun.” Simply gore, torture porn, or jump scares just don’t do it for me, I need an element of whimsy. I’ll take Leprechaun in the Hood, or Jason X, or Killer Clowns from Outer Space, or The Thing, or Godzilla Vs Biolante, or The Blob, or even Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and Maximum Overdrive, before Hostel or Saw.
The Internet gives us access to the kind of depths of human depravity on a daily basis that most people wouldn’t have been exposed to in 1968, unless they had just gotten back from Vietnam.
no movies are scary, wdym?
