I’ll make a Halloween post, I guess.A lot of people that have never bothered to get to know me

I’ll make a Halloween post, I guess.A lot of people that have never bothered to get to know me think that I love horror movies. That is incorrect. Also, a lot of people that have actually made an effort to get to know me think that I hate horror movies. That is incorrect as well, but to a lesser degree.I certainly do not hate all horror movies. In fact, many of my favorite films happen to fall within the horror genre. What I do hate is stupid movies, and it just so happens that nowadays a sizable part of the stupid movies being released are horror movies. And that’s why I have become so jaded to the genre than when the suggestion of watching a new horror movie comes around, my immediate response is to pass. Am I missing on some pretty good stuff due to my prejudice against new horror movies? Quite possibly, but I also like to think on all the hours of my life I didn’t waste watching something utterly inane and worthless.If memory serves me well, the last horror movie I actually saw on theaters was Insidious. I remembering giving it a chance because it was rated PG-13 instead of the usual (for a horror movie) rating of R. I thought it would be a welcome change to see a scary movie that didn’t rely of absurdly gratuitous amounts of gore (after all, I work at a hospital and Carcass is my favorite band; I’m pretty desensitized to gore on film at this point). And the movie turned out to be terrible because what it lacked in wanton inordinate blood and violence, it made up for in the OTHER modern horror movie cliche that I despise: jumpscares.I loathe jumpscares because they are to films what breakdowns are to music: they are cheap, they don’t require a lot of effort to pull off, they all look/sound the same, and while one or two can be okay when they are done tastefully, if your entire product consists of nothing but them, it becomes extremely irritating and repellent. A jumpscare doesn’t require character development or good acting, doesn’t need the establishment of atmosphere, doesn’t call for a complex and well-thought-out plot; just make everyone be quiet, mute the background music, then show something scary and play a loud sound. Take all the jumpscares out of Insidious and you are left with a paper-thin plot of a boy haunted by a ridiculous Darth Maul-looking demon thing, who is eventually faced by the boy’s father in an predictably successful rescue attempt, but the father himself ends up possessed in order to lead into the inevitable horror movie sequel.If I was asked to mention an example of a good, artistically and creatively successful horror movie, I’d go with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (one of my favorite movies, as is much of Mr Polanski’s oeuvre; fuck, even his comedic horror movie satire The Fearless Vampire Killers succeeds in creating the chilling atmosphere that bullshit like Insidious or Paranormal Activity fail miserably in pulling off). I believe that part of what makes a horror movie scary and thus interesting is the wariness of not being sure what’s going on for a good part of the movie. For the better part of said movie we don’t know exactly what’s going on with Mia Farrow’s Rosemary: is she ill? Possessed? Is her baby in danger? What’s up with the wacky neighbors and the creepy doctor? There is no need for loud noises and ugly faces, the fear comes from the atmosphere, the aversion we all feel towards what we don’t understand, the restlessness of not knowing what the outcome will be, of being unable to find a definitive escape from whatever unseen threat lurks around. And that tension is maintained through most of the movie, not cast aside in the middle of it to make way to a redundant good vs. evil encounter in which the main character will obviously prevail. It is not until the end of the movie, after it has actually elicited fear on the audience, that the plot is resolved and the outcome decided, leaving those viewing enthralled and fascinated. The only thing truly scary about Insidious was knowing at the end that there would be a Part Two.  -- source link
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