Reviving the horror genre

Name a movie from the last decade that truly frightened you and left a lasting impact on your pysche. If you can't, I don't blame you. Where did it go? H Ow can we save it? How can we scare people?

I don't like horror - movies or otherwise - but that post is begging for a Rhetorical Question Blunder.

Read Mister B. Gone.

These aren't rhetorical questions, I want to dive deep into the roots of horror and revitalize the genre since most of it is either remakes or rip-offs of The Grudge and Saw.

Just my opinion—horror has become banal because it's too explicit. You see some gore, you become desensitized, the market gives you even more gore. It's not frightening, it's just a test of endurance.

Another opinion—Lovecraft is a master because he showed less, not more. A bump in the room upstairs is all the more frightening when you can't see what made it—once you do, it becomes a finite threat, however threatening it may be. Lovecraft barely sketched his monsters, he let you fill in the blanks.

If you want to revive horror, don't think about what frightens you, think about how you are frightened. Zombies are frightening because not only are they unstoppable brain-eating machines, but they were once ordinary people.

^^ Agreed.

...the drifting classroom (a manga) scared me.

Maybe I'm unusual, but my first thought regarding any monster isn't "How can this thing kill me?" It's "How can I kill this thing?" The less information I'm given, the weaker the monster seems, and the more irritating the main characters seem when they start freaking out over something that could probably die to a cheap handgun. On the other hand, giving a monster too much power often feels cheap. I think a good solution is to have a large number of monsters.

(For what it's worth, my favorite work of horror is The Suffering.)

I think that horror needs someone who can pull a Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie: a story with the bleeding-edge intensity of, say, Saw or Friday the 13th or whatever, and the suspense and Nothing Is Scarier of Lovecraft or The Slender Man Mythos. If it could be done and done well, I think it would be a damn good piece of fiction... not to mention scary as fuck...

The best approach to fiction, the thing a lot of works lack, is subtlety. Less, not more is the key here. The best horror antagonist is the formless one, the one who leaves you completely stumped as to just how powerful and subversive the monster is. The monster that doesn't seem like it can be caught or stopped is most effective. And doing that usually involves going abstract. Really abstract.

Everything in this topic (and also both fiction and Horror itself) is entirely subjective. Different things work for different people, different things scare different people.

For example, I was entirely unmoved by Saw, but I know people who thought Saw was the scariest thing since bread started slicing itself.

You can't say that Horror as a genre is selling out, it's just moving a different direction. Whether or not it's a direction you happen to like is entirely irrelevant.

Insidious, The Strangers, Martyrs and Inside truly frightened me. Splice left an impact, though a more subtle one.

There are several ways to revitalize horror, but I'm more a screenwriter than a prose writer (though I'd certainly like to have more skill for the latter). In the way of film, I'd say the following things are just a few of the things that should be done in order to create a "renaissance" of the genre if you will:

• Bring back good soundtracks, less Jablonsky "everything sounds the same/vaguely intense" garbage and more stuff like Goblin's scores for Argento films, stuff that overwhelms (and not just deafens) you in some places, stuff that makes you fear for a coming jump scare in others. In the same vein, don't overscore: remember the importance of silence.

• No more "heroes." The closest you should get to an "ass kicker" if you want to make a scary film is Ash (the version from the FIRST Evil Dead film, mind you) who gets one lucky shot in and somehow manages to win the whole thing despite being psychologically shaken and physically maimed.

• No more turning killers into badasses for gorehounds to cheer on. Some of those types of killer work, but they're far and few in between. To have a non-supernatural villain (including types like Jason whose "supernatural" roots are mostly fanon) scare the audience, give them a mindset that's not animalistic, but human-yet-damaged or human-yet-clinically-psychopathic, something that would actively alienate an audience.

• Use good pacing. The best horror films are neither paced "rashly" (Blood and gore opening, 10 minutes of exposition, randomly placed blood and gore thru the rest...) nor overly cautiously (Exposition, vaguely creepy events interspersed with suspense-free moments thru the rest...). The best way to go is consistency with steadily elevating suspense: something foreboding at the beginning, exposition neither rushed nor drawn out with some subtle hints at the horror to come mixed in, and a few key moments of rising suspense with minimal "breaks in tension" afterward ending in a clear climax.

• Less camp, less self-referentialism. If one wants to save the horror genre, stop treating it like a "genre" and more like an emotion to be evoked through certain techniques.

• As others have said, more subtlety within buildup would be a great boon. However, not so much subtlety that the audience barely even notices the "creepy bits," and thus feels they have no real reason to be frightened throughout the film.

• Don't be lazy with direction. Don't just grab a camera and point it at things, oftentimes static shots at wide angles can be your best friend in creating a creepy mood. There are a number of other directorial tips, but that's a topic all its own really.

• Overall, stop trying to be "demographically relevant," and start trying to make scary films.

edited 22nd Jul '11 8:57:07 AM by DoctorDiabolical

Cut out the cliches (the wacky group of teenagers with the popular athlete, the hot chick, the nerdy chick, the best bro, so on and so forth) and cut out the random-ass unnecessary sex scenes that provide no real plot or character development. What excites me the most is when a story contains heavy psychological elements. The more the horror plays with your mind, the greater the effect. Visual or musical dissonance is another good way to grip the audience because the contrast, too, can have a fairly strong mental affect on the viewer.

Just as well, the audience must give a shit about who dies. Wanton death just to prove that Anyone Can Die means nothing if the audience has no investment in them.

EMBEDDING DISABLED BY REQUEST: WATCH ON YOUTUBE

Thank you for embedding an unwatchable video without context.

Try clicking on it. Or if the link doesn't work for you, try this.

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And context would be nice, even if the video did play properly.

edited 22nd Jul '11 12:30:51 PM by Madrugada

Alright - though I think it obvious you can click on "Watch on You Tube" at the black screen. It seems self-explanatory enough if you watch it, Tom Cruise walking the bright streets, stalked by a bald-headed man. But that is no the point, I mean to inspire by the eerie atmosphere, Ligeti's piano.

The film it's from, Eyes Wide Shut, is by no means meant to "be" a horror film (it's a dreamlike drama about frustrated sexuality and the darker side of indulgence), but nonetheless many people say this scene has unnervingly disturbed them. Perhaps more so than anything Jason Voorhees can come up, with his blood-stained machete.

There is no violence, grim dreariness, or the usual Bollywood scare-tactics in this scene. The point instead, is to show horror at its subtle finest - the things which might lie behind the bald-headed meng's intentions. If you look at it symbolically, he is the harbinger of Death in plain sight, looming. You cannot fathom stopping him.

edited 22nd Jul '11 12:45:30 PM by QQQQQ

WAIT ONE MINUTE; "NOT A HORROR FILM"

By definition your video is irrelevant. It's also not a "modern" film by an means. The current year is 2011 A.D., and that movie came out in 1999, right before horror went down the drain. You really should have said this in your original post.

edited 22nd Jul '11 2:19:13 PM by TweedlyDee

Good sir, I believe you have missed the point.

I think the chase at the climax of Friday the 13th part II might beat it in terms of fright-factor.

Horror or not though, that scene gives examples of some of the sorts of suspense-building techniques modern horror (and really, horror in general) could seriously use: low-key music interspersed with silence, a sense of urgency not made overly obvious by the music, not giving as much screen time to the threatening character because "that's what the audience wants to see"... it makes for an intense moment, and if horror filmmakers put more effort into making their films like that, then I feel the genre could get a lot more "credibility."

Makes sense that Kubrick also made The Shining. The guy could bring a masterful touch to just about any genre IMO.

And yeah, I think that was less "an example of good modern horror" and more "an example of what modern horror could do to improve"

edited 22nd Jul '11 2:26:15 PM by DoctorDiabolical

It's perfectly relevant if you can draw inspiration to better your horror, yes? You've mentioned that modern horror nowadays is miffed, too formulaic with Zombies and Darkness and ACME Bland Droning Music(R). It needs enlivening. A good way is to look outside the box.

edited 22nd Jul '11 2:42:51 PM by QQQQQ

In a strange way, Paranormal Activity could be seen as overcompensating for that problem. Seriously, nothing happens in that movie until the absolute end. Halfway through the movie and the scariest thing that happens is a door closing or opening. The classic House On Haunted Hill was scarier because even though we didn't see the villains, they did more to prove themselves an actual threat, i.e. violently rattling the entire house to get the unwanted guests out.

edited 22nd Jul '11 3:32:14 PM by TweedlyDee

I actually liked Paranormal Activity, but I agree that in many places what they gave us was "too little, not often enough." I'd venture to say there was more they could have done with the film, a good number of missed opportunities to build tension (they could've added small things on the first days instead of nothing at all, added easy-to-miss almost "Easter eggs" that they don't slow down on the fast-forwarded bits).

Also, I would've gone with the least popular of the three endings as the official one. I liked how it had a nice callback to a certain piece of figure-movement in an early scene, which turned it into a creepy bit of foreshadowing.

edited 22nd Jul '11 4:38:36 PM by DoctorDiabolical