Greetings fellow horror fans! I wanted to talk about something that has been bugging me for some time now. Too many times I see the argument of “It wasn’t scary” being used when judging the merit of a genre flick on every comment thread. It’s pretty much every time. But here’s my question: When was the last time a horror movie you really liked scared you? I don’t just mean jump scares, as those can actually be ineffective, but I mean actually scared you into leaving lights on and left you thinking about it for days after?
If you’re like me and countless others, you probably have a hard time really letting movies get under your skin. It happens! When we first discover horror, we immerse ourselves totally and never truly come back out again. You sought out the grisliest, disturbed things you could just to see how much you could stand. And then eventually you had seen the “big ones”, like Cannibal Holocaust, Faces of Death, Last House on the Left, I Spit on Your Grave, etc… The more you watch, the less frightening everything becomes and a more complex motive for watching evolves.
Why watch horror movies if they don’t scare you? This is a question I’ve gotten from non-horror friends. Fair question but I have an answer. I continue to watch, read, live and breath horror because it’s a never ending quest. I will never, ever run out of horror movies to watch, especially with things like streaming and online shopping, not to mention TV. Not only do I have a pre-existing catalog from around the world, but hundreds of new horror movies come out a year. Is all of it good? Absolutely fucking not. Which brings me to my main point.
Not every horror movie is great, obviously. But not enjoying something because “it wasn’t scary” is always something that irks me. For me, there are many elements that make a movie good and they all apply to any movie no matter the genre. Is the production quality as good as it should be? Is the story well evolved? Are the characters bearable? You get the picture. All of those elements stay in my brain when I’m thinking critically of a movie. And yes, if the movie does happen to scare me once or twice or, in a much rarer occurrence, actually stays with me for a day or so, then I consider that a bonus.
I know that I’m jaded when it comes to scares, more than the standard movie goer. But writing off an entire movie because it didn’t scare you when you are a seasoned viewer seems incredibly backward. We don’t go into the next movie with the same fresh eyes as the first time we saw our first horror movie. It sucks, but we don’t. I used to be guilty of this when I first started to think I’d seen it all but then I started looking at film in a more mentally stimulating level and I realized I could appreciate a cavalcade of thrills.
What do you guys think?