And the “party dude” who just wants to get loaded and sometimes thinks the killer is a hallucination caused by the, um…doobie he just smoked.

That’s what i was saying with the same stupid behaviour of lets split up being a common cliche?

I hate that cat.

That last one is the worst. It’s such a lazy bit of deus ex machina.

The Descent 2 features the very worst and most unbelievable instance of this. Writing and filming something that stupid should be punishable by law.

Does this really happen all that often? I must be watching the wrong films. As far as I can tell, the norm still seems to be evil witchy satan ghosts and creepy demons trying to steal your children and get you to have gay sex or whatever.

Fair point.

Easy solution: never make another found footage film ever again.

THIS

Seriously, that is the worst. The whole accidentally killing your friend/your mom/your friend’s mom cliche is bad enough already. It’s even worse when it leads the protagonist to drop their weapon and abandon their safe room. That was one of the many groan-inducing moments that came together to ruin The Strangers.

Or just stop making exorcism movies entirely. The exorcism itself is a played out cliche.

Except in real life families don’t live in haunted houses. That response is justified, because ghosts aren’t real. And in the film, the guy clearly knows that this kind of stuff can happen. If someone I knew and trusted actually presented me with credible evidence of something creepy happening, I wouldn’t just shrug it off.

Also, who says it needs to be supernatural? This trope is invoked in all manner of plots, with all manner of villains – whether it’s a ghost, a human maniac, a killer shark, or what have you.

OMG the not killing the bad guy when he’s unconscious bothers me soooooo much.

aha..and so are the windows and back doors, right?…

Indeed, someone just needs to put an entirely new spin on portraying possession onscreen. I’d be happy to do it if Hollywood is interested. i kind of envision a peeling of the skin with charred and molten red flesh beneath. Teeth falling out as the possessed talk. We could begin seeing the heart beating blackly beneath the possesed person’s chest.

OR just do it like portrayed in the comic Witch Doctor – medical possession via parasite (granted, that didn’t work too well in jason goes to hell).

It’s not even a cliché though. It happens a lot in real life when a family lives in a haunted house and only one person witnesses manifestations.

In that case you should see UK movie ‘Severance’. When the heroine shoots the killer when he’s stuck in the floor and says “I didn’t want anyone to say I didn’t kill him while I had the chance”

LMAO!! Kids are evil till they’re 26.

! I agree with Heather S, Pan’s creature was truly beautiful, from a true creative mind, not a corporate department head!

Shit!

Spoilers, yeah smart, don’t tell us what this thing might spoil. Just let us guess have we seen this random horror movie or not?

– Those endings where the final girl is thought to be behind the killing spree. Just pisses me right off. I chuckled a bit thinking of this cliche in Curse of Chucky; the court really thought the girl in the wheelchair was able to kill everyone? But seeing in Tormented, You’re Next and Red Mist…ugh.

– Here we go again/killer’s not dead/snatch the happiness away from the protags at the last second endings, I’m not too fond of, either.

So much this. What also bugs me are the scenes where there *is* a good, reasonable rationale for what is going on, yet the spouse/partner chooses to believe that it’s supernatural.

Annabelle is a good example of this. This woman just had a baby after being stabbed in the stomach. They moved and she’s still clearly shaken by everything. When she starts making noises about demons, her husband pretty much believes her. As a doctor and someone who wasn’t there for the supernatural stuff, it’d be more likely that he’d believe that his wife was suffering from post partum or some form of psychosis as a result of all of the recent traumatic events.

I think that part of this is because so many found footage films try to pretend that they’re “real”, hence the dead, slow portions of the film. That’s why movies like Devil’s Due were so terrible- they took a pretty decent idea (albeit one that’s overly done) and dragged it to death with too many boring scenes.

Absolutely!

Also, trying to start the car…! GEEZ…!!! I actually think that’s worse…

Did you even read the explanation? It didn’t even say Exorcist is cliche, it was merely an example of a scene that was done well and worked in Exorcist, but not in so many others.

My mistake and apologies, I thought you were implying that it wasn’t a cliche in this film because it was a CG squirrel, which is probably new, actually, instead of a cat or something.

All that just for a hammer to the dome!

My point was that I got what you were saying (hence why I upvoted your comment) but that specifying a CGI squirrel as though there are CGI squirrels everywhere is funny.

I was basically giving you props for being funny (because it’s so true that such stuff is unnecessary to the point of ridiculousness) by spelling out what was funny in that sense about what you said.

I was satirically stressing the ridiculousness of the specificity of the example and the appropriateness of pointing out CGI and/or “jump scare animals” as a tired cliche.

Your comment would be clever if there were no other CG animal / real animal jump scares ever.

Ugh. Does every movie need a CGI squirrel now?

…Wait.

To be fair, for people who have not experienced anything decidedly paranormal/threatening/etc. in the immediate, this is likely the most rational conclusion to draw.

I hate when a character (usually the final girl) finds a weapon,
strikes/shoots the killer once, and then throws the weapon down as if
they are disgusted with themselves for commiting an act of violence.

While I agree to an extent, this goes back to the whole “revenge of the repressed” description Carpenter gave for Halloween. Once they become the aggressor beyond immediate defense, they are generally no longer repressed in the immediate and some of the character dynamics become confused because they start taking on the characteristics of the attacker.

Sometimes this can be great but oftentimes this will lead to the sort of confusion experienced by fans with Halloween 4 and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter – where they naturally assume that the newer generation which crossed a line will continue to do so. But this goes against the inherent conceit of the original (sometimes previous) narrative so such things are often quite difficult to pull off.

To add to that, not only is the killer invincible but one cliche I hate is when each film pretends they can destroy the villain once and for all and then the sequel more or less has the villain show up again out of nowhere, with little-to-no justification within the narrative.

That’$ a very good que$tion.

Yet when the found footage movie cuts off abruptly, everyone says it’s awful or anticlimactic. So it’s probably difficult to find a way to shoehorn in a means to capture footage other than someone with a film fetish.

Agreed. Aliens is made all the more scary because it is a squad of heavily armed professional soldiers, and they still come apart completely at first contact with the xenomorphs. And we get to see what became of the helpless civilians…

Haha! That’s one of the biggest horror clichés of all, I think. But you know what? Always gets a laugh from me. These cats are always full-on psychopaths that come screaming out of the dark at their victims for a cheap jump scare. My favorite is probably Mr. Garrett in HALLOWEEN II.