Uh, well, this doesn't really count because it still scares me (or, at least, incredibly grosses me out every time, and frequently scares me), but I wish horror writers would stop thinking cannibalism was the best way out of a horror set-up.
I'm pretty tired of ghoulish children, especially creepily singing little girls. I won't say that this or anything else can't be made scary, but I don't find it interesting or original.
I think the most capable horror writers have realized that the world is just too scary for a lot of us to find ourselves legitimately terrified by a work of fiction. I mean, really, name a horror work of any kind that's gonna have the same scare effects of turning on any of the 24 hour news channels to see what the latest is in their How The World is Falling Apart updates. I mean, look at the Walking Dead comics - it centered around the use of the single most done to death supernatural creature ever and placed said character in one of the most overused plot lines in recent years. And yet? The comics were wildly successful and the tv adaptation is now the most watched drama in the history of basic cable. Maybe the fact that they tried to tie in our fears of the world falling apart from our news coverage into their storylines, and that this strategy can theoretically work for any horror concept.
Vampires. How has that one not been mentioned yet? Did I scroll too fast and miss a post?
Even when portrayed in the old-school manner -- like "Salem's Lot" -- they're not scary anymore.
I don't even understand the concept of an adult being scared by a novel, or a movie. When I was seven, yes. Then, the original Frankenstein movie gave me nightmares, and several books scared me near to death. But not now, and it has nothing to do with the real world being scary. It has to be with the fact that it's just a novel, just a movie, not real.
I read such novels, and watch such movies, because the characters have good reason to be scared, and I care about what happens to the characters.
Japanese horror. Now there's a subgenre that will never, ever not be creepy as all hell. The 1998 Ring movie has as good a chance as any horror work for messing the viewer up and its American remake was perhaps the only horror movie in high school that kids were saying truly scared them - these were kids who considered Jason and Freddie movies to basically be comedy. And Audition is the horrifying mental trip that American and European shock and gore fests wish they were. Shit, that country's commercials put 90 % of American and European horror to shame when it comes to scaring the daylights out of viewers.Any in-your-face violence or yuckiness leaves me cold unless it crosses ALL lines, like A Serbian Film. But that only got a "WTF, world. WTF." from me.
What I find scarier, are smiling, innocent faces around whom bodies drop like flies. Japanese horror is a great example.
Is it telling that that is the exact thing that came to my mind when the topic first came up of piecing horror together for yourself?Or, in "A Song of Ice and Fire," reading the Theon chapters post-torture and reading between the lines to figure out (and name yourself) all the disturbing things that it's implied happened to him, instead of being told or shown.
Shit, that country's commercials put 90 % of American and European horror to shame when it comes to scaring the daylights out of viewers.