That's Just Not Scary Anymore

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The_Ink_Goddess

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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.
 

Lhowling

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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.

Ugh me too. They're so annoying. As are dolls. And dumb clowns.

Now that I have gotten older I find fear in other areas that are not so obvious (or maybe are). As one of the members mentioned, it becomes psychological. Are my doors locked? Why is that guy so intently staring at me from the driver's seat of his rape van? What the hell am I supposed to do about taxes?

Fear, now, is more spontaneous. I recently read a love story and was confronted with the fear of not being able to be with the person that I loved because everything was telling me not to. Imagine that pain of being so consumed with someone that you could not imagine a world without them, driving you to do maddening things.
 

Mallory

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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. A story with an unknown supernatural threat could scare the shit out of me in the beginning chapters, in the dead of night: but as soon as I find out that it's vampires, it loses all fear factor for me, no matter how good the atmosphere/writing was.

I think the worst kind of horror comes when it's NOT spoon-fed, which is why the cheap jolty jump scares don't work. I find something far more scary when you, as the audience, have to make the connection in your own mind instead of being told.
For example:
Watching the movie "The Fly" and discovering that he's been merged with the fly in the machine. No one tells us this: we see the images of him and the fly on the computer screens, see the calculations, and see the horrified look on the character's face just as we name the realization ourselves.
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.
 

emax100

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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.
 

Jcomp

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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.

Well, in the case of The Walking Dead, I think a lot of the success is directly due to being centered around the "most done to death supernatural creature ever." (Also bear in mind that people piggy-backing on the success of The Walking Dead contributed to zombie supersaturation.)

When catering to the masses, "unique" or "original" are far from requisite. There's a reason why zombie novels, anthologies, movies and tv series remain prevalent. There's a reason why a pretty obvious Walking Dead knockoff like Z Nation can still find enough success to be renewed for a 2nd season. There's a reason why a movie like World War Z that had all the pre-release hallmarks of being a financial bomb (plagued production, well over budget, multiple re-writes, wildly unfaithful adaptation that alienated some fans of the novel, etc.) nonetheless managed to be a significant box office success (so successful that the studio decided to re-greenlight the originally planned trilogy). The zombie sub-genre has become the "comfort food" of horror. For every person who says they're tired of the genre, there are a handful of other people who are chomping at the bit for the next zombie release of any kind, and already have next year's zombie walk costume planned out.
 

Jamesaritchie

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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. Whether it's a zombie, a vampire, a mummy, a race of aliens, or a thug murderer in a noir detective novel, it's all the same to me. It's a good, well-written story with characters I care about who are in mortal danger, even if I'm not.

Having said this, the one story that made me just a tiny bit afraid because it did the best job of exemplifying evil as coldly murderous as it really is was a vampire story. Just one, and it was Stephen King's Night Flier. The movie wasn't as good, but the story was, I thought, as good as anything King has written.
 

Mallory

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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.

I agree with this for probably 99% of stories/movies out there. But, I think that some movies/stories are genuinely scary because the concepts represent some disturbing aspect of our own psyches or something dark about the world.

Yes, as a 23-year-old I'm not going to think a book is scary because of the way the noises and shadows are described in a story about a bland "monster in the closet" trope, or a zombie/vampire war or something. That's just stupid, like you said.

But then there are stories where the horror goes beyond, into something fleshed out much deeper. Two movies that come to mind are "The Fly" and "The Babadook" - they both cause the viewer to think about what the horror aspect represents, and although it's fantasy, the THEMES can very well relate to some of the darker aspects of real life, as well as hypothetical what-if possibilities that actually could happen soon. For example, in the Babadook, the monster represented her own self, the malevolent side of herself. Some people DO have sides to themselves that would make them shit bricks if they truly recognized what was underneath, and that's what makes movies like this scary to so many people.

So, yes, it's true that when you mature and develop, meaningless swamp monsters aren't scary anymore, and you learn to care more about the characters on a deeper human level. But also, some types of horror really do tap beneath the surface, when done in a thematic matter, and this type of horror is about more than just the characters alone.
 

Rhoda Nightingale

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Just swooping in to say Vampires are STILL AWESOME, although admittedly they have never scared me. They're one of those "monsters" that don't have to be scary to be kick-ass. That's not the point of vampires; it's the allure and the escapism. They're the rock stars of the horror universe. You know you shouldn't hang out with them, because they're a bad influence and do a lot of dangerous things, but you just can't help it.
 

Ravioli

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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.
 

emax100

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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.
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.
 
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TheCthultist

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Unfortunately, quite a few monsters have fallen out of beings scary. Even the idea of stories just focusing around a monster doing things that monsters do (killing, maiming, just being generally monster-y) just doesn't bring up the same sort of feelings of pure horror they once did. It's almost become a cliche to say, but zombies just plain aren't scary these days. Vampires, as much as I hate to admit it (beings a big fan of them as a kid) are old hat now. Werewolves are basically nonexistent in horror as antagonistic forces now. Demons are even beginning to go out of style if they aren't actively possessing someone (which is a shame as they are always a favorite of mine to fall back on when you need a sentient force of evil that's still somewhat relatable).

That said, I have to agree with what a few people have already said that the best type of horror is still the methodical, creeping, subtlety revealed (or not revealed) horror you get when you have to piece together exactly what has happened or is happening in a particularly scary situation/scene. I'd like to believe that will never go out of style.
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.
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?
 

Ravioli

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Shit, that country's commercials put 90 % of American and European horror to shame when it comes to scaring the daylights out of viewers.

LOL yeah I'll never forget my 2003 trip to Japan with my best friend. We were watching TV, enjoying the culture shock, when suddenly - shrimp pizza baguette commercial with a grown-ass black dude (color worth a mention because Japan can't have NOT done that deliberately for added effect) in a vintage swim suit, complete with white and red stripes, doing a weird as crap dance by the poolside with a bunch of kids in shrimp costumes. Now let's keep in mind that the shrimps in the advertized goods were to be eaten, not nurtured. And this came with one of those godawful cutesy Japanese commercial songs with screechy girl voices. My friend spent years looking for that shit on Youtube, I don't; it's forever burnt into my memory.
 

WriterDude

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Not sure that I have ever been scared by monsters in books. I like to read about the unknown.

I once helped a friend clear their garden of junk and lay a new driveway. As I dug in to the uneven earth I hit something stubborn that turned out to be a black plastic sack which I then convinced myself contained a corpse. It didn't, but if a book can have me as afraid to turn the page as I was to rip open the bag, then we are on to a winner.
 
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