Is it like that across the board? Have all the classic horror films from Universal and Hammer and all, everything that the late Forrest J. Ackerman used to gleefully showcase in Famous Monsters of Filmland (and don’t forget *Castle of Frankenstein),* everything that scared and thrilled the shit out of young Stephen King as he recounted so wonderfully in Danse Macabre, lost their power to awe and terrify? What about the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street? Are they also too dated? How new does a frightfilm have to be to do the job any more?
When I was a freshman in college (1996/1997) someone in my dorm rented The Exorcist and a bunch of us watched in the dorm lounge together.
It freaked the shit out of us. We were all afraid to leave the lounge and go back to our rooms, ha.
I watched Psycho by myself in 2005 and it disturbed me quite a bit. It was late by the time the movie was over but I decided to do some household chores with all of the lights on because I could not go straight to bed from that.
I was very dissapointed with The Excorcist’s distinct lack of scary when I saw it. The only frightening part was the flash to the upclose look at the demon’s face, which was a typical cheap trick…overall it wasn’t scary, though I think if I grew up a catholic and saw it in the 1970’s and hadn’t seen more modern horror movies, it probably would have been terrifying.
One thing I’ve noticed is that films from the '70s move at a much more deliberate pace than they do now. It’s just something I’ve noticed, but haven’t thought about greatly. So speaking off the cuff, I’m going to guess that the reason is one of two things: Either the filmmakers wanted the audience to think about what was transpiring in an emotional way, or else wanted the audience to be involved in the mystery and try to figure it out.
In the former case, I think that maybe they wanted the audience to consider the situation and how they would react. Remember that this was the time of the Ecology Movement. A film might be an allegory, to which the audience is expected to relate. Or by stretching things out, it may have heightened the suspense in audiences of the time. In the latter case, the '70s were a time for detective shows. The Rockford Files, Barnacle Groans – I mean Barnaby Jones, and others. Mass quantities of exposition allowed the audience to play along.
In the case of The Exorcist, I think that the intention was to slowly build suspense while presenting a situation that was extremely frightening. It was the style of the time, and it worked well. But The Exorcist is such an iconic film that after nearly four decades of ever-more-graphic horror films it seems slow and a bit quaint. It’s the old story of a film that is being judged by its direct descendants.
I was scared by the Exorcist, but really old stuff with mummies creaking around or zombies, from the 30s or 40s, leaves me cold.
Slow suspense definitely does scare me. Though Psycho didn’t–then again, I had read the book and knew the story, so maybe there’s that.
Things that leap out at me scare me but on a basic fright level. After I’ve seen it there’s no real sense of dread. Like, the horrid Robert DeNiro movie Hide and Seek freaked me out when there would be sudden noises/movements but when I think back on it, I think of it as a really silly movie. I still look back on the Exorcist in retrospect as being really scary.
And again, suspense and what you don’t see scares me the most. Like the scene in Jurassic Park (the first one) with the raptors stalking the kids in the kitchen. It’s so deliberate and slow that it still gets to me. Or, for a non scary example, the suspense of little Charlie Bucket ripping open his candy bar and finding a golden ticket. I know it’s going to happen but it’s still great suspense each time.
This is one of my all-time favorite movies and I was terrified by it as a child (I literally had nightmares for years after seeing it in the theatre), but my kids don’t think it’s all that scary. They were relatively scared by Mr. Sardonicus, though.
the final scene where the demon appears and kills Karswell; and I understand the director actually wanted to leave that out, just show Karswell’s mutilated body on the tracks, and leave the audience to wonder whether he was simply run over by the train.
Maybe the problem is that every major horror movie has been parodied a dozen times so audiences are desensitized.
I don’t particularly believe that though. I think it’s most that old movies in general are ridiculously dated and campy so it’s hard to take them seriously.
I haven’t watched the real oldies for a long time, the ones from the 30’s, but I still get tense at all the same places when I watch The Haunting, The Changeling, and Them!. Same thing happens with some of the newer ones, especially Pan’s Labyrinth and The Orphanage.
I won’t rewatch The Mummy (the original), because the scene where the mummy takes the woman into the water is just too much. It’s probably the first scary movie I saw that didn’t have a “happy” ending. It was traumatic.
Awesome well poisoning there Glutton. Way to make sure that no one will be able to address this without being preemptively dismissed as “Cinestapo.” It’s more fun I guess when only one point of view is presented in a thread, and easier to shut all the others out than to engage them constructively.
I just don’t think I get scared when watching a movie. Pan’s Labyrinth made me tense a couple of times, but I was never scared. I think the closest I’ve come to being scared during a movie was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake. It wasn’t that it was that scary, but it was the first of the modern torture porn movies that I saw. He would run out, hack off your leg, and then slowly drag you back to his basement to hang you on a hook to wait for him. That tensed me up a bit.
A couple of years ago I showed Poltergeist to my teenage stepkids, thoroughly modern children who don’t have any interest in things that happened before they were born, and it freaked their shit right out.
Exceptthe scene where the guy tears his own face off. The special effects there are so outdated it takes you right out of the movie. It worked on me when I was a kid, but it’s kind of laughable now.
Is it like that across the board? Have all the classic horror films from Universal and Hammer and all, everything that the late Forrest J. Ackerman used to gleefully showcase in Famous Monsters of Filmland (and don’t forget *Castle of Frankenstein),* everything that scared and thrilled the shit out of young Stephen King as he recounted so wonderfully in Danse Macabre, lost their power to awe and terrify? What about the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street? Are they also too dated? How new does a frightfilm have to be to do the job any more?