When I was a freshman in high school our English teacher had us read the short story Birds which I found very chilling. But when he showed us Birds the film (btw, the intro by Hitchcock with the bird cage is brilliant) he actually got angry with us when we laughed throughout the entire movie because, compared to what films can show us today, it’s ridiculous.
I find old horror movies laughable. They conjure nothing but amusement from me.
Of the 3 famous franchises, Halloween holds up the best, I think, at least before they started with the whole “curse of the thorn” bullshit. The first couple of Friday the 13th’s hold up relatively well. Nightmare on Elm Street is pretty goofy upon re-viewing now. the 2nd one in particular.
For me, the scariest thing is that you’re calling The Wicker Man, The Exorcist, and Halloween “old horror movies.”
I honestly thought this thread was going to be about the Universal movies of the 1930s and 1940s.
The new Wicker Man was horrifying.
That’s because you’re OLD.
I was 1 when Halloween came out, and the other two were already 4 years old. Hard to believe, but now they’re almost 40 years old. Now I’m wondering if today’s kids view those movies the way I viewed those old flicks from the 40’s and 50’s?
I think you mean “horrible.”
No, I meant horrifying. I was frightened and I had nightmares.
Well, watching Nicolas Cage “act” will do that. 
HOW’D IT GET BURNED?!?!
Step away from the bike!!!
I had nightmares after Jason vs. Freddy, but that’s because horror movies and I don’t mix well. It’s very easy to scare me.
I think The Exorcist probably works best on, you know, Catholics - I can’t imagine being all that afraid of something I don’t at all believe in, when so much of the movie is about that. My mom went to see it when it came out because she taught high school and her kids (at a Catholic school, and my mom was a nun) wouldn’t stop talking about it. Freaked her right the fuck out, it did.
Not the bees!!!
The original Last Man on Earth where the undead come to Vincent Price’s door calling for him still gives me shivers. The Will Smith version I could sleep through.
Were you laughing at the acting? The techniques used in the film? The effects? Or as children, were you and the others unable to put yourself into a story that was filmed the same way you put yourselves into the written story?
I’m not trying to be critical. I’m truly curious. Special effects have come a long way since filmmaking began. Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation looks crude and sometimes silly nowadays, but taken in context it was amazing. IMO dated s/fx do not usually get in the way of the story. Bad acting and archaic attitudes do elicit laughs from me (and they’re key to spoofs like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra), but I don’t ‘get’ laughing at a film because the best s/fx they could do 40 or 50 years ago are not as slick as ones that are used today.
Not a very good one, apparently.
It was the effects. We were quite content watching the film until the attack scenes.
My memory is fuzzy but I recall a scene at a playground. A little girl lying prone on the ground with a large, obviously fake seagull on her back, the only movement on its part being its big wings flapping painfully slowly. Scary music playing in the background to this. It was just so ridiculous. I’m sure things would have been different had we been born in an earlier era. But we’re so used to more realistic effects that when we see something like this it’s impossible to create a suspension of disbelief. We couldn’t help but laugh even when we’d been otherwise silent and focused on watching up until that point.
I stayed up late one night to watch The Birds on TV (volume down so as not to wake my parents, so I was close up to the TV and immersed in that fashion) in probably the late '70s or early '80s. I was a big Hitchcock fan as a kid, even buying the Hitchcock-branded short story magazine collections off the newsstand, and watching the Alfred Hitchcock Presents show in syndication. Watching a movie was tougher then, so I was really fired up to see this.
And I didn’t find it all that scary. There was some tension, sure, but I think that even then, the effects were offputting. I had seen wild stuff like Star Wars, after all! I didn’t startle until the end of the film, when they’re taking Tippi Hedren’s character out of the house, and she gets a couple pecks from a bird outside.
I think psychological horror films have much more potential for staying power, but that modern audiences would find other works that rely more on special effects to be easier to laugh at than be scared by.
Well, this movie is a special case. It’s kind of hard to watch The Birds without thinking “Don’t those idiots have any heavy clothing? Safety glasses and a tennis racquet?”
Nuns don’t go see movies? Actually, I think by that time she was already an ex-nun, but probably only by a year or so. Nuns totally see movies, dude. There aren’t many American cloistered orders.
Whoosh! 
Oh, that. I’m so used to that I don’t even notice it. 
She is, obviously, now an ex-nun and has been for many years. The funny thing is that I didn’t even know about it until I was 15 and my dad and I went to see Dead Man Walking and the conversation in the car turned to nuns and he said something not knowing I didn’t know. I asked her about it and she was all weird and told me it was none of my business.
Recently I asked her what the fuck was up with that, and she told me that for one thing she thought I knew and for another she hates telling people because then they’re all weird about it and ask her all these questions and treat her like a curiosity.