I saw the Exorcist in Malta when it came out amidst all of the hype about people passing out etc.
At that time Malta was an extremely Catholic country(might still be, haven’t been there for years)so it was definitely the target audience.
There were first aiders in attendance in case any of the audience suffered from shock I suppose.
A colleague and I sat in the front row and were bored sh****ss throughout, though there were plenty of gasps and not a little screaming from the (adult) viewers.
Never got it myself, thought it was total tripe.
No doubt a triumph for the Ad. industry showing the power of suggestion over intelligence.
Well, Boris Karloff’s portrayal of the monster in the original Frankenstein is downright creepy. That close-up of his face with its dead eyes is alarming, and completely sets you up for whatever it is he’s doing to Fritz in his cell. Not that we actually see, but Fritz tortured him first, so we know that whatever’s going down is not good.
Maybe it was the Hays Code, maybe just a cultural standard of decency, but movies of that time did not show much graphic violence on screen. Even in war movies and gangster movies and Westerns, much of the killing happened off-camera, and when it happened on-camera, a guy would just get shot or stabbed and keel over, no fountains of blood.
But, for horror movies, that worked. Suspense is scarier than the gross-out. Watching the monster shambling toward the victim is scarier than what happens when it catches the victim – and what happens to the victim is all the scarier because it happens off-camera, or in shadows, and the details are left to the viewer’s imagination.
In Link (1986) there is no violence at all on-screen – for practical reasons, probably, as they used real apes and you can’t train an ape to pretend to tear somebody’s arms off – but it was still quite an effective thriller.
Nosferatu (the 1928 version with Max von Schreck) is genuinely frightening, even with the hokey acting. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is creepy and unsettling, as is Freaks.
Of course, I am old, so maybe I am affected differently by someone raised on a diet of gore-fests.
I was a teen during the slasher film craze, and my friends dragged me to see every last one of them. I had to be dragged not because I was scared, but because after awhile, those slasher flicks got really boring.
So, I’m a little hard to please as far as scary movies are concerned. I have to find the story compelling, and I like suspense much better than blood gushing out of severed stumps and the like.
My favorite scary movies are Carrie, Halloween, The Shining, and The Changeling.
I don’t consider these to be “old movies”. But old monster movies (30’s and 40’s) don’t freak me out at all, although I admire them for what they are.
I think I don’t scare easily for the same reason I don’t cry easily at movies. There’s always something at the back of my mind saying, “It’s only a movie for chrissake.”
As a blanket statement I would say that old scary movies are no longer scary, but old creepy movies can still work. Village of the damned, Invasion of the body snatchers, The haunting… they still wig me the fuck out, even on the 50th viewing. Vincent Price? Not so much.
You mean the scenes set at the archeological dig in Iraq (or was it Syria)? I agree that’s the most chilling scene in the movie. Nothing graphic is shown–just a shot of a demonic-looking statue and some feral dogs fighting in the background. And yet, you immediately have the sense that a bit of hell has literally escaped into the world.
For me the key thing isn’t the effects (unless they’re REALLY bad). I can watch old stuff from the 60s and 70s, and not mind.
What makes the really old horror movies totally non-scary to me is the stage-y, hammy acting in most of them. Acting styles really changed at some point. You can still see a bit of the old ham-style acting up to the 50s/60s, after that, not so much, with a few notable exceptions.
The Omen scared the pants off of me when I re-watched it in the 90’s. Watched it again about three years ago or so…yep - still scared the pants off of me.
Caligari is an interesting example. I saw it with a live chamber quartet playing a new score to it, and I was all prepared to love it. Parts of it were excellent. But a key character is, to my modern eyes, an attention-whore of a goth chick. She’s all done up in pancake makeup with way too much eyeshadow on, and she keeps ostentatiously walking past the protagonist and fainting on top of him.
Had I not associated her with some of the annoying goth undergrads I knew at the time, maybe her behavior wouldn’t have been hilarious. Were I used to the melodramatic conventions necessary in silent films, I might have been moved by her fainting spells. But my cultural associations with her appearance and behavior made it very difficult to take any of the movie seriously.
That said, The Haunting is one of the all-time greats, IMO–and the old Pit and the Pendulum, while having almost nothing to do with the Poe story, scared the pants off me.
Check out Island of Lost Souls (1933): We never see what the revolting humanimals do to Dr. Moreau, but the final scene where the crowd of them are shuffling and shambling towards him is as scary as anything you’ll ever see from Freddy Kruger or Michael Meyers. And even kewler is the setup, when the Sayer of the Law (Bela Lugosi) confronts him:
DR. MOREAU: I made you!
SOTL: Yes . . . you made us . . . things! Not men . . . Not beasts . . . Part-men! Part-beasts! Things!
Consider the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The first half of the film is just creepy buildup with no bloodshed. Today, slice-‘n’-dice directors seem to feel obligated to space the killings as regularly as porn directors space cumshots.
I recently watched Trilogy Of Terror (Karen Black). Even with the really bad special effects the middle story with the voodoo doll made the hair stand on end.
My personal opinion is that nothing is that we lose our ability to get scared as we get older. Our only chance at truly being scared is when we are still too young to tell the difference. So, to answer the question: yes, they are still scary if the viewer is young enough, and no, they will not scare anyone older than say 25.
On the other hand, I think the original Last House on the Left is still one of the scariest movies ever made with virtually no special effects.
The Changeling is 30 years old so I think it definitely counts as an old movie. When I originally saw it in the mid-90’s it scared the crap out of me. I saw it again last year but this time I was annoyed at how overbearing the music was. There might as well have been signs like in silent films telling the audience, “This is the part where you’re supposed to be scared”. I felt like shouting “I know this is the scary part, I’m not an idiot! Stop with the music and let me enjoy the movie!” Horror movies aren’t scary when you keep getting reminded that you’re watching a movie, which the music did for me.
I think it’s because modern audiences are more steeped in the language of film and can fill in the blanks themselves, like how old movies show the car journey between two locations whereas today’s directors would think nothing of just using a jump-cut. Too bad though, Changeling was genuinely scary the first time I saw it.
