The tropes of the protagonist(s) in horror are well known. Knocking down the bad guy but not finishing him / her / it off. Running like crazy in the woods and falling down, twisting an ankle, when a slow steady jog would have done the job. Splitting up to search the creepy haunted house then getting picked off one by one. Not sharing all the available information when doing so could have meant coming up with a better plan. Adults not believing the kids or teenagers even though they were telling the truth. The list goes on.
I’m interested in examples of the opposite. What are some good examples of horror, whether books, movies, TV series, comics, whatever, in which the protagonists get together and approach things in a sensible, intelligent, and systematic way to try and figure out what’s going on and defeat the villain?
I thought the kids, and then adults in It did a pretty reasonable job figuring out what It is, what it wants and how to kill it. It required courage I wouldn’t have had.
Apologies for the extra period in the title. My keyboard has been double spacing intermittently for some reason, and I don’t think it’s worth getting a new laptop just because of a sticky space bar .
Many, many years ago a colleague joked that once the walls started bleeding he would have left the house while it was still just “The Amityville Concern”.
It Follows is one of the best horror films in many years. None of the classic tropes of stupidity. It’s genuinely frightening as they begin to understand and believe what’s happening and try to figure out how on earth they can escape the relentless pursuit.
After rewatching It Follows with friends who are seeing it for the first time, we’ve had discussions for hours as to what you could do.
If it just walks and can’t magically jump, then it takes a long time to walk a long distance. So move to San Diego. Then New York when it’s got there. Is it blocked by the pacific? Move to New Zealand, and live a long time. Also can you reget the ghost? If not get three or four people to switch between them (assuming you can’t switch it back to the one who gave it to you) and manage the switchover, staying away watching. People who’ve had it before can see it? Then manage this benefit.
It seemed a movie ripe for a lot of details not mentioned.
Oculus. presented as this, and the first half is a great version. Idea being there’s a haunted mirror which makes you hallucinate things, but they’ve set alarms of various kinds which will trigger and timers which need reset otherwise a huge metal spike goes through the mirror to kill it.
Unfortunately the second half seemed to be written by a much much worse writer and was kind of hohum.
Much as I prefer the Carpenter version (it’s pretty close to Campbell’s original story, and idea), one of the things I admire about the 1951 Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks version is how believable and intelligent the actions of the military men (if not those of the scientists) are in trying to cope with the Giant Invading Intelligent Carrot. You constantly see them tossing out ideas and improvising. One of the really cute things is that most of the ideas come from the subordinates, rather than the nominally commanding officer, who is himself smart enough to go with the flow and not obstruct an idea just because he didn’t come up with it.
(One of my favorite exchanges:
“This is no joke – what if he can read our minds?”
“Then he’s gonna be awful mad when he reads mine.”)
The Car featured a demon from Hell in the form of a car. It ran rampant at night killing people. The locals came up with a plan to lure it into a chase through a canyon, and they detonated the canyon walls and buried it under many tons of rock. I guess it went back to Hell.
Stranger Things has a lot of really smart moments. My favorite (spoilers ahoy) is when Joyce, realizing that her son can make lights flicker, sets up a Christmas Light Ouija board on her wall, letting him tap out messages to her by flickering lights under specific letters.
Tremorswas pretty good about this – the people trapped in the valley with the Giant Worms actually used intelligent ploys against the giant things, which, for once, weren’t invulnerable.
They did a pretty decent job in the sequels, too. at least, they did in the first two sequels (I didn’t watch the others, or the TV series after the first episode). And for once they treated Infrared Vision properly – they coated the guy with cold stuff to make him effectively invisible. (In the movie Hardware the heroine hides in a refrigerator to avoid thermal vision – which is like hiding a lit candle in a dark room.)
I’m a fan of “smart protagonist” horror movies. In addition to what’s been posted, I’ll throw out Splinter, The Descent, The Shallows, Pitch Black, The Collector, Cube, And #Alive.
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