Is it possible to create a horror movie too scary to be commercially viable?

Cafe Society
1

I’m not someone who enjoys horror movies but I gather there is a contingent of people for which it’s a pleasurable sensation and a subset among them who are thrill seekers and try to consumer the scariest movies possible.

My question is, is the limit in how scary we currently make movies a limitation in cinematic technique or marketplace viability? If we analogize it to spicy food, we know that it’s quite trivial to create dishes so spicy that they are beyond the pain tolerances of even the most diehard spice fiends. If it were not for how cheap it is to create one off stunt dishes, the spiciest foods sold at regular restaurants that need to care about margins are far below any chef’s ability to max out spiciness.

If we were to ask directors to throw every trick in the book to create a film as scary as possible, is that something die hard thrill seekers would find too scary to be pleasant to watch or would they still wish it could have been scarier? Are there any films in the horror community known as even a challenge for die hard horror fans to watch? Or is it that there’s only so much you can make something scary within the bounds of a 2D moving picture and audio track and, while that bound excludes normies like me, it’s far below what horror enjoyers can tolerate?

2

That’s how I feel about it. Given the horror involves some fear to one’s person, it’s always limited by the fact that you can close your eyes and escape it.

Going with the hot-pepper analogy, there is a market for these thrill-seekers. People intentionally seek out the “Ghost Pepper” experience to test their limits as a hobby. So it seems likely that we the horror film market should have/already has seen attempts at this. i.e. why do we think someone hasn’t already tried to serve this audience?

I think the answer is that they do their best. Horror filmmakers are always trying to make the “Ghost Chili” of horror films. But most of that terror depends on (a) unfamiliarity and (b) cultural context.

(side note, I wanted to go with “Carolina Reaper” above instead of “Ghost Chile” but the analogy here is so apt that the former might be confused with a horror theme)

As far as novelty & unfamiliarity, this only sticks while the movie is new. Then people get desensitized, the plot leaks, everyone gets the spoiler that the Blair Witch is actually a flying demon robot.

For cultural context, a lot of this is period-dependent. Look at The Exorcist or The Amityville Horror. I never saw these until 2008 or so and watched them to see what the big deal was. And the big deal is that in the 1970’s, sacrilege and occult were taboo and hence the transgression was terrifying. Nowadays that stuff is milk and cookies, it’s just amusing to think that anyone was ever frightened by stuff that’s been standard fare in the Nordic model of black metal since the late 80’s.

So yeah. Directors try to deliver a peak experience, and audiences get desensitized to it immediately. That’s why it’s hard to think of a “Ghost Chili” of a horror film that (a) holds up to a second watching, or (b) wasn’t released in the past 2 weeks or so.

3

I watched a horror movie that was shot documentary style. It was called “The Shadow People” (I think)

In the movie the viewer has to decide did these people die from the shadow people? Or did they die by suicide from a placebo effect?

In the movie a doctor gives a very logical sounding, scientific sounding reason as to why these people would kill themselves in their sleep.

And then at the very end of the movie the documentary guy basically says you could have been infected just by watching this movie. Which would leave a more gullible viewer to believe if they go to sleep they might die because they watched this movie.

Whoever produced this movie is beyond stupid for putting that in there. Granted most people won’t believe it, but there are a lot of people that would. And who knows what sort of traumatic effect that may have had on them.

4

One of the key difficulties in asking a question like this — and it’s not something you’d know unless you spent time seriously analyzing the genre — is that there isn’t, for lack of a better way to put it, “one kind of scary.”

In one of his books on writing, Stephen King described something I’ll call the “monster behind the door” problem. If the storyteller gives you a character approaching a door, and suggests there’s a terrifying monster on the other side, he says your imagination begins speculating on the nature of the monster and why it’s so scary. And the thing is, your imagination is entirely your own, and will come up with a monster that frightens you, specifically. But then when the door is opened, the monster has to be shown (or described), and maybe the storyteller’s monster isn’t scary to you any more. “Oh, it’s a ten-foot creature? It could have been a fifteen foot creature.” Or whatever.

He says one of the ways around this is to minimize the specific detail (unless you’re confident you’ve got a really scary monster). Lovecraft, for one example, does this a lot, describing the monster as something the rational mind can’t grasp, but including hints and suggestions to get your imagination to work against you. Or maybe don’t open the door at all, leaving the creature entirely suggested, fully in your imagination.

However, the more I read and watch horror and think about different people’s reactions to it, the more I believe King’s analysis here is incomplete. Because the reality is that some people’s imaginations don’t work like that. In some ways, it feels like some people don’t have that kind of imagination, at all. If you show a closed door and say there’s something scary behind it, some people will be scared, whether or not you open the door. But other people will just see the closed door, and will be unable to visualize anything on the other side; and if you don’t open the door and show them the monster, they’ll be disappointed, and say the story sucks.

A good example of this is the movie The Blair Witch Project (the original from 1999). It’s a movie that works entirely on suggestion and implication. It doesn’t show you anything.

I have a very active imagination, and this scared me out of my wits. But I also have a friend who’s the lacking-imagination type, and he thought the movie was lame, and not scary at all. As far as he was concerned, there were three dumb kids in the woods, and some noises, and that was all. The movie didn’t show a scary witch stabbing someone. All it showed was three characters, some trees, and an old house. For him, not scary at all, because there was nothing scary shown. For me, very scary, because of what wasn’t shown.

All of which means there isn’t a single objective “most scary” movie, even in a theoretical sense, because no matter how scary it is, it’ll be scary only for part of the audience.

My older daughter is 14, and is very interested in horror movies. I’ve been carefully showing her a mix of classics (the original Night of the Living Dead) and modern-era horror (the American Ring), not just to find the limits of her tolerance, but also to learn what kind of horror actually works on her. And it turns out, she appreciates it the same way I do. Case in point — the original Alien from 1979. All the atmospheric stuff worked like gangbusters for her: creeping through the spooky derelict, the tension of searching for the creature without knowing what or where it was… in these moments, she was very anxious, and enjoyed those scenes thoroughly. But the big set-piece chestburster scene? When the baby alien critter popped out, she laughed. She said it looked like an angry sausage.

That’s a perfect example of the contrasting reactions to different kinds of horror — not showing was frightening for her, but showing deflated the tension. But for another viewer, the reaction might be reversed; the setup is only setup and wouldn’t be effective without the payoff.

Consequently, in my view, the OP’s question is foundationally flawed, but it’s an understandable error because it’s not a flaw one will recognize unless one is deeply familiar with the genre.

5

This is part of what I was hoping to get at by asking this question.

I’ll approach it from my perspective in that I think the scariest movie I ever watched was Jeepers Creepers and it was a viscerally unpleasant experience of being scared. I’ve since consumed more art house “horror” like Nope/Get Out/A Quiet Place and appreciated them for what they were but I’ve avoided the “scary for the sake of scary” movies.

I guess I’m asking, regardless of which type of scared you want to be, once you’ve developed a certain tolerance, is every horror movie that comes out or could conceivably come out weak sauce or do some of them still produce the “this is unpleasant scary, not thrilling scary” reaction I had when watching Jeepers Creepers? How deep down the horror rabbit hole do you have to go before you get completely capped out? Is it like, Jalapeno spicy or habanero spicy or ghost pepper extract spicy?

6

To approach it from another angle, in movie discussions about movies that are hard to rewatch/stomach, movies that come up again and again are ones like Grave of the Fireflies, A Serbian Film, Salo, Irreversible, Man Bites Dog, Kids etc. It feels obvious to me those movies haven’t hit on the limits of cinematic technique yet, only of the audience’s appetite. I can imagine a movie that pushes every one of the dimensions of these films in an even more extreme dimension but the question becomes, “what’s the point” and who would pay you to create such a movie?

It doesn’t feel like horror has that kind of boundary but I’m asking a more informed audience whether that feels true.

7

An older example is that people used to be shocked and sometime terrified by close-ups of the actors in early movies; there were even incidents of people panicking and fleeing the theater. Apparently to people not used to it “GIANT FACE ON THE SCREEN!” was pretty frightening. Nowadays of course people don’t even notice.

8

I would say that, at this point in time, the answer is no. The horror experience seems to have evolved over time, and people’s tolerance of it has evolved along with it. There are two reasons for this. Number 1, people adapt to changing circumstances in pretty much every facet of life, so why not movies as well? Number 2, the industry wouldn’t want to make any movie, including a horror movie, that wouldn’t be economically viable. They’d be cutting their own throats.

9

Oh Jesus Christ. Sanitizing movies just in case the dumbest people alive get extra scared is a terrible idea.

10

Is there a jump scare so frightening that god would shit his pants?

11

I like the idea of OP’s question, but it seems to me to be almost indistinguishable from, “Is it possible to create a movie so unpleasant for audiences that it loses a lot of money?” And I think there have been quite a few of those.

12

Right, that’s the “to be commercially viable” part of the question. Of course creators will continue to seek new ways to create and push the envelope and try something no one has tried before before they thought it was too much. Some will do so in a manner that gets good audience reaction and others will not. As long as it’s just moving pictures on a screen and the viewer knows that’s all it is, the viewer will determine what’s “too much”. And hell, if it cost enough to make, it can even get a decentish number of ticket sales or streams but everyone still loses their shirts anyway.

13

Shalmanese mentioned Irreversible (2002) and I have to say that this was the very first film that came to mind when I read the OP. There are many things I admire about this movie, but parts of it are so horrifying and disturbing that I would never consider sharing it with anyone else by recommending it, and I have only watched it a couple times by myself. The director has stated that he didn’t really care how audiences felt about it…he made it for himself. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s ranked fairly high on IMDB.

14

The scarier it is the more successful the movie will be. A horror movie that is not scary could easily fail.

15

Excellent post, @Cervaise.

I love horror, but mostly consume it in written form. For whatever reason, I rarely see movies, so can’t really speak to some of these that have been mentioned. However, I just read the synopsis of Irreversible, and it doesn’t sound scary in the least. Isn’t it just violence and gore?
Although I enjoy horror, I would hardly describe my reaction to most of it as “being scared”. Come to think of it, I have been scared by movies and books, but not since I was a kid. Maybe I’ve grown out of it.

16

The Babadouk was scary, but subtle.

17

To be clear, there are obviously lots of ways to create a commercially unviable movie. I am asking for a movie that is sufficiently well done in all other dimensions that it would be commercially viable except for that it is “too scary”. Same as how you can make many spicy dishes that were already unpleasant to eat but it’s also pretty easy to make a dish that is pleasant to eat in all other aspects except that the spice level is beyond what almost anyone could tolerate.

18

This will quickly make this thread about jump scares - but I think the first appearance of the Nun likely qualifies.

That set of movies did a fantastic job with the jumps.

19

Two words: Large Marge.

20

Yes, Sir! The worst accident I ever seen.