Roger Ebert talked of his experience watching Night of the Living Dead when it was first released in 1968. He described the kids in the theater who were shocked and crying at seeing the good guys all get killed. Losing. This was in sharp contrast to the type of horror movies kids would have seen at the local matinee in previous years.
Eighteen years later a ten year old me watched NotLD and loved it but wasn’t scared in the least by it. By the time I saw NotLD I had seen Poltergeist, Silver Bullet, Wolfen, An American Werewolf in London, and other movies I sure as hell wouldn’t let my kid watch if I had any. So it’s possible I was just dead inside by the time I was 10 and watched NotLD, but I think audience expectations had changed in less than 20 years.
I don’t know if it’s possible to make a horror movie that is too scary to be commercially viable. If Human Centipede could make money than anything can make money.
I guess I’m still not expressing what I want accurately enough. I’m less interested in individual movies and more in specific cinematic techniques.
When a scary movie is throwing all of its different tricks at you like creepy music, jump scares, darkness, body horror etc. are you ever like, wow, this director dialed this in just right and if they turned up the dial a bit more, then this thing would actually be too scary and I don’t like it or are you like, this director turned the dial up on this as much as it could possibly go and I appreciate how they did that but I don’t see how this dial could be turned up any further?
Like, specifically around the emotion of disgust/unease, I believe the dial has never been turned all the way up. Of the “hard to watch” movies I mentioned previously (Grave of the Fireflies, A Serbian Film, Salo, Irreversible, Man Bites Dog, Kids), I believe there are still plenty of cinematic tricks still left in the bag to have made all of them even more graphic/gory/terrible/hard to stomach etc. but they would have passed the point of art into pure gratuitousness and it would have been pointless.
Another half remembered datapoint of mine is I remember reading somewhere there was a game in the Alien franchise that was specifically around wandering around a dark station with the Alien skulking around outside of your periphery vision and it would jump scare you and eat you and you would fail the mission. And I remember they saying it was legit scary on PC but people could still handle it but they made a VR version of it and that actually exceeded most people’s tolerances for being scared and it was too much. I don’t know if I remember the details right but that’s an instance of, in a different medium, the dial could be turned too far up and it wasn’t just about maxing the dial the entire time.
Ghostwatch probably fits what OP is looking for - it has never been rebroadcast in the UK since its first airing and was commercially unavailable for decades. I watched it years ago after downloading it from somewhere and I can see how it would have been very disturbing to people who thought they were watching a live broadcast descend into chaos.
Here is Ebert’s report on first watching Night of the Living Dead:
I first saw the film when I was about 14. It was half of a Friday night double-bill in the auditorium of my high school; the other half being Reefer Madness. Movie nights happened maybe two or three times a year, all to fundraise for the Student Council.
Reefer Madness was shown first, and was roundly laughed at. Then came Night of the Living Dead. Except for the screaming, the place was dead (heh) quiet. And it was too, after the film. Though we were all older than the kids he wrote about, it had that effect. Nobody, at least, not at my high school, had ever seen anything like it.
Which I recall being maybe a 5 on the scare-o-meter.
Funny story. I saw this with two stoner friends, and afterward the three of us drove a few blocks away to a residential neighborhood to park and get high again. A small yappy dog started barking at us from behind a fence, and all three of us jumped back into the car as if beset by a pack of Dobermans.
Well then you run into things like August Underground Mordum, the Guinea Pig series, anything by Lucifer Valentine, etc which were never made to be commercial.
I guess I am not totally understanding what you are looking for. There’s a subgenre of the subgenre of extreme horror where gratuitousness is the point so is this post just about gore? None of those films are scary though.
Something like Cannibal Holocaust could never be made the same way again because of all the real and graphic animal deaths. In fact an alternate version of that film was added to the Blu-ray release which completely edited out all the animal cruelty (and didn’t affect the plot at all, they truly were gratuitous for shock value) so I guess purposely killing animals is something that would be “too much”?
I’m not sure Salo belongs in this thread. It’s not really a horror film. It’s mainly a political diatribe. If you are aware of Pasolini’s politics, it ceases to be scary.
“If you don’t watch the violence, you’ll never get desensitized to it.” - Bart Simpson
I was in one of those wild animal parks where you’re separated from the animals by just a chain link fence. A lion was stalking me on the other side of the fence, doing what lions do, and when he got close, he let out that lion “cough” they do. That sent a visceral fear through me that no horror movie ever has. It was fear at the base level. I think we are hardwired from our time on the veldt to be deathly afraid of lions, and for good reason.
Make a movie that can do that and every audience member will shit their pants and run. That might not be commercially viable!
This happened to me once, sort of. I enjoy horror movies, but I saw a video I did not enjoy one bit. To illustrate how powerful the charged third line on an Amtrak train is, an employee showed me a video of a person committing suicide by touching the line. That was an awful thing to watch.
I feel like the thing that makes horror movies enjoyable is knowing it’s fiction. All the cinematic techniques give you this rush of adrenaline, but since you know it’s fake you’re not truly horrified. If a movie director decided to remove that line between fact and fiction, and show violence and horror that was really happening to people/animals, then I think it would, indeed, cross the line into something too scary to be pleasant to watch. (Though you could argue that the reason it’s not pleasant to watch has nothing to do with its scary factor and instead just has to do with immorality and not wanting to support such a thing.)
Films like Night of the Living Dead and, even more so The Blair Witch Project have a cinema verite style that really contributed to how scary they were on first viewing. But I think that ship has sailed. When ISIS was putting up video of actual beheadings a decade ago, I don’t think anybody thought it was scary; just enraging and revolting.
The Japanese version had something even worse: a few seconds after the full video tape had finished playing, there was a perfectly timed sound of an old telephone ringing. If you’ve just seen the movie, you know what it means. Clever trick.
The latter. I haven’t read all the posts, but have gotten some ideas on how they could produce a movie so scary that it would not be released commercially. Scary is obviously subjective.
Like Fargo, say it’s 100% true. Film it documentary style. Unknown actors. And use AI to put in “real” people doing and saying “real” things. Maybe take whatever scary conspiracy shit is out there, make it real. Make it scary. The key is that whatever the story is it’s “real” at a point in time when lots of people would believe it.
I think that would be considered too scary to be commercially viable. If it was popular enough and marketed properly (always cagey about whether it’s real or a movie), it could cause some real paranoia, and possibly real life consequences.
Documentary style horror films that claim to be true are super common.
Ghostwatch, mentioned in an earlier post, is a good example of one where viewers who turned in after it had started thought it was real. (It’s also a really excellent film, I highly recommend it.)
With a talented director who can expertly build tension, I believe that even a close-up shot of a bunny rabbit hopping toward the camera could terrify an audience. It’s not so much about what’s put on the screen, but how it’s shown and how it taps into the viewer’s imagination.
I’ve always felt that what an audience imagines can be far scarier than anything a filmmaker can explicitly display. Too often, horror directors make the mistake of revealing too much, which ends up robbing the film of its mystery and tension. In horror, less is often more. Just look at Jaws. The shark, named Bruce, kept breaking down during filming, so Steven Spielberg had to imply its presence rather than show it. Ironically, that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. By not fully revealing the creature, the tension skyrocketed, making the fear more about what you didn’t see than what you did.
This idea ties right into what Alfred Hitchcock believed about suspense. He knew that what’s left unseen—what’s lurking in the shadows of the audience’s mind—can be far more terrifying than anything you could depict on screen. When directors let viewers fill in the gaps with their own fears, the result is a horror experience that feels much more intimate and haunting. In the end, the real terror comes from what remains hidden, not what’s fully revealed.
As far as creating something too scary to be commercially viable, I think it would involve hyper-realistic depictions of children, puppies, and kitten mutilations—though perhaps “too horrible” is more apt.
You just described the opening of Cujo — fade-in on a cave (you’re not quite sure the size); camera moves in, moves in some more, still more — BAM! out pops the cutest bunny rabbit you ever did see. OK, bunny’s not really scary, but as he starts to silflay, the camera pulls back to reveal the puppa dog and it’s off to the races.
There was a torture genre mainstream movie 10-15 years ago IIRC that got to the point of being partially shot and they were running widespread mainstream advertising. At which point a hue and cry built up that this was simply a movie-length paean to misogyny and women-abuse.
They ended filming and shelved the project. Not because it was too scary, but because it was too socially unacceptable. Which seems like a good outcome to me.
Somebody more expert in film probably knows the title and can locate some cites.
Yea, Ghostwatch is pretty much what I was getting at - probably better. I had not heard of it before, but just checked some of it out. When you’re pushing up against what is even legal, that feels like the answer.
The “live” TV format adds an extra element I had not considered that would be much better than a straight up filmed documentary/movie format into getting something considered off-limits/not viable. Having the backing of the BBC is so baller; today you could probably get Netflix to do a live show or something like that but it wouldn’t be the same as BBC in primetime.
