I know there have been and still are threads on War of the Worlds, but I just want to know if the movie is actually scary. People have told me it is, and I cannot deal with scary movies.
So how about it?
Only if you consider being vaporized by unmerciful, xenocidal aliens to be frightening.
In other words, yes. Scary, loud, pretty, and very good.
It isn’t a horror flick. There isn’t overt gore. But it is intense and can be suspenseful.
I avoid horror movies, I obstinantly refuse to see them. I saw War of the Worlds and it didn’t bother me after I saw it, but during it I was gripping the arms of my chair.
What movies do you find too scary?
My son is 12 1/2 and he was very frightened during quite a bit of it. There’s a lot of flowing red liquid that he figured was blood, makes sense in context, and he was horrified.
The effects are pretty good, it’s not like watching Michael Myers and being scared just because the scary music is playing, y’know?
It sure scared me …the intensity of the movie had my heart thundering throughout the movie , and I had a definite uneasy feeling at home alone that night . I kepy waking up all through the night expecting to see the eye-thing staring at me :eek: .
With this said , it is one of the best movies of the genre I can imagine .
It’s not “Wow, there are zombies running around with bad prosthetics. Brr. Ooh! Gratuitous violence and unrealistic amounts of blood lost! Brr.” It’s scary in the same way that 9/11 was (sorry to make the cliched connection, but Spielberg does explicitly make use of that imagery), because of the depiction of tremendous powers outside human control - not only the Martians but also fate and the panicking mobs.
Actually, I have to disagree–WotW is a horror movie in the classic sense, because everything depicted is genuinely horrifying. Unfortunately, the horror genre has been corrupted to the point that people associate it with Bullshit-jumps-out-and-scares-you-BOO! scary. The great horror movies were about more than simply ratcheting up suspense or gratuitous gore–anyone can do that it in the most of hackneyed of ways.
Real horror settles in your gut, providing scenarios that are equally riveting and disturbing–a mix of fascination and repulsion. That’s what great horror does, and WotW is unrelenting in this sense. Scary? Bah, that’s a dime-a-dozen. What Spielberg does is, in a sense, much harder and purer. It’s by no means a perfect movie or one devoid of problems, but it is most definitely a Horror movie more, even, than a SciFi film, I’d say.
i was more ‘scared’ (in the sense of suspenseful chair-arm grabbing, nail biting, etc) by batman than WotW, to be honest.
I have to say the sound the tripods make is pretty much one of the scariest things I’ve heard in the movies. It’s big…it’s loud…and it’s mechanical in a way that you are quite certain the machine was not designed to spray confetti or dispense coffee and donuts.
(that would be an amusing story - our military wages war against a towering scary as fuck indestructable robot that aliens planted as a concessions stand for their peaceful visit to Earth).
I don’t scare easily at movies, but WOTW was pretty damned intense.
Here’s a good comparison - did you find Close Encounters Of The Third Kind scary? There was no gore or hideous monsters jumping out at one in that movie, yet it had me gripping my armrests throughout in suspense. This is similar, although there is a bit of gore factor. That part, however, is not what’s scary. It’s the director’s skill in creating primal fear from the circumstances that’s scary. I wouldn’t miss it because of the fear factor, by any means.
yes- scary AND unsettling
most unsettling part without spoiling it- Dakota at the river. whew!
I thought the Blair Witch Project was a humorous story about the Darwin Awards–so all I can say is, it didn’t scare me any.
The current vote seems to be going the other way though, so probably best to swing thataway.
It’s intense, but there is little or no “jump out and scare you” but lots of “are they gonna get away” scares and one scary-ass farmer.
Yes, I would say the word intense. Or FRICKING INTENSE DUDE!
I was really excited through the movie. When I left I was just excited. Kind of like Dash at the end of the Incredibles "AND THEN WENT WHOOSHE AND THEN IT WAS LIKE, AND THEN THOSE GUYS TRIED TO KILL US! IT WAS THE BEST MOVIE EVER!
(not seriously the best movie ever but you get the idea)
I went a few days ago with my girlfriend, and she found it scary (enough to have to close her eyes a couple of times).
I certainly found it intense, but not really gory (except for the…“fertilizing” scene).
Not gory, but definitely intense and scary. I’d peg it more as a horror movie with a sci-fi protagonist than a straight-up sci-fi movie, actually.
I watched it today, and if you can immerse yourself in a movie (forget you are watching actors and CGI) then it is scary.
The fat kid sat next to me had his hands on his mouth for parts of the movie. And people behind me shrieked a few times. Here the movie was classified 12a.
The tripod machines are orgasmically scary. Brilliant stuff from Spielberg again. Only wish the film had lasted longer… IN fact I almost wish it was real. How that must have felt when people did think it was real years ago…
Very well said. War of the Worlds most definitely is a horror movie. Gore and surprises don’t make a real horror movie, since gore isn’t really scary, and cheap surprises don’t last. Real horror movies put people into horrible situations where they don’t know what caused them and they don’t know how to stop it – The Shining, The Exorcist, The Birds, etc. I think War of the Worlds delivers on that.
But damn, it’s bleak. I was just saying a little while ago that Spielberg would be an unqualified genius if he could just let go of the schmaltz and stick to the action scenes, because even in an otherwise bad movie he makes action scenes that are unforgettable. This one is just one of those after the other; you keep hearing “intense” and “relentless” in reviews, and it’s pretty accurate.