Is what you CAN'T see really more scary?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve heard it said over and over again that a good horror movie is one where the monster is mostly unseen, since (supposedly) the audience can imagine something much scarier than what the filmmaker could possibly show.

Personally, I think this is a bit of a cop-out used by filmmakers who simply can’t make a scary monster. The old classics (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, The Mummy, etc.) certainly showed the monsters quite a lot, and in their day these movies were considered extremely frightening.

The original Alien movie didn’t show much of the monster for most of the film, mostly because it looked a little silly (or so said the director on the commentary track). And yes, Alien was certainly a scary movie. But Aliens, which showed the monsters up front and in person was absolutely terrifying (at least to me).

Not showing the monster certainly can make a movie more suspensful, but if you don’t eventually show the monster (and if it isn’t very scary looking after all), the whole movie loses its bite in my opinion. I’ve seen plenty of movies that started out well, but when the monster finally is shown any scares go out the window. And this isn’t because “what you can’t see is more scary” – it’s just because the filmmakers didn’t come up with a particularly scary monster in the first place.

I have a vivid imagination, and as a kid I used to get scared walking home in the dark imagining all the monsters that were out to get me. But I gurantee you that any fear I felt as a result of these imagined horrors would pale in comparison to the crap-in-my-pants terror I would have felt had something monstrous really jumped out at me.

So… what do you all think? Do you buy into the “what you can’t see is more scary” theory, or think it’s just a cop-out for incompetent filmmakers who don’t know how to make a scary monster?

Regards,

Barry

2

Even with modern advances in special effects, many of the scariest movies (IMHO, plus a little support from box office records) from the last ten years ago have relied more on creaking doors than elaborate monsters. The Sixth Sense, The Others, The Blair Witch Project.
If the monster shows up too early on in the movie, the audience gets used to it and there’s less of a scare throughout. But unveiling the beast during the final confrontation after a long build might be a set up for disappointment.

3

I agree with you there, Cat Fight (and love your name). With the Blair Witch Project they may have take it a wee bit too far, though. It’s been a while since I saw the movie, but as I recall it’s all lights/screaming/shadows at the end. The Alien movies were all quite good in presenting the monster at the correct time in the movie, even if nothing lived up to the original.

4

In answer to the OP: Absolutely.

I hate hate hate hate hate hate it when the actual monster is revealed. Seeing some rediculous rubbery puppet completely destroys the fear illusion. “Signs” started out as a great movie, until at the end, the fear was destroyed when I saw those stupid guys in their alien costumes.

In a sense, yes, it is a cop-out…my imagination will always create betters monsters than the movie-makers. And therefore, I’d prefer to leave it up to myself.

5

I knew a girl who swore they actually showed the witch at the end of The Blair Witch Project. She could vividly describe what the witch looked like. It wasn’t until she saw the movie a second time that she realized she’d imagined it.

Sometimes it’s best to never let the audience get a good look (or any look) at the monster because even with modern effects techniques it’s often impossible to create a monster that looks realistically scary in anything other than quick, dimly-lit shots. This is not incompetance, it’s understanding the technical limitations of the medium. If you can spring a great-looking monster on the audience after a suitably suspenseful buildup then that’s wonderful, but it’s also damn hard to do.

I think Blair Witch would have been scarier if it had been more clear that there was really something waiting in that cabin, because as things were you could easily assume that the intrepid heroes were running around screaming like panic-stricken fools because they actually were panic-stricken fools. But showing an old broad in a pointy hat, even if she were really creepy looking, would have been a big mistake. A lot of people would be scared by that for about half a second before they started laughing. Some people find the idea of evil witches truly terrifying, but many do not. They may, however, be scared by the idea of psycho backwoods serial killers, and Blair Witch left plenty of room to believe that it was really crazy ol’ Bubba waiting in that cabin.

6

You just have to ask yourself, is it scarier to see something behind you, or to think you saw something behind you?

The Alfred Hitchcock school of movie-making is simple to show a bomb blowing up something, but to show the bomb, then the room, then the bomb, then the room (with good scary music helping it along, of course), THEN you create a fear-filled moment.

7

I guess it depends on the movie. For me the original Haunting (as an example of one type) is a lot more scarier by leaving the wondering what it was. But in Night of the Living Dead (as an example of another type) the zombies are scarier by seeing what they are and seeing what they do. And I agree with OPs example, in Alien, part of the horror was what is it ? In Aliens, since we knew the monster from the first movie, the horror was how many there were and how they acted.

8

No amount of CGI, no make up, not even the best director in the world can top your own imagination.

9

I think genuine fear is not about whether or not you see the monster. It’s about not knowing what to expect.

I saw the film Alien recently. Somehow I’d never gotten around to seeing it before, but I’d heard all about it (mostly thanks to an Alien-obsessed friend in secondary school). I knew what aliens looked like, how they burst out of chests, and so on.

The film wasn’t the least bit scary to me. Not because I have nerves of steel but because I was far too informed about the alien, and thus there was none of the fear of the unknown.

On the other hand, the last film I can remember really freaking me out was Lost Highway, which wasn’t even marketed as horror. Very mild spoiler:

There’s a scene near the start of the film where the main character is lying in bed with his wife. He says something like: “Last night I dreamed you were someone else”, and closes his eyes. For just a second, her face changes to something grey and scaley and she begins to say something in a totally different voice to her own. He opens his eyes, and she’s back to normal

That had me on the edge of my chair watching the film, because essentially it demonstrated that the rules I thought the film was following were being ignored, and I could have no idea what would happen next. Watching the film was genuinely scary, a journey into a dark, strange fantasy.

You see, if you’re watching a film that’s advertised as, say, a slasher flick, no matter how good a slasher flick it is, you’ll always feel just a little reassured because you went in knowing what to expect and you’re aware of all the genre rules. That’s not true horror.

That’s why, if I were a horror film maker and I wanted to genuinely scare people (as opposed to actually making money) I’d advertise my first movie as… a cop film. Or a romantic drama. Or something. When I sprung the aliens/zombies/whatever, half-way through it would be scary because the audience would be as unprepared as the characters

10

Well, considering I’m rarely scared by horror movies, the movies that came the closest were the ones that either never showed the monster(Blair Witch) or slowed as little of the monster as possible (Alien). Otherwise, you may have a cool or gory monster, but scary it isn’t.

When I have no idea what it out there, or just a vague hint, I’ve found it’s much more effective then when you see the monster plain and clearly.

11

Well, that and the fact the aliens were morons.

12

Ditto…It’s all in the anticipation. The waiting, and so forth. In Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, he mentions that there’s always a sense of relief when you see the monster. That is, if there’s a big lead up, and then they reveal a bloodthirsty shark, the audience can say, “Well, at least it wasn’t a bloodthirsty UBER shark with uzis.” You know, it’s never as bad as you think it is.

I know many a time I’ve freaked myself out just standing at the bottom of the stairs outside my living room when it’s completely dark in the house. I mean, I know I’d flip out if something just came for me, but I just feel myself going crazy really slowly when I’m standing there thinking that something just might come out.

13

By the time you’ve got a good look at the zombies, the movie is more about the people in the cabin than the zombs. And, of course, you need to see the zombies and what they do to compare them to the people in the cabin and what they do.

The MONSTER isn’t the entire source of fear - the plot hinges on how people respond and what options are available to them.

Consider this - you have a full view of the monster, you have had several at this point. The monster has chased the lead into a dead end… at this point, you are going to start looking around for potential weapons and escape routes - and if you have had a good look at the monster, you are going to try and lessen your fear by thinking about how much worse the monster could be. (Zoggie quotes Stephen King on this very human reflex.)

If you still haven’t seen the whole monster, then you are looking around for potential weapons and escape routes, and good look at the monster. The tension is just going to be higher. Not seeing the monster, or not being sure of its motives, ratchets up the uncertainty level, and uncertainty keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Zoggie, hikeeba, moonchilde, Lamia and other made this point but I couldn’t help chiming in.

14

Zombie movies don’t really count, because they’re showing you something “real”: dead people. Dead people are scary even when they’re not moving around. And in the best zombie movies, the real monster - the thing that’s making all these corpses walk - is barely hinted at. Night of the Living Dead mentions something about a mysterious satellite, but no concrete explanation for the walking dead is ever given.

15

In general, absolutely what you can’t see is more frightening.

With some ground-shifting on what a “monster” is, though. Take one of the few films that legitimately creeped me out when watching them as an alleged adult, The Birds. You could say that the “monsters” in that film were, duh, the birds, who were always quite visible, but I’d disagree–the real monster was never seen–it was whatever was suddenly making the familiar world twist into something terribly unfamiliar and hostile.

That and the waiting; by far the most frightening elements of the film were the shots of perched, waiting flocks of birds–especially that final brutal scene of the characters on walking on proverbial eggshells to the car and “escape” with every surface simply covered in still, watchful feathered friends.

16

Great minds…

17

Alien was terrifying the first time I saw it (1980) You saw a hand, you saw the jaw or part of the head and in your mind you tried to put together what the whole thing looked like, and I’ll tell you what I thought it looked like was much scarier than the finished product.

Aliens bugged me because it wasn’t a horror film just an action adventure film… basically a sci fi remake of “The Lost Patrol”. The only moment it was scary was when you first see the walls move because the aliens and the walls looked similar. After they are revealed there is no real horror.

Yeah they’re tough and their is lots of 'em but they stopped being that unknown terror and it became a matter of who lives and who dies in a war film sense.

18

Hmmmm…

Do you think that we, as audiences, have simply become too jaded to the point where nothing shown on the screen can possibly scare us as much as what we imagine?

As I mentioned before, it wasn’t always so. The classic films of the 1930s and 40s were considered terrifying when they were released, even though they showed their monsters throughout the entire film. Perhaps, though those films were so terrifying because they were so unexpected. By the time somebody has see 100 vampire, mummy, werewolf, etc. movies, they expect more than the filmmakers can provide. At that point, one must rely on imagination to become really scared.

Just a thought. Personally, as a child those old B&W films scared the crap out of me, to the point of giving me nightmares, and what scared me most was what the monsters actually looked like.

Barry

19

As one who was introduced to the strange, macabre, frightening, horror genre by way of radio (!!) and whose imagination while reading a book like The Exorcist or Jaws paints a vivid picture of the terror, I must whole-heartedly agree with the notion that not showing the critter is way more frightening.

I would expand on the notion to say that rarely does an adaptation from book to movie, from radio drama to TV drama (or even movie), or from any medium where one must provide the pictures for oneself to a movie or TV production, even come close.

Cases in point:

The Lone Ranger sucked as a TV show (and movies)
The Shadow was made rinky-dink in movies

I think it has to do with the idea of a movie (or TV production) making specific something that the less visual media (books, radio, even music) leave to the audience/readers to do for themselves.

Have you ever seen an H.P. Lovecraft story made into a movie that even came close to the story’s depth of dread and terror? I haven’t.

20

I’m not sure that’s a fair example. I haven’t read everything by Lovecraft, but my recollection is that his stories don’t spend much time describing the various monstrosities in the first place. The movie adaptations fail because they try to portray visually what was never actually described in the first place, and the imagination of the filmmakers simply isn’t up to the task.

I’ve read a lot of horror stories, and you’re right that the reader’s imagination is paramount when it comes to providing the scares. But that’s the very nature of the written word. A film, on the other hand, relies primarily on visual images and not the viewer’s imagination.

So yes, any horror story that is adapted into a movie will suffer, since the filmmaker has to somehow provide an image for something that was previously only “seen” in the viewers’ imaginations. When making a film from scratch, however, the filmmakers are free to describe their monster visually instead of just verbally. The fact that so many modern films have disappointing monsters is, I maintain, a failure on the part of the filmmakers to create a decent monster and not proof of the supposed axiom that it’s better to let the viewer imagine what the monster looks like rather than show him.

I should point out, BTW, that a filmmaker does not need to show the monster in order to create suspense or dread. But for actual scares – the ones that stay with you and haunt your dreams – give me a good old fashioned monster and lots of it!

Barry

P.S. Anybody else think that “Pickman’s Model” and “The Rats in the Walls” would make great flicks?