I didn’t want to hijack another thread, but in that thread someone was asking about scary movies and there was discussion on what makes a scary movie “scary.” I’d like to see what makes things scary for the people here. What is the creepiest, scariest element in a movie or what would creep you out in a movie? It doesn’t have to have actually happened or been portrayed in a movie, but what would scare you in a movie.
For me, probably the creepiest thing in scary movies would be something like hearing children’s laughter in the distance while out in the woods in the middle of the night or having a small child see something off camera (a la Barry in Close Encounters). Those things definitely get goose bumps to appear on my body.
In general the scary aspects of a movie are the things that happen suddenly with no buildup or warning. Most of them are visual camera tricks. When there’s an obvious “scary part” coming, it’s not scary, just silly. But if they throw something at you with no warning it tends to frightem or at least startle me.
Blood and guts and disfigured things can be scary if they are sudden. Otherwise they’re just gross.
I can’t deal with the waiting. That’s why Paranormal Activity got to me - you always knew something was coming, because of the way it was filmed, and that just crawls all up my spine. Ditto the Pale Man in Pan’s Labrynth - he didn’t scare me once he moved, he scared me when I was waiting for him to move.
The scariest things are when something is shown that tells you that something isn’t being shown! Like what the OP said about the little kid in CE3K. A scarier example for me would be the scene in Aliens when Ripley & Newt are sleeping under the bed and she wakes up for a second, and then just as she’s about to go back to sleep she notices the empty, open containers for the facehuggers are on the floor!! Still creeps me out even after the zillionth time.
A strangely similar example: Near the end of Hitchcock’s Notorious when Ingrid Bergman realizes from the other’s conversation in front of her that she’s slowly being poisoned. Masterful!
I found Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch both annoying more than scary. Actually, I found Blair Witch downright stupid, and really have problems understanding how anybody could find it terrrifying, but I accept that some people found it scary. I rarely buy into advertising campaigns, and prefer to watch almost all movies at home instead of in theaters.
All it really takes is protracted suffering. I respond very strongly to the fear of the characters on screen. Scenes where someone is waiting to be killed, or is begging not to be killed, or who is being tortured really, really affect me. I rarely watch movies where those things happen. I can watch 100 bodies pile up in a martial arts or action film, but the second you get into ‘‘pscyhological thriller’’ territory I’m outta there.
Pan’s Labyrinth – excellent movie. I left the theater twice during the film because I couldn’t handle the sadism of the antagonist. I’m not afraid of the pale man, that’s fantasy. I’m afraid of fascist Spain in the 1930s. I can’t handle
watching a terrified man be clubbed to death with a broken beer bottle
knowing that shit happens all the time. Generally speaking, the more realistic the horror/terror, the worse it is.
So for me, horror movies are either too ridiculous to be entertaining (13 Ghosts, for example) or too utterly horrifying to contemplate. (Se7en).
Every once in a while a film will come along with great atmospheric creepy scariness without being existentially horrifying. 1408 is a really good example. The Omen too. The Silent Hill video game series is another. I hear that Shutter Island is another good one. Those are the only kind of scary movies I really like. They are too rare.
There’s a scene in (I think) the director’s cut of “The Exorcist” where Reagan sort of skitters down the stairs, upside down, on her fingers and toes. It’s just so, so creepy; I’m not really sure why. Because it’s so unnatural? Because it’s something that no normal person would ever do? I don’t know.
“Barry is shown to be surprised by the extraterrestrials. Director Steven Spielberg had two crew members hide in boxes off camera, one in a clown suit and one in a gorilla suit. One popped out, then the other as the cameras rolled, catching young Cary Guffey’s bewildered reaction. Spielberg then whispered to the gorilla to remove his mask, eliciting a smile from Guffey.”
And in Exoricist 3, I think, there’s a bit where an old woman spider-crawls across the ceiling. That is one of the most unnerving things I’ve ever seen on film.
For me, it’s the entirety of The Exorcist, but in particular, something about the scene where Father Karras is examining, with a sound engineer, the audio recording that he’d made of his first encounter with Regan, and they determine that part of what she said was backward speech, and they listen to the clip a couple of times, backward and forward creeps me the fuck out every time I see it. Shit, I’m getting the willies just thinking about it right now.
I’d say that a buildup of tension, preferably involving ambient sounds as opposed to the “jump scare” music buildup, combined with the unknown aspect of what is unseen causing the sounds, is most effective, a la Robert Wise’s adaptation of The Haunting.
The thing that makes a movie scary is sound, period. You can neuter the scariest movie ever simply by changing the audio. The combination of creepy sound effects, creepy music/score and frightened voices is what makes a scary movie. It’s possible to have no music and still be scary, ala Paranormal Activity, but it’s very difficult and even with that example many found it comical instead of scary.
Imagine the scariest movie ever, then switch out the music for goofy lighthearted music, remove the scary sound effects and loop in line readings for all the dialog that display no fear at all and the movie won’t scare a single person.
By contrast, take the regular movie, like say a romantic comedy, switch in scary music, scary sound effects and line readings where the actors portray fear and you’ll be able to freak some people out quite nicely.
The scariest movie I ever saw used the viewer’s imagination. There was an unseen force on the other side of a door that made all manner of noises starting with light scratching to an ever increasing amount of pressure making the wood crack and splinter. The buildup to the scene was excellent use of mental imagery.
but to be honest, I don’t watch movies involving chain saws or all manner of torture. I consider those a separate genre of movie.
For me, it’s inexplicability. I find the requirement to explain what caused all the horrible stuff (Nightmare on Elm St. for example, or the explication by the doctor in Paranormal Activity) deflates the feeling of unease. That’s why Ju-On and Ringu are so horrifying to me - there’s a tenuous bit of explanation about this or that phenomenon, but there are still many things that are left ambiguous. And not knowing why… that’s scary.
Most of The Descent. I thought I wasn’t claustrophobic at all, but that movie definitely made me reconsider.
Also, not a “movie”, but I do have a fear of heights, and that youtube video of the guys doing pull ups on a huge crane literally makes me sweat every time. (check it out).
IMO, it’s the “unnatural” element. That’s the stuff that always scares me - like when a mirror image of something moves or changes, but the real thing isn’t moving. Mirrors are creepy.
