I was scared by The Ring, but it also pissed me off. NOTHING was explained. The brief shots of the dead people’s faces were just an excuse to fit in a little gore. Also, IF THE HORSE IS DISTURBED BY YOUR PRESENCE, MAYBE YOU SHOULD MOVE AWAY FROM THE F*$%&!NG HORSE, YOU IDIOT. Grrrr.
I am also really sick of the ‘creepy little kid’ trend and the reliance on gore to create a scary movie.
… and sixty years from now people will remember the three or four good horror films made in the early 2000s and forget all the rest, just as we now remember the three or four good Universal horror films of the 30s and 40s and forget the rest …
To me the best moment was the little girl’s incredible acting and look of instant shock when
the medium asks “Is that the pillow she used to kill you?”
Beautiful scene and beautiful acting. I had long since figured out the twist as well but it didn’t detract; the Mother explaining to her children what has happened in the end was superb and somewhere between very sweet and absolutely terrifying, and I loved Fionnula Flanagan (such a beautiful woman, incidentally) as Mrs. Mills.
Plus kudos for using Dead Books as a plot device.
The problem with movies with a twist is that if you even know that there is a twist, then you start looking for it, and you can pick it early.
I watched The Others unaware that there was a twist and I enjoyed it.
My personal favourite scene:
[spoiler]Where the little girl is playing with a doll and she has a veil over her head. Mother comes in and can just see her face through the veil (as can we). It is not the girl.
“What have you done with my daughter!” Mother cries. To which she replies (in the girls voice), “are you mad? I AM your daughter.”
What I like about it is that the girls tone of voice sounds like she’d really like to say, “have you gone completely fucking bonkers Mother?”[/spoiler]
To me though, these films you talk about aren’t horror. Horror is gory, not particularly scarey, and sometimes funny. Suspense/thriller is what I’d call The Others. It’s no more horror than The Sixth Sense was.
I intend to see that, but I’m sort of annoyed about the trailer. Nothing in the trailer is objectionable, but they were playing trailers for this in November when I saw National Treasure… the movie doesn’t come out until August. :dubious:
I liked that one as well.
It was a magnificent gore fest. It was utterly disgusting. It was also funny, and that is one of my favorite combinations.
Also a reason I loved the Dawn of the Dead remake and Shaun of the Dead. Well, that and the zombies. Ya gotta love the zombies.
Not to mention The Birds, Psycho, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, and Rosemary’s Baby
I don’t think that the horror genre is particularly in a slump at the moment. On the contrary, the reason there is so much schlock is because there is so much. Horror is enjoying a major boom right now and there is much in the way of quality and style to root through, chew on, and enjoy.
Some of it is slasher, some of it is psychological, body horror, splatterpunk, disaster, and occult. There was a lull in the last decade with so little horror and now it seems we are back to the rhythm of the 70s/80s.
Personally, I enjoy the original stuff more than the throwbacks to the 80’s hayday (I still haven’t seen F vs. J) but I am looking forward to seeing the new Amityville. It looks to be a remake that may be better than the original, thoguh I do feel sorry for the folks that live there who will have to deal with the resurge in curious moviegoers.
For the most part, I like it all. The gore, I do not find particularly scary, but it is entertaining and if I want a good time movie is what I will turn to every time over the same ol’ action flick. I much more enjoy psychological tweaking. To me that is much more horrific than the blood. Open Water (another one that is widely hated) is still the scariest movie I have seen to date.
I’m not an expert at the genre, but as a child, I used to love horror movies. Even then, after renting so many and watching them all, none really scared me, but I still loved watching them over any other type of movie.
I think the definition of “horror” is a bit different for everyone… the only movie to creep me out during my younger years was “Halloween”. Michael Myers’ expressionless mask was enough to do that for me. Not the slasher scenes, not the surprise sequences… just seeing a still shot of his expressionless face. That was what made him creepy and scary.
This past weekend, my roommate rented Donnie Darko, directors edition. It was the first time I’ve seen it (hangs my head in shame). Even though that movie is rated as sci-fi/80’s/and sometimes horror, I gotta admit seeing Frank the Bunny the first time freaked me out for the first time in years! In the end, I took it in as a sci-fi movie with great 80’s songs, but that first impression still sticks with me!
The horror genre is too difficult to put into little boxes of what is considered great or terrible. Each person watching has different criteria and different threshholds of what truly makes a scary movie.
My 2 bits.
I can highly recommend the Japanese original - it’s one of the few horror movies recently that actually have scared me - it creeped me out quite a bit actually.
But I don’t know what to make of the trailer of the remake… it just doesn’t capture the creepiness of the original… Dunno, I hope it will translate well, but I’m just not sure.
Agreed.
I wish movie reviewers would stop telling readers/viewers that “the movie has a surprise twist,” because if I know that I can’t help looking for it. Guessing the surprise early on ruined The Usual Suspects and The Others for me.
To me, the stuff you’re calling horror isn’t horror at all. It’s crap people have tried to palm off as horror for so long that some people think that’s what horror is. Horror, real horror, is…well, horrifying. Scary. Creepy. Fucks with your head. Sometimes it’s gory, but only incidentally. And while it may have a light moment here and there, it’s certainly not funny.
Think about Poe. No gore I can think of offhand, just a mind-fuck. Think about Hitchcock’s horror classics–the only gore that springs immediately to mind for me is the blood going down the drain in Psycho’s shower scene. Think about TBWP. Nary a drop of blood, just a couple of teeth in hankie.
Whereas you draw the line between horror and suspense, I draw the line between horror and monster/slasher flicks. Monster/slasher movies are generally too explicit to be scary. I’m not sitting there thinking, “Omygod, omygod, omygod,” I’m sitting there thinking, “Well, that’s disgusting…Oh, that’s gross…eeewwwww, that’s just nasty.” They rely on all the icky little details to frighten people, when the situation itself really ought to be enough.
There’s a certain level of restraint needed for horror to really work, some room for the viewer to fill in the blanks himself, because he will always fill in those blanks with whatever frightens him most. I know lots of people who were weirded out about taking showers, especially when they were home alone, after seeing Psycho. If Hitchcock had actually shown the knife going in, or given us a good shot of Janet Leigh’s hacked up body, people would turn off the movie and hop right in the shower and not even think about it. It would have been robbed of its power.
What’s wrong with horror movies these days? They’re going back to some of the basics of the genre, which I don’t see as a flaw at all.
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Sorry, the word actors and Paris Hilton in connected sentences just threw me.
Count me in as another who liked this one. There were subtleties to it if you weren’t looking for a twist. For instance, the mother’s ‘sudden migraines’ at any loud noise… And when we find out -why- she’d be getting headaches from loud noises… Made me both shiver and go, “A-ha!”
Yes, you are quite right.
I guess horror should make you feel the way people who have night terrors must feel. You are also right that by not filling in the blanks, a good scarey movie allows the viewer to fill them in with what ever scares them the most. A little like the way a scantily clad woman can appear much more erotic than a Penthouse spread.
This is one of the reasons I don’t much like Stephen King books, they start out well enough, leaving a good deal to the imagination, but when it comes time to actually “see” the beast (or what ever), it just falls flat.
I saw The Blair Witch Project while it was still in limited release, having seen the pseudo-documentary special released at the same time, and that was just freaking terrifying (especially the
“Grab a corner, boy!” ending
I can understand why people who went to see it after it was incredibly hyped and were expecting- well, a movie with a budget- didn’t like it so much, but I’ll never understand it’s maligners.
PS- Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows isn’t terrible either, though it’s not on par with the first. Still it has its moments, and manages to cash in on the one type of geography that is more primordially terrifying than the neverending woods: the tourist town.
I Was A Teenage Caveman (It’s a post apocalyptic future, filled mostly with softporn), How To Make A Monster (forget everything you know about electricity or computers, it will only get in the way), Earth Vs The Spider (Haven’t seen it), and She Creature (great film, human greed, Victorian horror, a topless mermaid) were part of a series intended to have no connection with the old films except title. OTTOMH The old films were American International and they generally came up with a title and poster before a script. The remakes continue the tradition. In fact, She Creature was originally the remake of War Of The Collosal Beast (There’s still the line ‘You’re no siren, no collosus of the sea.’) But, somewhere in editting they changed it to She Creature.
13 Ghosts, House On Haunted Hill, and House Of Wax are remakes of William Castle films by a production company named Dark Castle. These people are on a mission to bring his shlock to a new generation, and to wring out every last cent from the rights to his work. I believe he’d approve.
I went to see Blair Witch Project at the outdoor stage at Huntingdon College. It was, of course, screened at night, in front of a very small audience. If you’ve ever been to the outdoor stage at Huntingdon, you know that it’s, well, out in the woods. Fantastic venue for that movie.
It didn’t occur to me until I actually arrived, and not with horror, but with sadness, that several years earlier, a good friend of mine had walked out to that stage, sat down on the edge, and blown his head off.
It was poignant, in a strange way, because I know the audience (who were largely too young to remember him) would have been even more horrified at the prospect, and also because of the undeniable fact that my friend would have loved the movie.
Yeah, I’m not sure why that movie is so hated. I thought it was rather cleverly done…even if it was a complete 180 from the style of the original.
Something’s wrong there – 13 Ghosts and House on Haunted Hill were William Castle films (I was raised on them), but House of Wax sure wasn’t. It was a big-budget color 3D film that long predated the back and white Castle cheapies (and was itself a remake of a very early color film, Horror of the Wax Museum).
What wasn’t explained in The Ring?
All I can think of are:
But these don’t seem like the kinds of things about which we the audience are owed an explanation.
It’s just a given that the girl was so evil–it’s just the kind of thing she is. And as to her conception, all we need to know is: it was mysterious and a little creepy. That tells us all we need to know for the sake of the story.
Are there other things I’m forgeting about the movie that need to be explained but aren’t?
-FrL-