No one has mentioned What Lies Beneath yet and that certainly qualifies as a horror movie.
I’ll also second The Sixth Sense and The Others.
Do The Legend of Sleepy Hollow or The Ninth Gate count?
Personally, I’d say that TLoSH counts while TNG doesn’t. But, hey, I’m running on 1.5 hours of sleep here, so what do I know?
The Ninth Gate’s primary horror element was Depp’s character’s habit of smoking like a chimney around priceless old books. Makes one cringe. 
My favorite horror movie of recent times is Silence of the Lambs. Anthony Hopkins convinced me utterly of his complete capability to do absolutely anything unspeakable to anybody. The entire film was charged with terrifying tension.
Personally, I find the most horrific horror movies the ones where the “monster” is a plain person. The first two Halloweens, Psycho, and a slew of others are prime examples already mentioned. The original House on Haunted Hill is the same, where you find the supernatural horror aspect was really just a ploy developed by a guy to murder his wife. Sure, at night I’m scared of the zombies and ghoulies that could come get me, but the thought of a person being able to do such horrible things worse than any monster could do is what’s truly terrifying. Of course, someone mentioned, that all falls under the category of “suspense” now.
I think what’s happened to horror movies is the whole “MTV effect.” I personally hate that term, but it’s true. People can’t seem to sit through suspense. I enjoyed Resident Evil because I am a big horror fan, but it was a bit too action oriented. A good horror movie knows about this thing called “pace,” where things don’t just jump out at you one after the other…you build it up, give it time, and just when you can’t take it anymore…wait a little longer. Let the imagination guide the audience and make the horror worse, so that when it finally does present itself, the effect is maximized. Unfortunately, nowadays, people just want it fast, which means more, which means over the top, and not all that scary. Someone already mentioned it, but if you love horror movies, find Ring. GREAT suspense, wonderful buildup, and an ending that left me and my friends absolutely terrified of our televisions for at least a week, and then a little unsettled after that. Amazing movie. And the sequels were actually really good as well.
I figure, its hard to be a villian when your victim has the balls
to fight back, as is the general mindset of today’s youth.
Makes a horror flick more of an action movie, anymore.
Freddy or Jason shows up, one guy sez “LETS ROLL!”
and thirty guys and gals run out and jump his ass!
Well, Psycho could be considered as horror films, because while it lacks a supernatural villain, it is extremely creepy. I think that a horror film requires a dose of the eldritch, the macabre, the eerie, in order to succeed.
Generally, slasher films don’t work as horror because they lack an aura of fear, death, or decay, A good horror movie should inspire, well, horror. That’s why zombie movies work so well because of that theme of infection from within, of being transformed into something awful.
It als helps not to reveal the monster until the end. The Blair Witch Project works well because we never see the monster. The movie keeps up a tone of menace that something is lurking in the woods.
That really surprises me. It was certainly ok, and did have some horrific parts to it, but…It wasn’t that good. It has a meandering plot that doesn’t build up to anything interesting until the last 15 minutes, most of which is shown in an irritating flashback method. It’s more psychologically creepy/disturbing than scary-sort of like the HOHH remake; but that’s just my opinion.
I can empathize with having trouble distinguishing horror from other genres, because I have difficulty finding movies that truly scare me; I tend to see them all as thrillers, I guess. I used to think In The Mouth Of Madness was scary, but upon a second viewing it wasn’t so much. The supposedly terrifying Event Horizon was interesting, but not very scary. I love the Gift as a suspense film, but its scary parts accounted for less than five minutes of the movie. Rose Red had some scary parts, but since the movie doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense, it’s hardly a great horror movie. The only movie I’ve watched on the edge of my seat isn’t even a horror movie, it’s billed as a sci-thriller: Phantoms. That one was scary twice. I haven’t seen Ring or The Others yet, hopefully they’ll be scary when I do!
I guess I’m just weird. I found the new House on Haunted Hill incredibly frightening… just the entire atmosphere, not to mention things like the camera scene, or the backstory to the institution…
What the hell do people see in this movie? Yes, the ending was great, but there was 90 minutes of pure tedium preceding it. Yet, everyone who’s seen it gushes like it’s second coming of Christ. The sequels are even worse. What in God’s name am I missing?
For me, it was the fact that the movie was very well paced. They didn’t rush to get to the creepy bit, they didn’t constantly hit you with a guy jumping in from off camera with a sheet on his head, and the gore was very lax, yet all of that helped make the tone of the movie very nail biting. And all of that helped make the ending even more terrifying. What you saw as “tedium proceding,” I saw as build up. I’ve watched a lot of Japanese movies so I’m used to a bit of the bizarre, so maybe that helped me out. And I found the sequal to be really good. Especially the fact that it continued straight from where the other left off, with same cast, characters, and everything. Not like most sequals that just pick up at some random point in time and have to find a reason for the killer to be killing.
Another thing I think killed horror is the use of CGI. I fucking hate it, because it’s never used well. House on Haunted Hill remake was **GREAT!!![/]b, until at the very end, they flushed everything down the toilet to have a Big Ball of Evil thrown in the mix. Old horror movies liked to hide the monster for the most part…it was something creeping in the shadows. You could often see it, but never get a good look at it, so that made it even more frightening. Nowadays, people just draw a few sketches, get on the computer, make the monster, and have to show it off as much as possible. And 90% of the time, it looks like shit. Again, making the monster more prevelant makes the movie more into an action flick, picks up the pace of things, and in turn, kinda takes a lot of the horror away. When the monster shows up in the first five minutes of the film, pops up every fifteen minutes of the film, it makes it’s final “coming out” scene less effective.
People just don’t expect suspense anymore, and that’s really a shame.
I suppose we remember Jeepers Creepers, which would have been a good movie if it didn’t feel the need to show us the monster so terribly much. The first half of this movie was classic and effective tension building. Then the second half was just a action movie.
It’s like the previous post said, the more you can take a good look at something, the more you realize that it’s ridiculous. Because with exposure comes acceptance. It’s like, nowadays, we all know what we’re going to do if we see a Mummy or a zombie. We’re going to run or blow it’s head off, because we’re all familiar with them by now.
I’m not sure that’s strictly true. Certainly we saw plenty of Boris Karloff’s Monster in the Frankenstein films. We got many good looks at King Kong or The Wolf Man. And of course Dracula strolled onstage pretty early. This is not to deny the importance of suspense. In all those movies–Frankenstein and Kong in particular–the first appearance of the monster is delayed for a while, and carefully orchestrated. But once we’ve met them, they don’t hide from us anymore.
The “something creeping in the shadows” description applies very well to the Val Lewton films of the 40s. While that kind of horror movie can be very effective, I would argue that historically it’s been the exception, not the rule.
At one time I would have agreed that the problem is a lack of horror actors, and the abundance of CGI. But now I’m not sure that’s quite it. As anybody who’s watched Farscape knows, you can create very appealing and likeable characters who are totally “artificial.” You just have to put time, skill, and effort into making them work.
The key word, I think, is character. Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster works because he’s a fully realized character. King Kong, despite being an eighteen-inch puppet, is also a fully realized character. That’s the problem. Too many of today’s monsters are just special effects. They aren’t characters that we can be interested in.
I’m reminded of something Karloff himself said, in an interview that I have on a very old and low-quality audiocassette:
I think that’s the real problem with horror movies (and it’s certainly nothing new). The poor ones don’t really have stories to tell. They just have special effects they want to show off. That’s not enough to support a film.
The thing about CGI is that it makes it very easy to show off the monster and what the artists behind the computer can do. The problem with that is that the viewer’s imagination will, nine times out of ten*, conceive of something much worse. I always hated when the monster wasn’t really shown in movies because I felt I was missing something, and prior to CGI that “something” was something worth looking at. Nowadays we have the fully fleshed-out hideous monstrosities, but after looking at them for 10 seconds or so you’re left with a feeling of “yeah, AND???” Ultimately it comes down to what has been said before, story. Without it you have something akin to faux-horror masturbation. You get a momentary thrill, but then nothing.
- Ah yes, the one in ten. John Carpenter’s version of The Thing. I don’t think I’d ever conceive anything like what Rob Bottin did for that film.
because people today have short attention spans, and building suspense takes effort, to a greater or lesser degree, on the part of the audience as far as following the plot and paying attention.
Also, the studio’s commercial mandate to make money dulls excellence in films - a genre, in this case, i.e., horror - by pushing for films to appeal to the widest audience possible, not an elite, educated consumer (like us - 
).
Add my vote for The Others. A classic horror film with great suspense and surprisingly good acting.
As for The Ring, well, I watch quite a few Japanese flicks, and I have no idea why someone would prefer the original Ringu over the remade US verison. Maybe it’s cultural, but the pacing & plot was much better, IMHO, in The Ring. In this rare case, buy American.
A recent Psycho meets Carrie movie I saw was May. An independent film that I thought was great. It’s not fast paced and might not be for everyone, but I loved it.
The original The Haunting is always good for a shiver, but don’t bother with the remake.
This weekend we’re checking out House of 1000 Corpses on PPV. Hopefully it’ll be good.
I’m not a horror fan, but I think that of late, the movies all spend way too much time trying to be hip and clever and totally screw everything up. Not every film can be Evil Dead. That movie was both funny and scary. Psycho has some funny moments, and in Hitchcock’s eyes it was a comedy. Not every movie can be like that, and they shouldn’t try. For the last ten years or so, every attempted scary movie I’ve seen (and a great many more I haven’t seen because they looked like crap) has been a ripoff of Scream, which I hated in the first place.
That’s one tyhing that happened to horror movies, anyway.
I think the attitude that some how todays audience is more sophisticated therefore we have to up the ante is completely bogus.
The so called sophisticted audience doesn’t pay attention longer than a few seconds and demands that plot points be spoonfed to it. There hasn’t been a decent mystery movie lately either for the same reason.
No one wants to figure out what is happening by themselves they just want to passively watch. If it blows up or flashes by quick enough it will work. Phaa!
The more older films I watch the more I believe sophistication doesn’t lie in the effects laden dumb films of today but in the films of yesteryear. Dialogue was much more clever and to make up for a lack of a decent monster or terror they kept it hidden. They Used suspense properly.
Hell, they actually wrote for Adults. It seems that you can note that the teen aimed horror films of the 50s seemed to provide more clunky horror films than the more adult ones 30s and 40s.
A good film had you cringing and wanting to get the hell out of your seat rather than wait for the inevitable.
Halloween was a great example of suspense. And as for the idea that some teen would laugh forgets that these are the same bright teens who found themselves scared by something like the Blair Witch where nothing happened and nothing was seen.
Japan is producing a whole new subgenre of extremely horrific horror movies.
Rent Audition, by Takashi Miike, gobear, and then get back to us.
(I also add my voice to the fans of The Others, although you really can’t fully appreciate that movie without seeing *The Innocents.*)
Hmm, another zombie thread–it’s alive, it’s Alive, it’s ALIVE!!!
Thanks for the recommendation, Lissener. I just put Audition into my Netflix queue, and I’ll be watching it this weekend if it gets here tomorrow. And you are spot-on about the new Japanese horror films, and horror is sprouting not only in Japan. The Eye is an intensely scary movie form Hong Kong.
And in the year and a half since I opened this thread, there has been a renaissance of the horror genre, from the awful (Wrong Turn) to the awesome (*28 Days Later).