A Question for Horror Movie Fans

[fringey]

I just finished reading Good to Great for work, a book that I thought would bore me to tears. Instead, i was thoroughly engrossed, and even inspired, by it. In the book, they talk about how good companies became great companies. One of the things that made companies great was adhering to what they call the Hedgehog Principle, wherein you try to discover what you can be best at and stick to it, without getting distracted by other things. It is a little more complicated than that, but that is the gist of it. Do what you can be great at, do it consistently.

Now, it has always been a dream of mine to make my own horror movies. I think great horror movies are few and far between, but I think someone with the right passion could find a way to make more. So, I have a few questions for all of you horror movie fans.

What are your favorite top ten horror movies? What movies creeped you out the first time, and stuck in your mind? Do they continue to do so on repeated viewings? What made them so great, in your opinion? This is serious research here, not just a wank off. There are no right or wrong answers, just opinions. I kind of want to get a feel for what the real movie viewing public likes rather than what the critics or movie studios say we should like. Anyone who could help me by responding to this sure would be helpful!


Patrick
a.k.a. Fringey, The Fringe Element
"A life lived without passion is a life not lived.

[scryer41]

I'll try to answer this one just from my own perspective on what HORROR is and how it affects my viewpoint on what I feel is a Horror Film.

The Random House Dictionary defines Horror as such:

Horror: 1. An overwhelming and painful feeling caused by something frightfully shocking. 2. Anything that causes such a feeling. 3. A strong aversion. Syn. 1. Dread, Fear, Terror.

Now, with that in mind, there really are very few films that have actually worked upon me in such a way that I went away feeling like I would lose sleep from watching it. A film that does such a thing must affect us on a deep psychological level. One film in point is Pet Sematary, in which a child is killed and then comes back to life only to be filled with evil.

Now, it wasn't the raising of the child from death through demonic powers that bothered me. It was the fact that the child died and in a horrible way. He was run over by a speeding 18 wheeler. To me, this very point in the film was the most horrible thing to happen and it was not done in a way that was gory. The film lets your mind "imagine" what the event looked like and simply shows you the boy's shoe coming to a stop on the pavement.

Today's horror films seem to rely on gory events to shock the viewer. Stephen King once said about his own writing (and I admit I may be paraphrasing here,) "I try to go for the scare first. But if I can't get you with the scare, I'll get you with the gross out." He does do more scare than gore though, and that's why I enjoy his works more than others.

In IT!, the only gore you see is due to the illusions that Pennywise causes the heroes to see when they were both children and adults. The real killings that Pennywise does are not shown, leaving the viewer to again imagine the horrorable things this beast is doing to it's victims. At the start of the story, the little boy out floating his paper boat down the street stream loses his boat down the sewer drain. He's about to cry and that's when Pennywise shows up, getting the boy to come close enough for him to snatch him and take him deep into the sewer system to his lair, where Pennywise kills him. To me, that's horror. You don't see how the boy dies, but you know it isn't pretty.

Another way to scare is by fast paced cuts. I offer the remake of 13 Ghosts as an example, in which many of the spirits in the house are only flashed at you, not really giving you a good look at what they look like most of the time and this imprints just enough imagery upon your mind to shock you. Another film that was good at this was Gothica. Not only was it well told, it used technics that worked very well on the deeper levels of the psychie.

Now, I love zombie films, with Night of the Living Dead being the best hands down. But since the creation of NOTLD, there have been a steady stream of zombie films that haven't really done anything new. They are simply gore fests for gore fans.

I'm also a fan of slasher films like Halloween, Halloween 2, and Halloween H20. But unfortunatly, in the end, they all are simply not horror. They too, end up being gore fests. You're not thinking about the horror part of the film, but reather "How will this person die?" What Halloween had was fresh when it first came out. It was not truely gory, but it did have a great deal of suspence. In my opin, no other slasher film, be it Jason or Freddy or such, has ever truely reached the greatness of Halloween.

A good horror film doesn't need to show the gore. It should leave it to the mind's eye to put that imagery there and, it must strike a cord deep inside us. If it fails to do that, then it's just another story. A little tale that never means anything, never causes us to leave the theaters thinking, "God, I hope that never happens to me or my family."

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Across the Sands of Time, along the Shores of Life, the Traveler rides on. For he knows his journey ends in lovers meeting.

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Beware the beast Man for he is the Devil's pawn.
Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport, or ----, or greed.
Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land.
Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert out of his home and yours.
Shun him. Drive him back into his jungle lair.
For he is the harbinger of death.

The Sacred Scrolls: 29th Scroll, 6th Verse

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Visit my website at www.angelfire.com/oh5/scryer41 to see my art, poems, short stories and photos.

[scryer41]

As an example of what I think a horror story should be done like, I invite you to go to my website and download the first chapter to a story I've been working on. It's called The Lonely Heart. Feel free to let me know what you think of it. You can also download the short story Shadows.

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Across the Sands of Time, along the Shores of Life, the Traveler rides on. For he knows his journey ends in lovers meeting.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beware the beast Man for he is the Devil's pawn.
Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport, or ----, or greed.
Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land.
Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert out of his home and yours.
Shun him. Drive him back into his jungle lair.
For he is the harbinger of death.

The Sacred Scrolls: 29th Scroll, 6th Verse

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Visit my website at www.angelfire.com/oh5/scryer41 to see my art, poems, short stories and photos.

[fringey]

I agree that gore doesn't necessarily mnake a film scary, but there have been some gory films that were scary. Halloween, the first film, is very scary, and it had some gore. Not nearly as much as many of the imitators that came later. Gore tends to make people squirm, which a good horror film should do, but it does not have to be gory to achieve chils.

Patrick
a.k.a. Fringey, The Fringe Element
"A life lived without passion is a life not lived.