Have you ever noticed a horror movie taking a tad too long to get to anything scary? Or a jumpscare seemingly out of nowhere?
A trend in horror movies is to have an hour to an hour and 15 minutes of buildup with a jumpscare sprinkled in to keep the audience’s attention, all for just 30 minutes of craziness paired with a rushed ending. These 30 minutes of insanity leave the audience thinking the movie was good because “it was so scary at the end!”
Horror movies need to stop relying on bits and pieces of scare with a flimsy plot and instead create movies with actual purpose and real horror.
Movies like “Smile,” “The Nun,” both “The Orphan” movies, “M3GAN,” majority of the “Insidious” and “The Conjuring” franchises, and plenty of slasher films and cinema surrounding paranormal activity follow the same tedious plot structure.
In the horror template used over and over, the audience is introduced to a happy family or a happy protagonist who slowly starts to notice weird things. Professionals are sometimes called, but not until much later when things have truly gotten out of hand. Nobody in the movie believes the things they see, and everyone is the stupidest person you’ve ever met, walking straight toward the danger instead of away.
The movie has scenes of suspense, and the jumpscares are put in to keep the audience on their toes, but the movie itself isn’t doing anything that hasn’t been done many times prior.
Should horror movie fans settle for the same thing over and over, or should they demand a horror movie with actual horror? Not to say the movies listed above aren’t scary — some of them definitely are, but does the scariness of a movie make it good? Or does it just make it scary?
To determine a movie to be “good” or “bad” is of course completely up to the viewer, and one person cannot decide whether a movie is good or not. However, there are ways movies can outshine each other, and in the horror movie franchise, there has been a pattern of recycling. The same tropes, the same scares and the same narratives. The movies are made to scare and little else. However, there have been some movies in recent years that have broken free from this because of the creators’ reverence for horror.
Directors like Julia Ducournau, Jordan Peele, Coralie Fargeat, James Wan, Gaspar Noé, Ari Aster and so many more have broken out into the horror movie scene, showing there are still new and fresh ideas found in horror.
With films ranging from visceral body horror to aliens hiding in the clouds above our houses, these directors, along with many others, have created films that don’t just terrify, but terrify because the subjects themselves are terrifying and fresh.
Movies made with purpose don’t rely on a popout ghost startling the audience or someone getting murdered with a chainsaw, splattering blood everywhere. They create horrific images in our heads of things we had never seen or thought of before. A sexually transmitted disease that slowly walks toward you that nobody can see until it kills you? Horrific. Losing your child to a peanut allergy while they are away at a party? Terrifying.
On another note, horror movies don’t even need to be scary to be a horror movie. Body horror has been making a huge resurgence as of late, with “The Substance” just making a huge splash in theaters. Body horror may not be scary in the sense that a ghost will haunt you and your family, but seeing someone pull a cooked chicken leg out of their stomach is still pretty horrifying to watch.
Horror movies can also be pure camp, movies that don’t focus so much on fear, but rather over-the-top silliness and drama. They can be just awash with blood and guts and zombies and dummies running into locked doors all to make the audience laugh. These camp classics are all timeless and entertaining because they play off of the tired and boring tropes we see so often in horror movies. How else do you think they’ve made five “Scary Movie” movies? Because of the insanely high number of repetitive tropes found in horror movies.
Horror movies do not owe you anything. They do not owe you a jumpscare by a creepy kid holding a balloon, or a man in a mask with a knife running after a barely-clad girl or an explanation of evil. Nothing. True horror is found in the unexplainable, in what we cannot see or understand. Dark corners, evil with no sad backstory, monsters existing purely to harm. Something without an explanation is instinctively feared because we as humans find comfort in the understood.
Ducournau speaks on this absence of explanation in an interview with the Final Girls, a blog focusing on horror movies and their relation to women.
“I think the reason why she’s so terrifying, I guess, is that I try not to justify or give a cause for her violence,” she said.
There is no reason for the main character in “Titane” to be doing the things she does because Ducournau doesn’t want there to be a reason. People are violent, and that’s plenty horrifying in and of itself.
Directors and creators are realizing that viewers no longer need explanations or reasons for something to be horrifying; they just need to feel it. Slowly but surely, the horror movie world is being populated with weirder movies about weirder concepts that play on fears you never even knew existed.
These stories are scary and gripping because they create these new fears, not because they play on old ones. Horror must invent new scares to stay relevant as a genre, and if the horror movie directors of tomorrow do not implement new concepts, then the same movies will continue to be made over and over again.
