Do you like scary movies?

Seeing as how it is now October, it seems about time to bring up the topic of Halloween movies, and I do not mean necessarily Michael Myers. Well that and we saw Paranormal Activity (trailer) and it got me thinking of how movies tackle the idea of terror in movies. I personally have a love-hate relationship with "horror" movies. The love part is that I leave being scared and the hate part comes because most of them are, well, bad is probably a nice way to put it. My dislike of the concept of genre rears its head again as a number of awful movies are made with no effort at quality because they are unabashedly genre movies and supposedly are not expected to do anything more than just cause teenagers with too much time on their hands to jump out of their chairs a few times and maybe shout at the screen. When a slasher movie gets its frights out of exposing the audience to gruesome visuals or delivers jack-in-the-box-like effects toward the screen, I just yawn. Sure those moments when something pops in front of the screen might make me jump as much as the next guy, but in between those scenes I could care less. Gore for the sake of gore also does nothing for me and consequently the emergence of torture porn to supplant the scream queens had not improved the situation.

So that being said, film is a great medium for scaring people and it disappoints me that so few movies take advantage of the opportunity. The big screen and dark auditorium -- at least for those who see it at a theater -- are probably the best environment to escape reality and the tools a filmmaker has in controlling the visuals and audio allow manipulation of mood and tone that are much less effective in realms such as theater and books. Consequently there are a number of scary movies (a term I prefer to horror because of the way that word has been denigrated in the realm of film) that I enjoy quite a bit and those experiences where I am on the edge of my seat in suspense make up some of my favorite film watching. I think I have mentioned to you that when I lived in Alabama I would try to rent movies that would legitimately scare me as a way to make my life more interesting. So I've seen The Omen and Cujo and What Lies Beneath (the last one being one of the scarier of the startling movies) among others, but would not say I am an expert. So the point of this post is just to toss out some titles I think are worth watching in the month of October and perhaps start a discussion with you and maybe even our readers on what could be added to the list.

I should start the list by discussing the movie we just watched -- Paranormal Activity. The best part of watching this movie was that I knew nothing about it going in aside from the fact that it was made for like $10,000 (which I now discover is $15,000), which is truly the best way to go into it. Although I'm fairly certain that pretty much the extent of our readership was at the movie with us, I will shy away from saying too much about the plot so as not to give any spoilers and allow others to have the same experience as me. But the basic idea is a mocumentary of a young couple trying to catch on film evidence of a paranormal entity in their home. The entire movie takes place at the house and uses the unknown to create the tension in the movie. It slowly builds to the point where every time it would show the couple lying in bed, the audience would either gasp our shout at the screen in anticipation of what slight addition to the story would develop (side note there: this is not a movie for the standard horror crowd and is much slower and character-centric, leading to a lot of screaming when it was not that kind of a scare and complaining by the mostly teenage crowd in the theater with us that the movie was lame). What I liked about the movie is that it felt believable even though I do not believe in the paranormal, ghosts, demons, etc. and I did find my heart beating faster as it built toward the climax. It did seem to start out awfully slow, but on the whole the ability of the movie to slowly ratchet up the tension was rather masterful. You have mentioned you are considering writing about this film so although there is a lot more I find fascinating about this movie, I think I will leave that either to yours or a possibly response to your post. I already saw as I was writing this post that a commentator brought up particularly noteworthy element, which is that there was a Hollywood remake planned but scrapped when they decided to just release what they had already in the can (original version FTW!).

So on to the topic of other scary movies. The obvious relative to this is The Blair Witch Project -- another low-budget mocumentary made with no script and for next to nothing. That film, about people terrified in the woods, scared a lot of people and left many others not knowing what to think. A number of people told me they didn't find it scary at all and in conversing I came to realize they were not scared because there weren't a lot of those startling moments as found in many horror movies. In other words, the dumbing-down of the movie of film horror has meant that we expect immediate gratification of being frightened instead of having a movie slowly get under our skin. I would say that this movie is one I wouldn't mind watching again as I can honestly say I hardly remember it. What I do recall, however, is feeling like I was genuinely sharing in the terror that the characters were experiencing, and in that Paranormal Activity lived up to its predecessor.

So what other movies can I think of that I enjoyed? I don't want to exhaust the list so I will just list a few good examples of scary movies. The gold standard in my book (as mentioned before) is The Shining -- a Stanley Kubrick interpretation of Stephen King's novel starring Jack Nicholson. There are several reasons this movie is so scary and I would summon it up to three main reasons: (1) Kubrick is a master of using the visuals to throw the audience off guard, (2) the terror in the movie is very down-to-earth and realistic, and (3) Nicholson's creepy performance -- one of the best of his career.

Foreign horror movies are not generally an area in which I am an expert (I leave that more to you), but the political and familial aspects of The Host made it a great modern monster/scary movie and I like the way that Guillermo del Toro uses a sense of history in The Devil's Backbone to tell a story that is both more fantastic yet realistic as it draws a connection between the horror of war and that of the undead. He uses a similar approach in the more acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth, but I found the earlier movie to be more in line with a scary movie.

With that I have thrown some titles out there, but I have certainly not exhausted the list (in fact, I have left out a classic that was filmed in our area) and look forward to seeing if you or any others have more to add to the list.