Ever since seeing the acclaimed scary film, The Ring, I’ve acquired a soft spot for the horror genre. The movie took me two weeks of sleeping with the lights on, but when I made it through I discovered my addiction to being scared. However, as I’ve watched more and more of these macabre movies, I have also become very desensitized and therefore bored with most of these types of films. It’s rare for me to find a horror movie that actually scares me at all. In my quest for a decently entertaining horror movie, I’ve come to question what it takes to make a good one. There is some attribute apart from special effects and fake blood that distinguishes an amateur horror movie from an exceptional one.
The trait that separates cliched movies like Prom Night from renowned films such as The Shining is the scary, intangible quality of “the unknown.”
Fear of something we have no knowledge of is innate in human nature- it’s a basic survival instinct. This ingrained, primitive fear of unknown things is the single element in horror movies that can terrify me to the core. It’s that panicked feeling you get when you enter a dark room alone, or the reason you dread what lies underneath your bed, wondering what could be lurking below.
When in a room, quiet and solitary, with a darkness so complete that it’s tangible, my mind begins to distort the shadows around me into sinister creatures. If I get an identical feeling to this while I watch a horror movie, I know that the makers of the film truly understand the horrors that I crave.
While gore, CGI effects, and disgusting costumes may provoke a few startled cries, the alienation of the mind creates a scare that will haunt the psyche.
Eternally In Progress 