Thread by @UrsulaV

So in my recent horror movie binge watch, I have composed a theory, which I am now going to ramble about for a few minutes. You’ve been warned.

The point where a movie fails for me can pretty much be pinpointed as the moment where I say “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” and roll my eyes hard enough to sprain my optic nerve, a point I shall therefore call the OFFSwitch.

Take POLTERGEIST as the ur-example. That is a terrifying goddamn movie right up until the corpses pop out of the ground, whereupon I go “oh, for fuck’s sake.” And then it’s just not scary. The immersion is blown.

(Now, the thing is that ONLY movies trying to be serious get held to this standard. I consumed every Fast & the Furious movie and not merely because of my base desire to climb Vin Diesel like a tree, and c’mon, cars don’t DO that.)

Pretty much every horror movie that has failed for me, I can point to the OFFSwitch. And I go in willing to be scared! I am a nervous soul! I have more anxiety than God! I can’t look in mirrors in the dark! And then…wham.

If a horror movie is lucky, it becomes funny at that point. Usually, though, I’m just annoyed. I could pretty much turn the TV off at that point and not care any more.

So Kevin loves the Conjuring movies and put on THE NUN. This movie fails about eighty times over, not least of which is making the evil nun makeup resemble Tim Burton’s Penguin, which made me mutter “Cobblepott?” every time she showed up.

But the failure is actually kind of interesting because there are a couple of genuinely scary scenes that they then botch utterly, often in new and exciting ways.

I finally pinned down that it feels like lack of confidence.

There’s no confidence in the scare. Dude is locked in a coffin and the air is running out? That’s scary enough. You don’t need to have hands start grabbing him too. Just lean into the claustrophobia and ditch the hands.

Dude encounters the hanging corpse he cut down earlier? That’s enough. He can fall down and wet his pants over that. The corpse doesn’t need to fall on him and try to bite his throat out. (That was, incidentally, the OFFSwitch.)

It’s like you made a cupcake and it was a perfectly good cupcake, but then you were like “okay, maybe people won’t like my cupcake?” so you upended a five pound bag of sprinkles over it in hopes of improving it.

Now it’s just mouthfuls of sprinkles. And everything has to be the MOST. The holy relic has to be straight-up blood of Jesus, no saints allowed. It has to be the end of the world, because what if the audience doesn’t care enough about one person? Etc, etc.

(I said this to Kevin.
HIM: …I like sprinkles.
ME: And you also like the Conjuring movies.
HIM: That’s fair.)

Now, Jordan Peele, whether or not you find them scary, makes marvelously confident movies.

When our hero is falling into the sunken place, it’s not also full of snakes. Hands don’t come out of the void and grab him. There is this faith that the bit that SHOULD scare you WILL scare you.

MIDSOMMAR, for as much as people get annoyed by it, was very confident in what it was doing. (In another context, the blood eagle would probably have been an
OFFSwitch, but I was just so charmed that they did an honest-to-god classic that I let it go.)

Mind you, it’s not always sprinkles. MAMA had some just beautifully creepy scenes and build-up, and then the info dump character was wearing a Three Wolf Moon shirt and I just lost it.

THE RING is genuinely creepy and as soon as the heroine started cozying up to a panicking horse who was kicking the trailer apart—and then galloped across a slick sloping deck without so much as a stumble—“OH COME ON!”

(It recovered, which is a testimony to the sheer creep factor, because hardly anything ever comes back from the OFFSwitch.)

Sometimes the special effects are what fail you. I absolutely believe THE THING was mindblowing in 1983, but once the head started wandering around on spiderlegs…well, some things age better than others. (I hear the original KING KONG made people faint in the aisles, too.)

Now, not having an OFFSwitch doesn’t mean it’s scary. THE WITCH didn’t scare me. Loved all the Peele movies, wasn’t scared. Which is fine, because horror is super individual! But I remember them as good movies that I enjoyed watching, not as an infuriating waste of potential.

There are some really marvelous horror novels, come to that, that didn’t scare me but which I will re-read because they were just a fantastically well-done story. (Go read John Langan’s THE FISHERMAN, dammit.)

Anyway, I suppose my thought at the end of all of this is to have confidence in the scare, give the audience some room to sit there and just BE SCARED, and don’t panic and pour on sprinkles.

And make sure nobody’s wearing a Three Wolf Moon shirt.

This is a great question. Weirdly enough, I’m also kind of an outsider in that regard—I would not call myself a fan of horror movies. Kevin is! @KBSpangler is! I’m just a weirdo who writes books.

https://twitter.com/esmereldes/status/1494736929291747334

Maybe it is naive of me to think of the horror movie as a vehicle to be scary! (I mean that entirely sincerely and without snark. It may be like watching Westerns and expecting to learn accurate history.)

MOTHMAN PROPHECIES scares the absolutely frittering be jeez us out of me.

https://twitter.com/ogiel23/status/1494737077581328391

To add to this—horror is deeply, deeply individual. Mothman Prophecies scared me for the same reason that grey aliens creep me the hell out, namely that I don’t understand their motives, I can’t communicate, I can’t talk or think my way out.

That’s one of the things that really gets to me. Slasher movies don’t, because while I may be horribly murdered, at least I understand what’s happening. It’s like being mauled by a bear. I don’t want it to happen, but I’m not worried there’s a bear in the closet.