My recent comments on Paranormal Activity has garnered a bit of response. I figured to help people understand why I didn’t like it I would explain my perspective on horror movies. I said a lot of things in reaction to another person’s review and didn’t bother to state the precedence of my horror experiences. What follows is just my thoughts on horror movies spilled out into the internet.

I started watching horror movies when I was thirteen. My friends and I went through the entire horror section of our local video store over the next few years. We devoured everything from the classics (Psycho) to the terrible (Frankenhooker) and came back for more every week. Even then, most of it didn’t scare me. I’ve always been very grounded in reality and I knew that Jason wasn’t real and when I went to sleep Freddy wasn’t going to get me. They were just movies. Except for Stephen King’s IT. That movie gave me nightmares. Well, the first half did at least.

I’ve been a horror junkie for half of my life. The ones that stick with me are special and I can’t really tell you why each. Everyone speaks me on some level. Sometimes its the premise, like turning into a monster in An American Werewolf in London. Sometimes its just one scene, taking a meathook into the spine in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The ones that really get me have a protagonist that I can feel sympathetic towards. The idea of being Jacob Singer in Jacob’s Ladder terrifies me. Watching the world end as John Trent in the movie In the Mouth of Madness would haunt my dreams. Being trapped and tormented like Kristen McKay and James Hoyt in The Strangers would be too much to take.

I honestly can’t think of many horror movies that I don’t like in some regard. Sure sometime colossal failures like Chupacabra Terror come around but those aren’t even good from a movie stand point. The hardest thing is that people don’t agree on what makes a good horror movie. I loved Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween which gets panned by horror fans constantly for “destroying the franchise”. Why did I like it? Because I wasn’t all caught up with the original Halloween. I loved both of them because they both did different things. Rob Zombie’s version gave us a terrifying look at the creation of Michael Myers while John Carpenter’s was more about the exploits of the character then what created him. Both movies touched on the same points but the horror came from different directions.

The ones I don’t like just disappoint me then anything else. I can see the potential in movies like Jeepers Creepers, The Ring, or Hostel. Hell, the first half of Jeepers Creepers was good but the lackluster climax of the story and the resulting final act ruined anything that movie originally did. Disappointment is almost worse than not liking a movie all together. Seeing the potential for success in something that falls short makes the fall even harder for me. There are very few horror films that I’ve seen that I couldn’t appreciate on some level. Very few that I couldn’t find a nugget of good idea in an otherwise shitty plot. I’d rather watch a dozen movies with no redeeming value then one that could have been so much better.

I can’t really put my finger on what makes a good horror movie to me. Hellraiser is my all time favorite and I could cite a dozen different reasons why. It’s not just one thing. It’s the entire package. If a movie has killer effects but everything else is mediocre then I’m not going to love it. Hellraiser did a lot of things that really sold me. First, the very concept behind it. A puzzle that opens a doorway to hell. I fucking love puzzles and one that compels you to solve it. Yeah, that’s something I could see myself getting sucked into. The scene where Frank is being rebuilt is so gruesome that it still makes me nauseous. The alien nature of the cenobites shows me a force I couldn’t escape because I’d never understand it. The lengths that Julia is willing to go to all just to rebuild Frank shows the depth of macabre that a normal person can descend to.  There is just so much about that movie that sells me, I can’t just say it’s X or Y.

For me, it’s never about being scared. I don’t get scared by movies. The last movie to really scare me was The Strangers but before that it was Stephen King’s IT. I saw that when I was fifteen, making it ten years in-between movies that truly scared me. I love horror not because I love to be frightened. I never expect a movie to scare me, outside of the jumps of unexpected reflex to a loud noise or sudden movement. Those I don’t consider scares, just reactions. I expect horror movies to entertain me. I watch them for the same reason anyone watches any movie. I just love horror because they tend to focus on the darker subjects that other movies don’t touch on. Horror taps into something visceral in all of us that a romantic buddy-cop comedic love-story just doesn’t. To me, horror is academic. It gives me something to think about.