Is it because they keep me up at night, or cause me to constantly check for some insane knife wielding maniac behind my shower curtain? A little. I scare easily, and so naturally I tend to avoid horror movies. However, until recently I used to actually watch them on occasion if . The classic Psycho, Blair Witch, and Rose Red movies I felt were all composed rather well and scared me immensely. The key to each of these movies was to build the suspense and let the audience's own imaginations terrify them.

The way I see it, the classic horror film genre is dead. Writers don't try to create compelling plots for their films and often rely on shock tactics or gruesome scenes to draw in big crowds. While yes these movies will still scare me, they do so only by suddenly shaking the camera around as some terrifying monster leaps into the foreground of the scene. Horror movies today only scare people by surprising them with loud music and sudden movements of frightening apparitions.

I understand that many people enjoy the movies have been released in recent years. Obviously if no one went to see them then studios would stop producing them, but I can't see the appeal in watching people get dismembered, decapitated, or disemboweled. You may leave a theatre with frightening images burned into your mind, but were you actually scared by the movie or just disturbed by it? There is a difference.

To me a horror movie should frighten you into thinking certain terrifying situations could happen and leave you creeped out just enough so that you too will occasionally check for monsters in your shower or lurking in the back seat of your car. If a movie only makes you think of the ways in which people were killed then it has failed. Scary movies should scare, not disturb you. Have you ever watched a scene in a movie knowing exactly what was about to happen but the only reason you were scared was because of the anticipation of the event itself? This shows the lack of creativity and cleverness on the part of the writers. Film producers have all jumped on the bandwagons of other popular shock horror films and have continued to produce these kinds of films in record numbers over the past few years, leaving those of us who enjoy a good well developed plot wondering if we'll ever get to see another good horror movie.

Yes I scare easy, but I also don't find entertainment in watching people get maimed. I'd rather a movie left some of its horror to my imagination.

Learn more about this author, Christopher Davis.
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