Horror Movies

Post Reply New Topic

I have loved horror movies since I was a young girl, and never found them truly frightening, I suppose because the reality at home was somehow worse. I also adore Ghost Stories, have been collecting books of ghost stories since my teenage years and it is still my favourite reading matter. Good ghost story movies are scarce though, I still find "The Haunting of Hill House" (from a book by Shirley Jackson), the black-and-white version from the fifties (or sixties? my memory fails me here) the best ghost story movie, because it is subtle yet creepy.

Yeah I'm the same horror films don't scare me I hate it when they make you jump with the soundtrack or some big bang it's just a cheap trick IMO

The two best things about the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre are it leaves your imagination to do a lot of the work by not showing much gore and the unpredictable atmosphere keeps you on edge, an excellent movie IMO.

I like horror novels and stories better than horror movies, but that's just because I like novels and stories better than movies anyway. A good horror story really makes you think; the hidden terrors of the mundane things around us combined with huge cosmic or psychological terrors is a formula that makes people wonder about what lurks in the shadows of their yard or their mind.

Reading horror is a guard against hubris if one takes it seriously; forces beyond my control could still destroy me, whether I think I'm right about everything or not. It's good to remind yourself of that once in a while.

My favorite type of HF is the Cosmic subgenre. Supernatural things interest me because of their allegorical potential, and I have yet to find anything as supernatural yet creepily plausible as Lovecraftian ("Cosmic") horror. Murder stories never excited me as much, but they are amazing psychological journeys if the author gets the characterization right (Crime and Punishment, The Stranger, The Telltale Heart, Memoirs of a Pornographer's Shroud). Sexual horror I find nauseating. I'm a little neurotic in the classic sense, so it can hit too close to home.

So I'm kind of a fan. Why? I think it has something to do with my aspie chilliness and tendency not to be shocked. I may be like those undersensitive autistic kids who stick themselves with pins to get stimulation: I enjoy shocking myself and messing with my sensibilities.