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What is your least favourite horror trope? (hexbear.net)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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One of the things I hate is (usually amateur stuff on YouTube) in which the person is getting overly scared even when it makes no sense.

Like they'll over act and start hyperventilating at a leaf and saying shit like "Oh my god what is that?!?!?! WHAT IS THAT?!?!" at like...a thud in the distance.

YouTube and Ghost Hunting shows seem to be the worst offender.

Another trope I hate is a horror game one but it's somewhat related; I hate it when the game tells you when to be scared by having a "sanity" effect or by the player character gasp or scream or whatever. Worst is if they have some kind of heartbeat sound effect that plays when you're supposed to be spooked.

But yeah, if a character starts saying shit like "WhAt ThE FuCk WaS ThAt?!" then I just get more annoyed than scared.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm okay with "found footage" style horror, and last year watched a lot of it because of a friend who likes it a lot better than I do. The peeve I developed watching them was dependence on brief glimpses of something in the darkness. Yes, horror thrives on the unknown, but if I have to be looking at exactly the right corner of the screen for the right 250 milliseconds without any hints that I should be looking there, and I have to try to puzzle out what the characters are scared by (or rewind and go frame-by-frame), it's not going to produce the desired emotional effect.

More broadly, I don't think horror is really a genre. Horror is a feeling, or rather a broad set of feelings (fear, disgust, alienation, existential horror, dread, etc) that some works of art can provoke. The horror genre is when you take the tropes from those works and deploy them without much regard for the feelings they were used to convey.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

The peeve I developed watching them was dependence on brief glimpses of something in the darkness.

YES, absolutely. In fact, you can break new ground if you just set the camera on the darkness or whatever seems aberrant for an extended period of time.