askchapo

Characters being unconvincingly incompetent or foolish. Alien and Aliens are some of my favorite horror movies to this day because the characters behave in a consistent and believable fashion based on who they are and what they know. The space truckers aren't at all equipped to handle the situation but they apply their knowledge as best they can. The marines are totally absorbed in their self image as gung ho badasses and so wildly underestimate their enemy while making foolish but believable decisions.

Basically; I like when the characters behave competently and lose not because the writer's made them carry the idiot ball and behave foolishly, but because the threat overwhelmed their competence and resourcefulness. It makes the threat more legitimately frightening; these peopkle did their best and were still wiped out, so hwo could I expect to do better?

Extreme skepticism/refusal to believe what's happening.

I'm an absolutely annoying skeptic, never seen anything i would consider paranormal in the slightest.

People in horror movies will see something completely fucking bonkers and still be 20 movie minutes from believing the one character who says there's a problem. I can't think of any examples right now but especially when a child continually describes horrible things happening and the parents say "is just a series of bad dreams that are escalating and oddly coherent" like buddy at least spend a few nights in their bed to see what's going on

Using music or loud sounds to startle, it's the definition of cheap and hackery

Eternal Darkness broke the mold on sanity effects in console games. The only thing that's compared to that for me, since then, was haptic vest heartbeat effects in Half Life Alyx.

Anyway, least favorite trope is the racist black guy first to die trope. Followed by whomever had sex. Seems prudish.

The ritual of hear noise/turn around/see nothing/sigh of relief/turn back/die

I can easily imagine that it was once a masterstroke of tension-building, because otherwise every movie for 50 years wouldn't have copied it. But now it's so easy to see coming that it actually flatlines all tension and leaves me knowing exactly what will happen and just waiting for the formalities to occur.

Seemingly unkillable monster that has, for the entire film, proven itself to be unkillable gets "killed" only to murder the person who is standing ontop of the dead/not dead monster while looking back at the rest of the group.

Like, seriously, you know the thing isn't easy to kill. Why suddenly lose all sense of self preservation and paranoia about the monster's leathal state?

Honorable mention to the "unecessary sacrifice" where a character "bravely" stands in the way of the monster (who tears through them like tissue paper) instead of running away to give the rest of the characters something like .001 second more time to run away.

I just hate jump scares. Give me crushing inescapable dread instead

I don't expect perfect competence from a fictional person who is supposed to be a regular person in a a stressful situation, but when the incompetence is too extreme, especially in the form of obviously unnecessary risks that terror would probably work to dissuade you from, it's hard for me to handle.

In Guillermo del Toro's remake of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, the little girl is aware of the tiny monsters living in the house and repeatedly tells her father and stepmother about them, they disregard her words for most of the movie, but eventually realize that she's telling the truth and leave the dilapidated old mansion that her father is renovating in a panic.

They plan to go to a hotel for the night. Since the creatures can't survive in the daylight, they can safely return to gather their things the following day, But instead of having the entire group run to the car together and then just booking it, they tranquilize the little girl, forcing one of the parents to carry her at all times, and when they get close to the car, one of them decides that it's imperative to get her favorite blanket or pillow or stuffed animal. I can't remember. It's been a long time. Anyways, they run back into the house to get it. Why would you go back into the house. This ultimately leads to one of the parents getting killed by the creatures.

The most recent Alien movie dusted off the “handsome male love interest’s aggressive asshole best friend” archetype and it was as painful to watch as its ever been

In zombie related media they never call them "zombies". It's a super problematic genre to begin with, but it just feels so stupid to me. Like, how are you going to have a character ask "what are they?" or "what's wrong with them?".

Also, black dude who's clearly written as a token character, golly gee I wonder what's going to happen to him.

My biggest gripe of comically incompetent characters has already been well addressed elsewhere, so I'll go with my second least favorite trope: every single character being unlikable to the point where I have no investment in them.

There's this running undercurrent of horror films involving the worst people getting their comeuppance (which I'm cool with), but if every character in your movie is a serial abusive partner or a hyperaggressive asshole or the least charitable alpha cheerleader archetype or whatever I'm not going to feel any reason to care when they start getting offed by a ghost. It can be cathartic if there's one or two characters that fill this role, but if I can't make any connection with any of your characters then the film is just boring and painful to sit through.

Between these two tropes, there's not a lot of horror I actually do like.

Edit: One other thing that's not entirely on-topic, but relevant both to my general distaste for horror and the fact that someone mentioned Nope elsewhere: I think horror falls apart for me because it mostly only works if all your characters are useless. Nope is a fantastic film to me because the main characters are all competent, smart people who leverage their skills and strengths to overcome something much bigger and scarier than them, and outside of outright supernatural immortal slasher villains there's not a lot of horror antagonists that can't be felled that way, but it rarely happens. Nope is two hours of metaphorically watching neolithic humans take down a wooly mammoth because they bothered to use their brains, and it's awesome.

Sorry I don't follow the horror genre too closely. But it seems like, for many of their films, they hire really young actresses who have never had a major role (which honestly is fine by itself). And then revel in the stress of said really young women.

Maybe somebody who follows this more closely can correct me.

Do not care for needless "Lore"

Like, with Freddy Krueger, being a child murderer gruesomely killed in an act of vigilant violence was enough

Then we get the "Actually, he's the bastard son of a hundred madmen, that's why he was evil" and it's like, are you for real?

It makes horror less scary when you explain it so much!

People making obviously horrible decisions or not questioning blatantly strange things

That and it's opposite, very bizarre and strange things happening in front of someone and they are told by people in the know what's happening but they just hand waive it away after seeing a gate to hell open in front of them or something lol

All of them I can't think of a horror movie that hasn't just been either unintentional comedy or plain shite. Also its always gore and body horror like therr are other drivers for fear.

Games do horror a lot better but its still quite rare to get a truly good horror game.

A lot of horror misses how the mundane is scary. How normality is scary. Focus on some real existential fear based on real things not just some stupid monster or ghost. My favourite horror movie is possum which focuses on horror of having to live in England.

Mouthwashing not to spoil anything is a perfect example of finding your own personalised aspect of horror in a game with many layers to it. It does shoot itself in the foot leaning into some traditional horror game tropes that didn't really need to be there tho

I absolutely hate when a horror movie has some kind of cool premise and makes you wonder what’s going on the whole time and at the end of the movie it was “just in their head the whole time” or “they were crazy.” If you can’t write a proper ending for your movie don’t make the fucking movie. Also “they were dead the whole time” annoys me too. But not as much as the crazy cop out.

I hate horror fake outs. There's a small-budget folk horror called The Borderlands (2015), and the last ten minutes are scary, the last thirty seconds are the best, scariest thing I've ever seen in a horror movie. But the entire run time before that is just constant fake outs, so nothing actually has any tension because you expect it to be fake. There's also one early in Nope, which honestly is not a scary movie, but the best bit of horror that actually creeped me out is when kids are dressed as aliens being creepy in the barn. They're silhouetted in shadow, so you can't tell what they are, just that they are small humanoids with weird proportions, and that is way creepier than anything that actually happens in that movie.

Plots that rely heavily on character stupidity and that's almost every single horror movie

Slasher villains who are seemingly killed but miraculously escape or come back to life. I think it deflates the stakes, especially for movies where the climax is the defeat of the villain. Most slasher flicks are actually pretty good about this, which makes it particularly off-putting when I see it in a modern movie.

All of them horror is too scary for me it makes me feel bad and very sad and then I struggle to sleep :(

When the entire plot depends on the (usually affluent liberal) POV characters being incredibly passive, naive, and dedicated to politeness over their own well-being. recent example is Speak No Evil.

"The absent partner" where there is a written in partner but for some reason, they're never around when scary shit is happening.

They did it in The front room, eventhough I thought the guy could work at home. Imaginary, and for a dumb reason too "hey this is the first time you met my kids but I need to leave for like a month. Ok bye". I think the first Smile had it too but I cannot remember if I'm thinking of the right movie.

I don't like it when the monster has super powers so extreme that nobody could possible approach it without getting annihilated instantly, then some nobody easily walks up to the monster and kills it.