askchapo

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.

Spoliers for Haute Tension below. Light spoilers maybe for Cabin in the Woods, Candyman, and Terrifier

I think for like classic slashers, probably the racist or sexist trope where the PoC, promiscuous girl, or "dumb blond" dies first. Like, I get that the whole cast is just murder fodder but it was always rare to see the one of the black guys or "bimbos" be the final girl or boy. It was usually the unlikely "mousy girl" though. A caveat would be like in Cabin in the Woods where the stoner kid survives until the end.

But other than that, I'm a really big horror movie fan and sort of learned to lean into the tropes you see often. To me, they are just story devices to help set the scene.

My meta trope(if you will) issues are when fans whine that a horror movie is "too political" like with the Candyman sequel/soft reboot by Jordan Peele. I saw a lot of people bitching that is was gonna be all "white people bad" and I was like, y'all watched the original right? Same complaints about his remake of People Under the Stairs, and I guess him in general. I love Peele because he puts bigotry in your face though. If you are having a hard time with it, maybe look into a mirror(lol Candyman).

Another is when people try to find deeper meaning in plot shallow movies or completely miss the deeper meaning of movies they view at surface level. Two examples that always come up: Terrifier is just suposed to be a silly slasher that hearkens back to the 80s but I saw a lot of people complain that is didn't have a deeper meaning they could find(lore not withstanding). It's literally just a classic horror and a practical effects tech demo. Shut your brain off and go for the ride. The second is the plot twist in Haute Tension. It seems people really feel like they were cheated when the unreliable narrator plot twist is revealed. Or they flat out don't even catch it. The short haired girl is the one telling the story the ENTIRE FUCKING TIME and she had like Dissociative Identity Disorder or some other personality disorder. It's the same trope that is in Fight Club and Mr. Robot but people don't seem to feel cheated when they watch those.

I love everything from B-budget to "high art" horror so I probably disagree with some takes here. I also don't like a lot of classics as much as others. I think The Shining is boring and although I like The Thing, I hate how much hype it gets. Maybe it's just the echo chamber that is reddit but goddamn they have a hard-on for that film.

Shakycam. It completely destroys immersion for me, my brain just goes, "HEY DUMBASS THIS IS A MOVIE! IT'S ALL FAKE! You're in a theater with friends or at home on a couch, you're perfectly safe and there's nothing to be afraid of." Really anything that tries too hard to convince me that it's real.

Listen, movie, let me give it to you straight. I'm here to suspend my disbelief and play pretend so that I can get spooked for fun. But here you are being like, "No, suspending disbelief isn't good enough, you need to actually believe," and that is a) not your job, and b) going to trigger a response from my mental immune system and bring out my most critical and skeptical brain functions, which is the exact opposite of the headspace you want me to be in if I'm supposed to enjoy a horror movie. I need to be able to trust the movie enough to let my guard down.

• Animals can sense evilness. Cats, dogs, etc.
• Attics. If an attic appears in a horror movie - it hides secrets decades old best left hidden. But there are also clues.
• Mirrors. Mirrors are a portal to the "other side".

That's all I can think of right now. I'm sure ~10 hours from now I'll say to myself "How could I forget X, Y, and Z!"

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.

Fakeout jumpscares - For example, in The Woman in Black, there's this scene where the protagonist's stumbling 'round this mansion at night and the tension violin stuff is going full force like something spooky is about to happen and... then he turns on a tap and it makes a startlingly loud noise. That was it, that's the scare.

(Dis)honorable mentions go to: black characters always dying first, female victims of slashers being used for titillation, ghost movies where 90% of the film is just empty tension (fuck you Paranormal Activity), scene where the monster's whole deal is explained in unnecessary detail, exorcists/spirit mediums being portrayed as heroes and not the exploitative parasites of human misery they are in real life.

I definitely picked this up from YMS but "scares" that are directed towards the audience and not anything in the actual medium.