Horror Business 1! 2! 3!

Ok as I said like 2 weeks ago I'm going to start giving ideas as to how I would fix modern day horror movies. Just for the sake of this discussion we are going to go with the last 30 years of movies. Obviously the Hitchcock movies have a lot to teach us but those have been discussed at nausea. So 30 year cap. Starting. Now!

1 Suspense!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Actual suspense!!!! Not the Hollywood version of this in the 21st century. The void of happening. The consequence-free filler. Not having anything happen. Characters pressing pause on themselves and the story line is not suspense. Fuck modern horror movies for even selling that. You don't want the audience sitting around going "holy shit do something" when the whole point of a movie is to take the audience with you on a magic journey of wonderment. When you let a movie kind of just stop and sit there in the absence of anything of anything you've stopped watching a movie and you are now just watching flashing lights that oddly correspond to make images on a wall. To really address suspense you have to go to The Thing.


In The Thing you were hoping shit would stop happening. I actually wished for a quick fix and end the movie an hour sooner than needed. People would get infected spaceship unearthed and you're starting to beg for them to get on a helicopter and drop a nuke. I remember distinctly not even 30 minutes into the movie after already seeing it 3 times hoping they'd just quarantine the parasite successfully host seeker thing and go about maintaining the base for the remaining hour just to avoid my mind having to deal with the stimulation of my terror clit. A horror movie succeeds when you sit there wishing you rented a documentary about a dull military base in the south pole. Its like watching Dune and thinking, I hope there's enough spice for everyone to be happy. The very heat of conflict itself is enough to turn your stomach.

A perfect example of failure to build suspense was when I saw Jason in Space I got mad the title and opening credits took so long because that could've been more Jason killing stuff time. Jason in Space is an awful example of modern horror movies but when the first 20 minutes of a movie seem like a chore in order to get to the conflict you've achieved what I have deemed the Salt wormhole where you've time traveled to the future and you're bullshit the movie hasn't caught up to you.
especially when jason is swinging a girl in a sleeping bag into a tree


The Thing and the original Halloween did an exceptional job of building suspense and they didn't do it in the modern horror sense of just having nothing happen. Like in Final destination having a screw loosen itself slowly when things like that happen you're just building anticipation while you quietly hope someone will die then you realize "holy shit I'm watching a movie where literally nothing is happening." Other than me wanting characters that strive to survive through a horrible ordeal (the point of the movie) to fail and to die.