Fallible wrote:Good post, I agree with it almost in its entirety. A couple of things I would add - I am perhaps into 'religious' horror a little bit more, but it's not my favourite approach. Does
Rosemary's Baby ualify as religious horror? I can take or leave
The Omen, but I think that's because it was scary to me at 12 and I watched it too much. As a result I've grown past it.
The Exorcist is a classic and I will watch it if it's on, but there are many more recent demon-y type films which I prefer, such as
The Last Exorcism,
The House of the Devil and
The Possession of Michael King (although people generally hate it
).
Okay. Maybe I haven't given the genre a fair chance. I still need to see
Rosemary's Baby and was reminded to in a recent blog post by Peter Hitchens, who gave it high praise. I'll try one of the possession films too.
Just to prattle on a bit more about Clive Barker: I like his perversion of religious tropes. Hellraiser is unsettling because of its sadomasochistic vision of Hell. I love the bit in the second where the doctor emerges mutilated from the puzzle box saying "and to think I hesitated."
The same attitude to torture is found in Candyman, one of my all time favourite films. It is criminally underrated. The opening overhead shot with all its stark right angles set to Philip Glass sets the tone for the whole film.
I have a soft spot for
The Fourth Kind (although people generally hate it
), and
Sinister is a film which I found genuinely disturbing, but don't bother with
Sinister II.
Secondly, it doesn't really matter to me too much whether a horror film contains anything supernatural or not. Psychological horror can be just as effective, providing it is relatively subtle. One film which I found very unsettling but contained nothing supernatural was
The Sacrament, which is a story based on the Jonestown massacre and another is
The Conspiracy.
Cheers for the references. It seems I have a fair few films to watch.
Also, I do enjoy a film more if it's shot in a low budget, slapdash way. I think this is why I like found footage so much. There's a lot of crap in that sub genre, but I also think it contains many of the most effectively unsettling films I've ever seen. I think it's because of the immediacy and realism which can be achieved by using these techniues.
They're much more intimate. There isn't even event music. The budget constraints of the genre force the creators to be a lot more subtle and indirect, and obtain scares with simple tricks like taking something ordinary and making it feel out of place. There were cool bits in the train museum film involving the signal bell that were pretty creepy. I'll take this over the CGI nonsense that concluded the Ouija sequel any day.
I genuinely loved Paranormal Activity. I was grinning excitedly through much of it at the cinema. The day/night cycle was just smart. You had this natural break between night incidents, after which you knew things would escalate and you'd see some new cool thing. It felt like a funfair ride, in a good way.
The best found footage ever though is
The Navidson Record.Here we go again. First, we discover recursion.
by 
I know I've got it on DVD somewhere.
