Do You Like Scary Movies?
Film-makers seem interested in fast money and gruesome effects nowadays to provide a "scary" movie. What happened to actual tension and skill? Maybe some interesting techniques in story telling or suspense building? I don't understand why so many movies, supposed to be tense or frightening, rely solely on the visuals of gore and guts and less on tension. The only tension involved is the inevitable, hackneyed pursuit and picking-off of victims and which character is going to bite it in the most unusually atrocious way .
Is it all down to the need for instant gratification? Do young people nowadays have such low concentration spans that they literally can't sit still long enough to wait for a tension to build? Or maybe they're just so used to violence in all its forms from the Internet and video games and film makers have to go one step further to even interest them in a movie.
The best scary movies are ones where nothing much actually happens involving the spilling of people's innards or over-the-top psychotic monsters with a terrific imagination for unconventional weapons. One of my favorite scary movies - Stephen Spielberg's, 1970 made for TV movie, "Duel" - doesn't even have more than a few lines of dialogue, it's just 90 minutes of a guy driving through the desert being pursued by an inexplicably pissed-off truck driver you never get to see, yet it's a chilling, piece of work where the truck and the scenery provide all the dread necessary. Of course, it wouldn't satisfy today's sixteen year olds as I think the only blood in that movie involved Dennis Weaver bumping his head off the dashboard during an errant emergency stop.
I love scary movies, there just aren't enough of them around that aren't just an excuse to show the most grotesquely dreamed-up carnage ever inflicted upon human beings at the hands of emotionless psychopaths. Yawn. Where is the fear people?