Why Are Some Scary Movies Scarier Than Others?
Sunday, May 8th, 2011Scary movies are films in which the ultimate goal is to scare, shock, or induce feelings of revulsion from the theater’s audience. The items have been around since the early nineteenth century and occasionally overlap with similar genres such as thrillers. The word “horror” can be used to label all types of different films from ones about serial killers to ones about monsters. Although, what makes some scary movies scarier than others is sometimes difficult to determine.
The very first scary movies were silent films about demons and cursed locations. In 1910, the first film version of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein was released and was extremely successful in scaring audiences across Europe and North America. The majority of the early full length horror movies were made and produced in Germany, who had, early on, effectively cornered the market. By the early thirties, filmmakers in America jumped into the game with works such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde.
Different things will scare different types of people but the directors and producers of the early thirties and twenties discovered fairly quickly that suspense, sudden plot twists, eerie sound effects, and other factors were more effective at getting people frightened than scary monsters or bloody guts.
Perhaps the greatest contribution to the horror genre was made by the world famous writer and director, Alfred Hitchcock. Throughout his long and successful career, he pioneered numerous techniques and methods that are still used in suspense and psychological films today. Hitchcock is considered to be one of the best directors in the world with most of his fifty feature films being considered absolute classics.
Hitchcock’s most famous early movie, “Shadow of a Doubt” is also one of the original psychological thrillers and the man himself’s personal favorite. The film was so culturally relevant that it was selected to be included in a National Film Registry so its scary dialogue, well developed characters, and suspenseful camera angles could be viewed and studied by film fans for years to come.
His most famous films, such as “Vertigo”, “The Birds”, and “Strangers on a Train” were made in the fifties. All of them displayed Alfred’s natural gift for scaring people with smart plots, emotionally unstable movie characters, and well chosen eerie music.
Although monsters like Godzilla and King Kong are pretty scary, many of the industry’s most frightening thriller and horror films are ones in which the antagonist or ‘monster’ is never actually seen. “Rosemary’s Baby” did a great job with this by avoiding showing the demonic baby which is mentioned and alluded to throughout the movie. Other films such as “The Blair Witch Project” and “Jaws” use this technique as well. By not showing something, directors could ultimately force the audience to fear it even more.
Another popular and effective technique involves the placement and type of music that a scary movie uses. Sometimes a film’s soundtrack is the most powerful factor when it comes to frightening or shocking people. While they may not have realized it at the time, the audiences who watched “Jaws” were kept on the edge of their seats by the movie’s infamous score.
If you like watching scary movies then why not play scary games? There are many free scary games that can be played online like the scary maze game.
