#there r a lot of horror movies way more unpredictable and scary and fucked up than that. find them

[horrorknife]

ok i have to say. as someone who really enjoyed barbarian, all the ppl who are like ITS SO FUCKED UUUPPP DUDE ITS SO CRAZY YOULL NEVER BELIEVE IT!!!!! need to watch more horror movies

[horror-movie-blog]

HMB: Top Ten Worst Horror Movie Clichés

Original Publishing Date: July 14th, 2017 

So for the first time in Thursday Horror Movie Night history I couldn't manage to watch a horror film in time for a review. I was too busy and lost track of time. But I have been saving something for this occasion, something I always wanted to talk about but never had the opportunity to. That being horror movie clichés. I did a list a long time ago, but it sucked, so this is a revived version, full off new clichés that eat away at my bones. So without further ado, here it is.      

The act of calling out horror movie clichés is in it of itself a cliché, and if more people start to pointing this out, the act of calling out clichés will become a cliché. Point I’m trying to make is no one likes clichés. Especially in horror; Horror is at its best when it presents something new. Humans fear the unknown, so when horror starts to getting too repetitive, we loose our sense of uncertainty, and it becomes predictable. And yet film makers still make these mistakes, most likely because they’re unaware that what they are doing is a cliché. So I hope this list inspires future film makers to think outside the box and create something fresh and original. I’ll even throw in some tips to make these clichés more digestible. Also I made it into a list for clickbait, I mean… Yeah, because of clickbait. Let’s begin.

Number 10: Jump Scares

Yeah-Yeah, let’s get the obvious one out of the way. Nobody likes jump scares, but believe it or not, jump scares can actually be a good thing. Don’t believe me? Check out the video by Now You See It that perfectly explains why jump scares can be effective. The problem with jump scares though is that film makers rely on it to scare you, when really its more like a catalyst. Like, take the kitchen scene from Insidious. Now, some would argue that the lack of music could have made the scene better, but its clear that the scariest thing in the scene is the shock of the monster’s presence, not the music. The music only serves to intensify the shock. Now, to me, that’s fine. It only becomes a problem when the music doesn’t intensify anything, and is just used as a means to scare, like sneaking up behind someone and screaming the n word, it’s the poor man’s way of scaring people. So, obviously, jump scares are a huge cliché that need to be improved on.

Number 9: Mandatory Sex Scenes

Now, this might sound weird, but hear me out. In almost every horror film I’ve seen, there’s a scene where the main couple have sex. Sometimes it’s just implied, other times it’s five minutes long and boring. This spot is reserved for the latter. Sex scenes feel like detours, you’re just sitting there watching soft core porn, hoping to God someone doesn’t walk past you. I won’t mind if there was a purpose, but there isn’t. Sometimes there’s a purpose, like to establish a sense of safety in an otherwise hostile movie, but for most of the time, it’s either a way for the director to be “artsy” by filming something so taboo as sex, or to win back the audience who only watched the movie for the boobies. I don’t know why this mainly happens in horror films, maybe due to the R rating allowing it to happen and, like I said, the theme of safety and hostility, but unless it’s does something along those lines, it just feels like waste of time.

Number 8: Scapegoat Characters

In horror, you have the opportunity to kill anyone you create. Anyone! Think about your worst enemy, you can write a story where he or she gets their head chopped off. How great is that? Actually, it’s not great. Talented writers can turn their worst enemy into one of their victims, but most who do this create an obvious scapegoat character. Take the film, Death of a Ghost Hunter, where a bible humping Christian is so rude and nasty, that it feels like everything that comes out of their mouth is followed by a “whoa, did you hear that”, kind of reaction. Basically what I’m trying to say is, you’re not fooling anyone. You can instantly tell a scapegoat character by the way the other characters treat them or how their opinions effect their actions throughout the film. But whatever, so we get an unlikable character, isn’t that the point? Well, no. Because in order for horror to be scary, we need to root for the victims, and condone the ones trying to kill them. You can make the murderers as sympathetic as you want, but at the end of the day, we do not want to see them kill people. If you are watching a horror film and you want someone too die, as much as it might feel satisfactory, it’s still a bad thing. You make the flawed, you can have their actions be their down falls, but please, remove any kind of emotional attachment you have to these characters and give them some sort of humanity.

Number 7: Ouija Boards

How many Ouija Board movies have we had in the last decade? Okay, let’s forget that Ouija boards are a huge scam and they don’t actually work, its fiction, our imagination makes them work, they are boring. I tolerate Ouija Boards when we’ve earned them, like the heroes have no other means to communicate with the dead. It’s not like if they whip it out, I suddenly groan, but you know the routine. The, I don’t know, clairvoyant ask vague questions like, “Are you here”, “What’s your name”, “How many sexual partners have you had” and the fucking triangle thing moves, and it’s always a close up shot, and the skeptic suddenly becomes shocked, and some dumbass says “Whose moving it” or something along those lines, and then the questions start getting more specific until they ask a question that pisses off the ghost, and the scene ends with either a possession or a poltergeist. If you’re going to put a Ouija Board in a movie, don’t copy this formula. Do something original with it. Maybe the characters don’t have an Ouija Board so instead they use Scrabble or Boggle, just have fun with it. Do something you’ve never seen an Ouija Board do, which is anything.

Number 6: Thinking that the Kid Did Something, When Really It Was the Monster

I know this sounds specific, but I’ve have seen way too many horror films that copies this type of story arch. Child’s Play, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Jack Frost, and countless Goosebumps books. It’s lame. We know what’s going to happen. Everyone’s going to think the kid or the main character is crazy, someone’s going to bring up a psychologist, and by the end of the movie the main skeptic will be proven wrong, and they will need to fight the supernatural force. What bothers me about this, is that all you have to do to make this plot original and engaging is simply add ambiguity to the supernatural force. Have us, the audience, question whether or not the child or character is insane, not the film characters. Have us go on the mind roller coaster along with the character, not riding side lines looking at it. That’s boring. And you can have a lot of fun figuring out what’s going on. Add subtle clues that you wouldn’t pick up on until you realize what you’re dealing with. That will create more tension, suspense, and mystery to the story. But no, keep telling yourself no one has ever did this type of story before and make Chucky 12: Chucky Files For Divorce or something.

Number 5: Ghosts Motivation Not Lining Up With Actions

Now this is more of a plot problem then a cliché, but so many movies do this that it’s become a cliché. So here’s the deal with ghosts, they can either lack a motivation and just be the supernatural equivalent of a hurricane, or they can have motivation, and everything they do is dictated by that motivation. For example, if the ghost wants you to get the Hell out of his house, they will try to do a butt ton of scary shit to chase you out. Now, if the ghost’s motivation was, say, get revenge on the descendants of an island community for what their ancestors did, how exactly does setting up a diner table on a beach line up with that? Short answer, it doesn’t. Yes, ghosts can be random and unpredictable, but when it comes to motivation lining up with action, they do not get a free pass. Make sure the spooky stuff the ghosts do isn’t just for the sake of being spooky, unless the intent is to be spooky. Don’t have them make a chicken sandwich and nail it to a sofa and then claim they were really after the family’s youngest daughter. It will only confuse the audience, like, what the fuck was with the chicken sandwich? You know?

Number Four: Wandering the House Looking for the Bump in the Night

So you’re making a horror film when, oh no, you forgot to actually put horror stuff in it and you’re twenty minutes into the film! What do you do? I know! Let’s have a scene where the main character hears a bump in the night, and they go to investigate. They wander their house for what feels like five minutes looking for whatever made the noise. Was it a ghost? Was it an alien? Or was it nothing? Isn’t this suspenseful? No one has ever done this before! Actually, they have. Tons have. And it’s just as effective at scaring people as a raccoon hiding in your garage, meaning sometimes. When done right it could work, but you know the magic word by now, the key is originality. The whole deal of wandering the house looking for whatever made the noise is just a detour, a reminder to the audience that they are watching a horror film, and it never ends with the person realizing there’s a ghoul in the house, often it leads to nothing or we, the audience, see a shadow lurking behind the character but they disappear into the shadows. And this is followed by ten to twenty minutes of more non-horror stuff. It’s a total waste of time. Speaking of total wastes of time…

Number Three: The Dream Sequence

Just like what I described previously, but instead of the person going back to bed after finding nothing, something happens, and it gets intense, and shit starts to happen, and right when you think the character might loose something precious to them, they wake up. It was a dream. It didn’t happen. These kinds of scenes are made for the same reason as the last one, an excuse and a detour. But what makes this worse is that you can instantly tell when you are watching a dream sequence, solely based off your knowledge of film. Like in the dream, the supposed monster could kill an important character, but you know how movies work, important characters don’t get killed off until the third act, so you know that what you are seeing isn’t happening. Then you are just waiting for the obvious wake up scene. The only movie I could think of that did this scene differently was Get Out, which I can’t say what exactly they did right without spoiling the movie, but it was very effective. So if you’re going to do a dream sequence, make sure it serves a purpose other than, we need to put a scary scene in here because we’ve got ten minutes without something scary happening.

Number Two: The Drawing/Imaginary Friend

Even in movies I respect like the Conjuring, they are guilty to one of the most over used tropes in horror. The child has an imaginary friend, and they draw crayon drawings of the friend. The mother or the father then walks over and ask “what are you drawing”, and the child answers vaguely, “Jodie. Or Dave. Or stupid, simple name. Then the child will make a comment like, “only I can see them” or “They live in the walls” or something vague like that. Then the parents starts to notice that these arn’t innocent crayon drawings at all… These drawings are actually spooky! With spooky images like hangings, or blood, or shadow people! And suddenly the parent realizes that, perhaps, the house is… Hu-Hu-Hu Haunted! Insidious. The Ring. The Conjuring. Amityville Horror. Wicked Little Things. The Others. Oh God, the fucking Babadook. How has no one caught on about this? Why do people keep doing this? They know it’s done before, and yet, they do it word to word. God, there is no excuse for this one. Just don’t do it.

Number One: Zombies There was once a time the zombie was a menacing creature. It not only captured our fears of the apocalypse, but it used the paranoia of the Cold War nuclear fall out to transform the originally voodoo centric creatures into something brand new. And since that day, it became one of the scariest creatures ever thought up. But then Hollywood took notice, and started to pass produce zombie films, to a point where zombies are now underwelming. Zombie Beavers, Zombie Zoo, Zombie romance, Zombie comedies. There is no more land for the zombie to trek, almost any story you can do with a zombie has been done. There's nothing left to tell. But does that stop these movies from being made? No. Because they are profitable, and no matter how cliché, generic or bad it is, people will see a zombie movie. And because of that, I award it my number one spot. So those are my top ten horror movie clichés. That's it. Bye.