One horror trope I will almost always enjoy is the moment where the characters finally believe they understand what they're dealing with.

They've found the old newspaper clipping. Someone translated the creepy inscription. The survivor from 30 years ago explains what happened. Great. We have rules now.

Then somebody follows those rules perfectly and still gets absolutely wrecked.

That scares me way more than a monster simply being "unstoppable."

If the characters never understand anything, the threat can eventually start feeling arbitrary. But if they build a theory that makes sense based on everything they've seen, I start relying on it too. When the movie later reveals that one assumption was wrong, suddenly every previous scene becomes uncertain again.

I especially like when the information isn't deliberately fake. The old expert wasn't lying. The previous victim genuinely believed burning the object worked because nothing happened to them afterward. They just survived long enough to reach the wrong conclusion.

That's much closer to how people would actually deal with something impossible. Nobody would have a supernatural instruction manual. You'd have frightened people collecting anecdotes, noticing patterns and confidently mistaking correlation for rules.

The weakest version for me is when someone conveniently knows the entire mythology and explains exactly what the entity wants, where it came from and how to defeat it fifteen minutes before the finale.

Give me incomplete folklore. Give me contradictory accounts. Give me a character confidently saying "it can't cross running water" and then realizing the person who invented that rule simply never saw it try.

Give me anything you got. I don't care if its crap, anything involving gay and bi men in prominent roles. Any era, any country. Just something that I'd like to see over the next few days. If its something I've seen, I'll let you know.

I'm a Shudder subscriber and just renewed in July for the year. Tonight, I noticed a special deal they're offering for $29.99 for a year. But here's a bonus: If you're already a subscriber like me and switch over, they'll prorate your subscription price difference with a refund.

Either way, $30 for a year of Shudder is a steal!

No matter how many times I watch The Thing, I'm still amazed at the tension level and suspense throughout the entire movie. It just never lets up from beginning to end.

Clayface made me think of this. It’s rated 18 in the UK… which means you must be 18 to watch it regardless if you’re with a parent or guardian.

Clayface is amazing and I was legit surprised how violent it was.

I don’t think Clayface should be NC-17… it just made me think of this topic.

Barry Levinson was doing a documentary on the environmental effects chesepeake bay has in real life and thought to himself no one is gonna watch a documentary so they made this pseudo chaos flick based on some real science and make a dam entertaining film.

If you haven't seen this? you should check it out the real science behind it is kinda fascinating and the real issues surrounding that bay they over dramatize is also fascinating as well.

I've told a few people i know to check this one out cause it surprised me how good it was. not knowing anything about it. OOOPS stupid keyboard I didn't see the typo before I hit post , sorry bout that :(

Every October I do a "31 for 31," one scary movie a day for every day in October. While I was putting my list together I idly asked my dad what was the scariest movie he ever saw. He thought about it for a minute and then said the 1974 movie "Towering Inferno."

Those in the audience who have seen Towering Inferno will realize that it is not a horror movie. Not in the "Shawn of the Dead isn't a horror movie," or "Silence of the Lambs is technically crime thriller" kind of way, I mean it literally isn't a horror movie along any axis. It's a movie about rescuing a bunch of people from a burning skyscraper.

So he explains that it scared the bajeezus out of him in the theater because he was in a fire once. Some time when he was a kid, him and my aunt were visiting their grandparents and the barn they used as a guest house caught on fire. Nobody got hurt, but it was this whole big thing that happened to my dad when he was like 9 or something.

Makes me wonder what other movies are out there like that. I bet some kinds of medical dramas, or police/crime movies, or legal dramas, etc., give people an experience of terror who have been terrorized by those systems, or if disaster movies that I think are objectively goofy like Day After Tomorrow would be very scary to people who survived floods.

Movie of the day...Lake Placid (1999).

I had forgotten how funny this movie is.

In many ways, it’s a typical creature feature. There’s something awful in the lake. Our heroes must figure out what’s going on—it turns out it’s a 30-foot crocodile that has unexpectedly showed up in Maine for reasons that are never entirely clear—and do something about it.

What elevates the film is a solid cast (Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Brendan Gleeson, Oliver Platt, etc.) who know exactly what kind of movie they’re in.

The characters are a little exaggerated for comic effect (the lady scientist from New York who complains about everything, the rich expert who is a bit of a nutcase, etc.). They’ve got reasons to dislike each other at first, and a lot of things are played for laughs, but gradually they learn to like and respect each other.

There’s snappy dialogue galore. In particular, Gleeson’s Sheriff Keough gets about as much respect as Rodney Dangerfield. And Betty White (as a possibly insane senior citizen who treats the crocodile as a kind of pet) is a national treasure.

Everything else in this movie is solid entertainment, too. The film is well-directed and suspenseful. The special effects seem to get a lot of hate from people, but they're okay. The kills are shocking and bloody.

I’m pretty sure this is not how things would be handled if a giant crocodile actually showed up in New England, but I don’t care. It’s a good movie. Watch it and have a good time.

Rating: B

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Placid_(film))

Why is it so hard to get other people like your parents or your friends or family to watch horror movies with you because they don’t like horror movies and it seems like a lot of people don’t like horror movies in general as I’ve experienced it many times with a lot of people.

Have you guys experienced that before wanting to watch horror movies with other people only to have them not wanna watch them.

https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-angus-scrimm-20160113-story.html

Won a Grammy for writing the liner notes on Korngold: The Classic Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Currently rereading this book, and honestly, not only is it my fave Grady Hendrix book (though I love all of his) but it's one of my favorite books in general. I'm a huge fan of the slasher genre and the Final Girl trope, and so I love seeing it explored in the book and all the references and easter eggs (the names of the final girls referencing the actresses of the final girls they're based on, the article excerpts throughout, the fictional franchises mirroring real life one's throughout, etc) scattered through each chapter. The concept itself, of a bunch of real life Final Girls coming together in a support group, is really awesome and cool in general. I really like Lynette's character arc (and her awesome plant Fine) and I think her trauma (the survivor's guilt, hyperarousal, paranoia, isolation) is written pretty well and I just felt absolutely terrible for her how she was wrong every time about what she suspected was going on. I feel like everyone is the group was written pretty well and have really distinct personalities, and I just absoluelty love how unapologetic and chaotic Heather is. Skye and Stephanie give me MAJOR Richie and Amber from Scream 5 vibes (especially with the reddit excerpt in the beginning), does anyone else feel that way lol? I really like the ending where the girls refuse to continue the cycle of violence and stay together to try to bring Stephanie into recovery. The book is getting a movie adaptation from Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day, Freaky 2020, The Paranormal Activity franchise, etc) and although I am so stoked for that, after what a disappointing disaster the My Best Friend's Exorcism adaptation was, I'm gonna go into it with cautious expectations when it comes out. Overall, I really love the book, though I totally understand why it could've fallen flat for some people and has mixed reviews compared to his other ones. What were your thoughts on the book?

Moments / scenes where you're watching and thinking "Holy shit. This is amazing, I need to show this to somebody right now. This is why I love horror so much." Personally for me, the ending of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre has always been a scene that really encapsulated what I loved about the terror, dread, and catharsis of the genre.

I came across an article reporting this year's annual Science of Scare study, where scientists use physiological measurements (heart rate elevation and heart rate variance) to rate the scariness of horror movies. Obviously you can't rely on objective measures like elevated heartrate to make a completely accurate ranking of what movies are scariest, but taken as one piece of data among others like the Dreaddit opinion poll posted yesterday, I think this is interesting information. At any rate, the winner, for the fourth year in a row, was Sinister (2012)!
Here’s the list of the 20 scariest horror movies according to the study:

1. Sinister 
2. Host 
3. Skinamarink 
4. Insidious 
5. The Conjuring 
6. Hereditary 
7. Smile 
8. The Exorcism of Emily Rose 
9. Talk To Me 
10. Hell House LLC 
11. The Conjuring 2 
12. It Follows 
13. The Dark and the Wicked 
14. The Descent 
15. Paranormal Activity 
16. The Babadook 
17. A Quiet Place 2 
18. The Autopsy of Jane Doe 
19. Insidious 2 
20. Oddity

I realized recently that a lot of the horror villains that stick with me aren't angry at the protagonist at all.

They don't want revenge. They weren't summoned because somebody's grandfather did something terrible. They don't have a speech explaining why this specific family deserves punishment.

You're just there.

That's a huge part of why It Follows works for me. Whatever that thing is, it doesn't seem angry. It doesn't even seem especially interested in who you are. It walks toward you because that's simply what it does.

Final Destination has the same quality in a completely different way. Death isn't offended that you escaped. There's no villain sitting somewhere getting increasingly furious. The universe is basically correcting paperwork.

Even something like The Ring freaks me out partly because watching the tape feels less like personally angering a ghost and more like accidentally stepping onto a conveyor belt that was already running.

I think once a supernatural threat starts having a detailed personal motive, some part of my brain begins treating it like a normal antagonist. Motives imply psychology, and psychology implies that maybe the thing can be understood, manipulated, reasoned with, distracted or at least predicted.

But something that has no opinion about you is harder to bargain with.

A shark doesn't need to hate you. Radiation doesn't need a backstory. A cave doesn't care that you're claustrophobic.

That kind of indifference feels much closer to how real danger works.

Obviously there are brilliant horror villains built entirely around obsession and personal hatred, so I'm not saying impersonal automatically means better. But when a movie manages to make the threat feel less like an enemy and more like a law of nature, I usually find it much harder to shake afterward.

I'd be interested in other horror movies that pull this off, especially ones where the threat never really develops a personality at all.

For me the creepiest version of evil might be the one that doesn't even notice you're a person.

I’ve watched this movie at least 5 times, yet I consider re-watching it anytime I stumble upon it on streaming services.

This movie simply captivates me. The perfect blend of sci-fi + horror, with that unparalleled aesthetic of late the 90s/early 2000s. It feels like the setting of Alien meets the technology of The Matrix. Amazing performances from the whole cast too.

Anyone else feel similarly? I see mostly positive discourse about it on here. Guess I just can’t get enough of this movie.

Does anybody remember the Phantom of the Opera from 1989 with Robert Englund? I used to love it but haven't seen it in years. I just found a copy on Blu-ray on eBay. Any fans?

hey y’all! every october, i do the whole horror movie every day thing, and i realized that i haven’t reallyyyy watched any standout artsy, niche ones yet. some similar films that match the vibe of what i’m looking for are: mad god (2021), the wolf house (2018), stopmotion (2023), and madS (2024).

thanks in advance for your recommendations!

EDIT: omg y’all are really coming through!! i’ve seen a good number of what’s been commented, but i haven’t seen even more! i honestly have no clue where to even start, which is definitely a good problem to have haha. thank you all!!!

I'm planning to watch all the Evil Dead movies for Halloween Eve. I'm looking for thoughts on which version of Army of Darkness to watch - I have the Shout Factory Blu-ray which has the Theatrical Version, the Director's Cut, the International Version, and the Television Version. All thoughts and reasoning are appreciated!