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by VinegarBob
Sat Oct 01, 2016 11:43 pm
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: What's a horror movie?
Replies: 6
Views: 2129

What's a horror movie?

I was thinking about this in light of Brickwall's Macabre Month of Horror idea - a good idea, even though I'm not generally much of a fan of horror. Or am I? It got me to thinking 'what's a horror movie anyway'? To me when I think of horror movies I think of things involving some sort of supernatural element like ghosts or unexplained events. Films like Alejandro Amenábar's The Others, Jack Clayton's The Innocents, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead or George Romero's zombie movies. Then I thought of Texas Chainsaw Massacre which I would certainly consider to be a horror movie, but that has no supernatural elements. Those dudes in the house are just serial killers, so are all movies featuring serial killers horror movies? What about The Snowton Murders, for example? Or Angst - that's pretty fucked up, but is it a horror movie?

When I use the search function here and click the 'horror' genre filter it throws up stuff like Jaws and Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer - films that I wouldn't have categorised as horror if someone had asked me to categorise them.

What do you think of when someone says 'horror movie'? The following are some movies that showed up in my rankings when I filtered it to horror; which would you categorise as horror?

Alien
Aliens
Altered States
Jaws
Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer
The Invisible Man
Mad Max
Natural Born Killers
Only God Forgives
Se7en
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me


Is a horror movie simply a movie in which something horrific happens? Murder and rape are pretty horrific, but even though a movie like Hard Boiled features dozens of murders, and Irreversible is centred around a really horrific rape I don't think anyone would call either of them horror movies. Something that's creepy? Who's to say what's creepy?*

Curioser and curioser.....

*(Obviously the correct answer to this whole thread is 'who cares', but where's the fun in that?)