The elements of a good horror movie
I'm not doing much for Halloween this year. My partner is working the late shift, the weather isn't so great and the novelty wears off as one gets older. My partner and I decided to watch a couple of horror films last night instead: Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark, and The Shining. Both are quite good, the first one surprisingly so.
Pretty much all the modern 'horror' films, I find, are lame to the point of being unimaginitive and formulaic, and 90% of them made over the last ~20 years are rehashes of the same thing: A group of entirely generic affluent people run around a haunted house, screaming every thirty seconds whenever something or other happens. A female from said group - and we can always predict which from the beginning - is the one who overcomes the villain and survives.
Also, I think CGI, or the over-use of it, has ruined movies in general. For all the advances in this technology, we can still differentiate between the physical and the computer-generated, so a CGI monster or villain just isn't convincing. One example that comes to mind is the T800 skeleton off The Terminator. In the first Terminator film, made back in 1984, the T800 skeleton was quite an intimidating physical and mechanical thing that reacted to being struck by physical weapons and made sounds when it made contact with things. The fact it was physical, coupled with the way that scene was shot, made it so believable. In the latest rehashes of the Terminator, we instead get a CGI version of the T800 skeleton, which can, apparently, defy gravity, somehow weigh about 1,000 tons and can effortlessly punch through walls. It may as well be a cartoon character.
Good horror films play on our primordial fears in an intelligent way, and Alien uses this instead of suspense and shock. The alien is a predator, a creature that's perfectly adapted to harsh environments - a sort of hybrid between human and scorpion - and appears to be more intelligent than humans. There are several references in the film to humans being penetrated by something non-human, whether it's a giant spider-like thing, with human-like skin, forcing eggs down a guy's throat, or an android trying to regurgitate lubricant into someone's mouth.
I've also observed that some of the best horror movies present an incongruence between the villain and everything else. By that, I mean horror works when the villain or entity is completely out of place in the main setting of the movie. Basically the opposite of our generic jumpy airheads wandering the generic haunted house, where a ghost is the first thing everyone expects. Think more along the lines of a group of relatable working-class guys doing maintainance work in an old building, not believing in ghosts, and not thinking anything of unexplained noises, until they encounter something they can't make sense of.
There was one particular horror film - the name of which I can't recall - that did this skillfuly. It was about a group of people staying at a medical centre for some drug trial. In that group, there was a journalist, a typical office worker, a guy on JSA, a student and a few other Average Joes. They were all so relatable. It was this choice of characters that made the film such a damn good horror.
The original Wicker Man did this well. It's set on an island village, where the community lived ostensibly prosaic lives, and gave mundane explanations for everything the main character was uncomfortable with. This made for true horror and a pretty good plot twist near the end.
There was a scene in 2020: Odyssey Two that made me jump the first time I saw it: The central character, Floyd, is sitting in a deserted space ship, because he wants some quiet time with his thoughts. There is no suspense or build-up in that scene, and the viewer expects the peace to be disturbed by one of the other scientists or engineers. The last thing we'd expect to see is the ghost of Dave Bowman appear behind Floyd.