I'd wonder what'll happen if Hollywood remade EVERY horror movie. What will happen after that?

Quoted from I_M I'd wonder what'll happen if Hollywood remade EVERY horror movie. What will happen after that?

You'd hear a lot of producers asking you, "Would you like fries with that?"


Phil

Quoted from IceRose What makes a horrors good or bad and give examples. .

First of all, you need characters that the viewers care about, which mean character development.  Too many times, I've seen a horror movie where the killer kills a two dimensional character and I sit there and ask, "So?"

Better to kill two characters that the audience would care about than to kill ten that no one cares about.

Second of all, no matter how evil the killer is, give him/her a likeable trait.  Something that people can relate to.  If you think about it, you probably liked Hannibal Lector.  Why?  Because he was so damn classy....



Phil

Quoted from IceRose What makes a horrors good or bad and give examples.

A horror should be at its basest, a suspense thriller. There should be something in it beyond the control of one of the characters and something that attacks us and plays with our basest fears.

A Nightmare on Elm Street -- A killer can get you while you sleep in your dreams. He controls the dreams and can do anything he wants to. You are a part of his world just by falling asleep. The first film was a thriller in that the characters had to discover the killer's identity little by little by gaining information until who he was is known, but how to defeat him is not.

The Ring -- A video can kill you. This created a short term fear of unmarked videos because we all have at least one of these if we have a VCR. "What's on this one?," we say. Well, this one kills you in a week. This one had the added bonus of the monster crawling out of the TV -- talk about every horror fan's nightmare.

Halloween -- someone is after me and I don't know why. And neither does the audience. This was extremely scary because it felt so random. In most horror films, the characters do something to be on "the list" and we know what it is. In this one, we don't, and in fact, don't find this out until the sequel or TV version. In the original cut, he is the boogeyman who comes out on Halloween to kill you. Anyone up for trick or treating?

The Grudge -- A curse on a house can kill you anytime and anywhere if you cross the house's threshhold. This one raises the question of whether anything happened in my house and do I want to explore its darkest corners? What made this one more over the top freaky is that once you are cursed, the curse can get no matter where you go; you don't need to return to the house to die. Since it's supernatural, the imagery in this one was especially scary.

Scream -- This one twisted the mold a bit. We had the killer and didn't know why it was happening. We get rules of movies, but is the killer following them? We finally get a vicious backstory that goes back beyond the beginning of the movie and fills in a lot of character. This one toys with the audience and forces us to wonder if there is anything out there or not. Plays the suspense angle very well.

So what we get from these is that there is something that attacks, it has a reason to do so, and does it in such a way as to frighten us.

Action chase sequences are decent additions to the basic horror film, but they need a reason to exist, and not just there to take up some screentime. These sequences, however, are a staple of the slasher sub-genre and simply required to be in those types of films. What usually occurs in these chases is that the main character has a chance to get away and hide from the killer. The killer gets to toy with his victim a little before the inevitable gory death.

In the above examples, the ones without long chases are more horrific (on average) than those with. Here's an example of a stock slasher that doesn't thrill very well.

House of Wax -- Killers are brothers wanting victims for their wax museum town. Scares? Not really. Characters? Asinine, and wandering into places they shouldn't go such as private places in people's houses (who does this, really?). Chase sequences? Multiple and extensive following the cutout stated above.

We can look at bad movies and figure out based on good ones what went wrong. And no, Paris Hilton is not the reason this film is bad. She neither wrote or directed it. Two things in my opinion would have improved this film immensely. 1) Characters should behave in a realistic manner and do things that people would actually do (i.e. if a strange truck pulls up to your campsite and just sits there shining its headlights on you, you pack up and leave when he goes). 2) Milk the suspense, not the gore. There were several points in this film where they could have kept us hanging, but instead, they just barreled onward, content to flash blood everywhere instead of messing with us.

Finally, we shouldn't WANT the characters to die. We should want them to live a full and happy life with everything their heart desires. Watching someone's death shouldn't be fun; it should be heart-wrenching. We should relate to them and feel their pain and fear and everything they're going to lose once they die. We need hopes and ambitions and things to care about. Chanting die, die, die makes not a good film of any genre.

Quoted from dogglebe You'd hear a lot of producers asking you, "Would you like fries with that?" Phil

Oops. I must've said something wrong again.

Anyways, I am looking forward to the Black Christmas remake.

Quoted from dogglebe Second of all, no matter how evil the killer is, give him/her a likeable trait.  Something that people can relate to.  If you think about it, you probably liked Hannibal Lector.  Why?  Because he was so damn classy....

Not just classy, but extremely smart and intriguing, he also came across as someone you'd think you could trust. You could take his word for it.

This is so true.  Which makes me worry about my script.  I want a top notch story and such with characters you care about, or even hate.  One of my characters I definitely hate.  But I want it to be more than just a 2-d poor quality piece.

I hope I have or can accomplish that.  I think Six Days has a lot of those qualities, but I struggle with the beginning.  At least people don't hate my main character anymore lol.

Sara

Quoted from George Willson A horror should be at its basest, a suspense thriller. There should be something in it beyond the control of one of the characters and something that attacks us and plays with our basest fears.

And how many of us are actually afraid of a masked lunatic with a chainsaw chasing us through the woods at night?

Really!

I ask you!


Phil

Quoted from dogglebe And how many of us are actually afraid of a masked lunatic with a chainsaw chasing us through the woods at night?

Um, well...I think being chased by a maniac with a chainsaw would be a pretty frightening experience. The real question is "How many of us would put ourselves in that situation?" A lot of these "isolation slashers" place characters in situations a lot of people can't relate to. If you can't relate to the situation, it isn't scary. You may feel for the characters and have some nervousness, but once it's over, it was only a movie.

Sure, I've been to a summer campout for a couple nights. I was never a counselor, though. I went with a campfire group as a helper. The worst we had was a skunk who sniffed around the tents. Unless you're in that situation, Friday the 13th isn't coming back to you.

The good ones are films that throw the enemy into personal territory. The Japanese ones did this really well with The Grudge and The Ring. Wes Craven did it with A Nightmare on Elm Street. The monsters here are so personal that even if the movie itself is poor, the fear stays with you because you can immediately relate to it. The audience has to say at some point, "I do that" or "I go there" or "That's me later tonight" for the fear to really work. Think anyone was a little afraid to dream back in '84? Probably. That's why monsters tend to have their final scare. It means they're still out there.

Quoted from dogglebe And how many of us are actually afraid of a masked lunatic with a chainsaw chasing us through the woods at night?

Everyone's afraid of a chainsaw because everyone knows what it feels like to be cut. It hurts, we can relate to that. This is why people are afraid of maniacs weilding knives and other sharp objects.

If some maniac was chasing me with a proton gravity cannon, I'd be somewhat less afraid because I can't imagine what the pain is like.

How about this, A man sneaks into your bedroom through the window, has the wife tie up the husband then forces him to watch what he does to his wife.  If he chooses to let them live, he sends them freaky phone calls of him breathing or talking about the incident or threatening to kill them.  He has left some alive, killed others...

Oh wait, Thats real, The Nightstalker.  Hmm just goes to show that sometimes real life is even scarier than the movies.

Talk about the worst relateable kind of horror.  During a toswn meeting a guy stood up and questioned why the others weren't strong enough to stop him and that it would never happen to him, he would stop him.  Well it did happen to him, a few weeks later.  The guy was right there at the meeting, probably someone they all knew.

Wrap up those elements into a story and you have a horror.  I feel bad for the people who have lived it.  

I do agree with the relatable elements and how important they are.

Sara

The biggest horror in real life...you open your mailbox and take out all those wonderful magazines you've been waiting for. A smile is growing on your face and then, a letter imbedded in one of them falls out and lands on the ground. The envelope is brown in color and you pick it up. You feel anxiety as you open the letter from the IRS and starts to read "You are being audited".

Haha, you're so funny Tomson, and yes that would be pretty horrible.  

Quoted from tomson The biggest horror in real life...you open your mailbox and take out all those wonderful magazines you've been waiting for. A smile is growing on your face and then, a letter imbedded in one of them falls out and lands on the ground. The envelope is brown in color and you pick it up. You feel anxiety as you open the letter from the IRS and starts to read "You are being audited".

Never been into those "adult horror" stories there, Tomson. That's way too scary for film.  

Well, to add to a former part of the discussion, today, I watched Ghost Ship and The Fog (1980).

From a critical perspective, both films had a lot in common. They both had decent plots, good reasoning, thinking characters, logical outcomes, some solid creepy moments, but both lacked in any depth to their characters.

Ghost Ship had a couple of good characters: one was Greer. Why? He had something outside the plot: a fiancee to come home to because he is getting married next month. Relatable and a decent character point gives us something to feel with this character. Katie (the ghost girl) was another good one. She had a history, somethign within and without the plot, and she lost something in the course of her tale creating a solid sympathy vote as well. Everyone else was developed within the boundaries of the plot but weren't given any life outside of it.

The Fog was even worse in this respect. I very much prefer this 1980 version over the 2005 due to the huge gaps in logic and idiotic moves by the characters in the current version, but the 1980 version suffers by not developing any of the characters. Nick castle got a moment on the boat, and Elizabeth got a hobby in drawing (if you were paying close attention) and a bit of a history. The monster got the most characterization through Father Malone reading the journal. This film would have totally rocked if Carpenter had spent a little more time on the characters. There were a slew of them here, but a little time would have been good.

Now, to compare the 1980 with the 2005, I will say that the 2005 version did make some improvements to the original story. They goofed, however, by removing some of the best parts of the original in terms of the plotline and the resolution (which makes no sense in the remake). Probably the best improvement was the telling of the legend. The 1980 did it by reading...not great for a film. In 2005, they did it by showing it little by little as the story unfolded. That was awesome. In 1980, Elizabeth was a stranger passing through. That's ok, but doesn't tie in to anything. She's just another character dragged along. In 2005, Elizabeth had moved out of town and was coming back to visit. She tied into the story more and though her resolution doesn't make any sense, she tied into it. So points for the tie-in, but they lose them for the nonsense.

So there's what I think of those two films.