After watching thirteen horror movies and clips from several others, I can say that I am no longer so frightened of them. For one, it is a lot easier to see the effects used and decide whether they are effective or not. For another, I can put to use some things that I have learned in the class and decide whether the movie is actually horrifying or not. (If I liked scary movies, I might be upset by this.) After watching some of these movies though and not being scared, I wondered why I was frightened by some things and not by others. What I mean is, why some things are more frightening than the technical "horror" movies.
Of course, I believe that the world has grown immune to some movies and effects that at one time were terrifying. For example, I cannot imagine someone over the age of ten today being afraid of The Bride of Frankenstein. There are things happening in the world today that are more horrifying than that movie - the Virginia Tech shooting, for instance. So actual monster movies are no longer having the effect that Noel Carroll talked about when he defined "horror." Instead, I think that movies that have a real person behaving in a monstrous way are more horrifying. Though slasher films are overly done and cheesy for the most part, these are frightening to me because there really are psychos that murder innocent people. The movie "Psycho" is scary because even if we look at Norman as a person and not an impure monster, there are people out there in today's world who have split personalities and do strange things because voices tell them to, or whatever.
Looking at movies that are not classified specifically as "horror" like the "Saw" series. "Saw" is classified as a thriller. But the events that take place are positively horrifying. The fact that some faceless killer went through the trouble that he did to force his victims to see the errors of their previous ways is horrible. The way the guy went about his victims, locking the two guys in a cell, chained to the wall with the option of cutting off his own foot... It is a psychological horror because the horror lies within the mind, the characters being stuck between two choices, both likely leading to eventual death. I can say that after watching this movie, I was up for several hours afterwards, unable to sleep. The way that the killer thought every move out perfectly and knew exactly what would happen, how his victims would react, and each move was perfectly synchronized was bone-chilling to me.
Another movie that I found horrifying in several scenes was "O," the newer movie based on Shakespeare's Othello. The movie wasn't so horrifying as the character of Iago. Iago frightened me because he is so incredibly intelligent about how people's minds work. He knew exactly what he needed to do and say to Desdemona and Othello to make them behave in his desired manner. It was his manipulation that enabled his to do this, the way he thought out his every action, allowing him to move the other characters around like chess pawns.
I think that what makes a movie so horrifying now is the premeditated actions of characters. Those characters that do not behave in jerky, radical, unexplainable ways, but those who plan everything, who patiently wait for their moves, their events to fall into place. This may be due to the events happening in the 20th and 21st centuries, a backlash of fear from the carefully calculated killings of Columbine and other schools that have experienced similar horrors. Yes, the startle effect still works for many - especially me - but it is more horrifying to watch the way the monstrous killer's mind works as he executes his horrifying plot to cause as much damage as possible.
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