Are Horror Movies not Scary Anymore?

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Joanna Augelletta, Writer

When it comes to the Halloween season, everyone wants a good scary movie to watch, but nowadays they do not make too many as good as they used to. 

Most scary movies are now targeted to teenagers so either they are not as scary, or they try too hard and overdo it. They add too many special effects and most new horror movie stories are not original.

“There doesn’t seem to be many original ideas left and sometimes the plots can be overly complicated with holes. There is sometimes too much reliance on effects as opposed to clear, well developed storylines. Sometimes less is more,” Tony Augelletta, a horror movie fan, said.

However, lots of new horror movies are relying on jump scares. Some add some excitement and suspense to the movie but others are just awful and make the viewers annoyed.

“In film, most jump scares leave no lasting impression because they’re not earned — they’re just poking the right parts of your nervous system. The worst version of this trope is the fake jump scare. This is when a scene builds up to a monster suddenly entering the picture, only for it to turn out to be … a cat, a piece of trash, or something otherwise mundane,” Mike Bedard, author of Things from horror movies that aren’t scary anymore, said.

For instance, some horror and Halloween movies that are not worth watching include Hubie Halloween, The Nun, the new Poltergeist, IT Chapter 2, the Chucky series, and Bad Hair. Some of these movies had good potential, but most of the good parts of the movies were already shown in the trailer so when moviegoers watch it there is nothing new or exciting happening. 

I personally have not seen Bad Hair, but it sounds like another bad horror movie. It is about a woman’s weave that gets possessed. Although that is an original story plot, it is very unrealistic. 

“The plot fell apart the moment the hair drank the blood from her papercut. It was so fake I thought I had imagined the scene. This part happened too fast. The plot and background needed to be flushed out a little more. It seemed to jump ahead days, then weeks, then months,” Kenia Sharp-Bucknor wrote in her review of Bad Hair.

Although most new horror movies are not worth watching, there are still some good filmmakers out there such as Guillermo Del Toro, John Carpenter, and Jordan Peele who have been making exhilarating, original scary movies for a while, so they know what true horror fans like to see. They do a great job of actually making their movies scary and having original and exciting ideas. Some popular and well made movies by these filmmakers are the  Halloween series, Get out, Us, Mamma, Splice, Christien, etc. These movies are all very original and suspenseful and actually give you a good scare. 

Many horror movie fans like Claudia Petrilli think that the older horror movies are much better and are disappointed in a lot of the new ones that have come out. 

“They just don’t make them like they used to,” Claudia Petrilli, a horror movie fan, said.

It is rare to watch a good horror movie and actually get scared. There are a few new horror movies coming out soon such as Freaky, A Quiet Place Part II, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, Candyman, and Halloween Kills. Hopefully, these movies will be decent and worth watching, because they all sound like they have the potential to be scary!