When Was the Last Time a Horror Movie Scared You?

I mean, really scared you. It's easy to produce a startle response by making a loud noise on the soundtrack while having something jump at the camera. Similarly, it's simple to gross out the audience by cutting open an abdomen and revealing intestines or something. But neither of those are what I would call a real scare. A real scare is when you're so involved with the story that it matters to you what happens next, and you are in terror of what that thing might be--and of what it is turning out to be. It's the kind of scare that makes you have to tell yourself, "It's only a movie."

The earliest horror movie to scare me in this way was Night Monster (1942), a low-budget Universal chiller that I think was about a legless man who magically recovers use of his legs only to stalk around killing people. I'm not sure of the details because I was only about ten when I saw it, on one of those Saturday night "Creature Features" programs that used to air old horror movies. Night Monster scared me tremendously, but I've never been able to find a copy of it since then to verify if it would still have the same effect.

Other movies have really scared me since then--Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Exorcist (1974), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Jaws (1975) The Omen (1976), Halloween (1978), The Fly (1986), and so on. But the older I get the harder it is for a horror movie to do the job of really scaring me. I'm not sure that it's just because the movies have gotten worse. I think I've gotten more jaded, less able to involve myself in the lives of what I know to be fictional characters.

Anyway, the last horror movie to come close was the 2009 The House of the Devil. I don't remember the movie well, but there was a scene where the babysitter was wandering alone in the house of the Satanic cultists, and I had to tell myself, "It's only a movie." What a blissful phrase: a sign that the horror movie is doing its job.

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

"Molly Hartley" Needed More Haunting

Having just written about a good horror film (The Human Centipede [First Sequence]), I think it only proper to explain what I think makes a bad horror film. For that, I need look no further than the film I just saw last night, The Haunting of Molly Hartley.

I won't say this film is all bad. It had nice schoolgirl uniforms. Nor would I call it an incoherent, laughably inept mess of a film, such as Plan 9 from Outer Space. That would be rating it more highly than it merits. Laughably inept horror films at least provide laughs. The Haunting of Molly Hartley prompted little emotion at all, other than a strong desire to check my watch.

The Haunting of Molly Hartley, you see, was dull, and that is the worst thing a horror movie can be. The purpose of a horror movie is to present you with the illusion that a new form of being--a deformed destructive being (DDB)--has entered the world and is threatening to destroy you. That should not be dull. If it is dull, the horror movie is failing at its job.

Molly Hartley is dull for a number of reasons. The settings are bland, the dialogue is without crackle or spice, the acting is wooden, the plot is a copy of other copies of Rosemary's Baby, and at no point does anything surprising happen. Even when some hallucination or other pops out from behind Molly, accompanied by a loud noise, this is expected by the alert horror movie fan, because that is the sort of thing that happens at about this point in this kind of movie.

The worst disgrace of Molly Hartley is the lack of a strong DDB. Molly is supposed to turn into a demon or devil-servant or something on her 18th birthday, and we can expect that this makes her the DDB. But she is not physically deformed (aside from a scar daintily obscured by her decolletage), and although she is supposed to be spiritually deformed, she exhibits this deformity largely by adopting a mean schoolgirl manner common to the other mean schoolgirls around her. Perhaps this is supposed to be a comment on the banality of schoolgirl meanness, but it succeeds only in being banal.

Nor is Molly very destructive. She breaks a girl's arm and kills a couple of people, but her heart doesn't seem to be in it. Possibly actress Haley Bennett's heart wasn't really in it.

The greatest virtue of The Haunting of Molly Hartley is to clarify what makes a bad horror movie. This, in turn, makes the good ones scream louder.

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films