One of the things I hate is (usually amateur stuff on YouTube) in which the person is getting overly scared even when it makes no sense.
Like they’ll over act and start hyperventilating at a leaf and saying shit like “Oh my god what is that!!! WHAT IS THAT!!!” at like…a thud in the distance.
YouTube and Ghost Hunting shows seem to be the worst offender.
Another trope I hate is a horror game one but it’s somewhat related; I hate it when the game tells you when to be scared by having a “sanity” effect or by the player character gasp or scream or whatever. Worst is if they have some kind of heartbeat sound effect that plays when you’re supposed to be spooked.
But yeah, if a character starts saying shit like “WhAt ThE FuCk WaS ThAt?!” then I just get more annoyed than scared.
Shakycam. It completely destroys immersion for me, my brain just goes, “HEY DUMBASS THIS IS A MOVIE! IT’S ALL FAKE! You’re in a theater with friends or at home on a couch, you’re perfectly safe and there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Really anything that tries too hard to convince me that it’s real.
Listen, movie, let me give it to you straight. I’m here to suspend my disbelief and play pretend so that I can get spooked for fun. But here you are being like, “No, suspending disbelief isn’t good enough, you need to actually believe,” and that is a) not your job, and b) going to trigger a response from my mental immune system and bring out my most critical and skeptical brain functions, which is the exact opposite of the headspace you want me to be in if I’m supposed to enjoy a horror movie. I need to be able to trust the movie enough to let my guard down.
Fakeout jumpscares - For example, in The Woman in Black, there’s this scene where the protagonist’s stumbling 'round this mansion at night and the tension violin stuff is going full force like something spooky is about to happen and… then he turns on a tap and it makes a startlingly loud noise. That was it, that’s the scare.
(Dis)honorable mentions go to: black characters always dying first, female victims of slashers being used for titillation, ghost movies where 90% of the film is just empty tension (fuck you Paranormal Activity), scene where the monster’s whole deal is explained in unnecessary detail, exorcists/spirit mediums being portrayed as heroes and not the exploitative parasites of human misery they are in real life.
Spoliers for Haute Tension below. Light spoilers maybe for Cabin in the Woods, Candyman, and Terrifier
I think for like classic slashers, probably the racist or sexist trope where the PoC, promiscuous girl, or “dumb blond” dies first. Like, I get that the whole cast is just murder fodder but it was always rare to see the one of the black guys or “bimbos” be the final girl or boy. It was usually the unlikely “mousy girl” though. A caveat would be like in Cabin in the Woods where the stoner kid survives until the end.
But other than that, I’m a really big horror movie fan and sort of learned to lean into the tropes you see often. To me, they are just story devices to help set the scene.
My meta trope(if you will) issues are when fans whine that a horror movie is “too political” like with the Candyman sequel/soft reboot by Jordan Peele. I saw a lot of people bitching that is was gonna be all “white people bad” and I was like, y’all watched the original right? Same complaints about his remake of People Under the Stairs, and I guess him in general. I love Peele because he puts bigotry in your face though. If you are having a hard time with it, maybe look into a mirror(lol Candyman).
Another is when people try to find deeper meaning in plot shallow movies or completely miss the deeper meaning of movies they view at surface level. Two examples that always come up: Terrifier is just suposed to be a silly slasher that hearkens back to the 80s but I saw a lot of people complain that is didn’t have a deeper meaning they could find(lore not withstanding). It’s literally just a classic horror and a practical effects tech demo. Shut your brain off and go for the ride. The second is the plot twist in Haute Tension. It seems people really feel like they were cheated when the unreliable narrator plot twist is revealed. Or they flat out don’t even catch it. The short haired girl is the one telling the story the ENTIRE FUCKING TIME and she had like Dissociative Identity Disorder or some other personality disorder. It’s the same trope that is in Fight Club and Mr. Robot but people don’t seem to feel cheated when they watch those.
I love everything from B-budget to “high art” horror so I probably disagree with some takes here. I also don’t like a lot of classics as much as others. I think The Shining is boring and although I like The Thing, I hate how much hype it gets. Maybe it’s just the echo chamber that is reddit but goddamn they have a hard-on for that film.
Jordan Peele
remake of People Under the Stairs
Holy shit how did I miss this news?
I’m okay with “found footage” style horror, and last year watched a lot of it because of a friend who likes it a lot better than I do. The peeve I developed watching them was dependence on brief glimpses of something in the darkness. Yes, horror thrives on the unknown, but if I have to be looking at exactly the right corner of the screen for the right 250 milliseconds without any hints that I should be looking there, and I have to try to puzzle out what the characters are scared by (or rewind and go frame-by-frame), it’s not going to produce the desired emotional effect.
More broadly, I don’t think horror is really a genre. Horror is a feeling, or rather a broad set of feelings (fear, disgust, alienation, existential horror, dread, etc) that some works of art can provoke. The horror genre is when you take the tropes from those works and deploy them without much regard for the feelings they were used to convey.
Extreme skepticism/refusal to believe what’s happening.
I’m an absolutely annoying skeptic, never seen anything i would consider paranormal in the slightest.
People in horror movies will see something completely fucking bonkers and still be 20 movie minutes from believing the one character who says there’s a problem. I can’t think of any examples right now but especially when a child continually describes horrible things happening and the parents say “is just a series of bad dreams that are escalating and oddly coherent” like buddy at least spend a few nights in their bed to see what’s going on
I have so much hatred for “The front room” and they were egregious in this troupe .
Guy: by the way my grandma is pretty racist
Black wife: I don’t believe you(?? Literally what black person says this)
racist things happen
Black wife: you’re right she is racist
Guy: no she isn’t, it’s all in your head
As a Marxist I subscribe to a materialist worldview and therefore have no belief in ghosts whatsoever, but if my furniture started floating I would run screaming from the house
But like after you calm down, you probably start thinking of ways to make furniture float (or your daughter’s head spinning in circles while she vomits everywhere). There should be some explanation for what’s happening, even if it’s a supernatural one.
This trope is silly because no one thinks to experiment or investigate. Okay, so my child is possessed. Clearly some things we thought about the world are wrong. But you’d think people would be ask questions like “How does possession occur? Are there ways to prevent it? Where do the demons come from and how does culture change our interactions with them?”
For real! My fundamental understanding of the world has been broken, time to learn. “Ok so if it can manipulate objects, is it just avoiding touching me when it’s not causing Havok?” You know, next time the couch lifts up have a jar of flour and throw it around to see if it’s just an invisible guy being a dick.
Yeah I hate this one. It’s probably my least favorite, too. You’d think with the SCP Foundation being over a decade old at this point, writers would realize you can do some creepy shit with the scientific method, skepticism, and experiments.
For example, let’s say a house is haunted. Some science nerds go to the house to start investigating how the house became haunted and they conduct a study the same way you’d study animals in the wild. Lions are still really fucking scary when they rip your colleague’s head off when something supposed to protect them didn’t work.
It’s also one of the ways that unintentionally makes characters unlikable. We, the audience, know the protagonist is experiencing something real. Then having some asshole brush them off (especially a man being skeptical of his wife) just makes us frustrated with the film as a film and not with the plot. It Follows was great because even though only one person could see the monster at a time, everyone who cared about the protagonist believed her that she was experiencing something irregular.
