Grave Encounters - for all of its corniness, I think that came from the fact they were modelling those 'ghost hunter shows' Discovery puts out, but I enjoyed it.
Yellowbrickroad - about an American town that was removed from maps and classified after the townfolk watched a screening of The Wizard of Oz in 1940, got up as one, walked to the trailhead, and disappeared into the woods of New England. As is prone to happen, the government decides to declassify the town and trail, so some people decide to make a documentary about it.
these are two of my favorites. In Grave Encounters, that moment where they break open the front door and see what’s beyond it is perfect. There’s no glitzing it up, no portal flow or shimmer, nothing but the bald of reality of something that can’t be there but is.
Yellowbrickroad renders the effects of sound in visual terms as effectively as any movie I can think of. Also, go back to the first scene and pay attention to what we can see and hear of the guy in the office there. Not a generic government guy.
Is there a word for movies like Carrie and Willard where much of the part that would usually be the horror part is cathartic because the victims are terrible people whose harassment is what caused the killer to snap?
Sure. “Horror”.
or if you want some academic terminology…in his book Weird Fiction: A Genre Study, Michael Cisco borrows from Deleuze and Guattari to write of minor and major modes in weird fiction (and literature generally).
Major modes end up reinforcing the status quo: Ebenezer Scrooge becomes a better person but not a crusader for any serious social change.
Minor modes shake the status quo loose and don’t put the pieces back when they’re done; even when the incursion of the story ends, people can’t live the way they did. Hellraiser, Alien + Alien 3, and the original three Living Dead movies push the surviving characters and/or the world at large over an abyss you can’t climb back out of.
What’s interesting is that a monster killing people who really have coming it can work in either mode, depending on how they go about it. When the story tends toward “see, you should have been a nice regular person”, that’s major. When it heads toward “the monster is also a person who’s owed accommodation and respect too”, that’s probably more minor.
Cisco goes into this over many many pages, and Deleuze and Guattari at many more. This is an entirely inadequate summary.