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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9492805">I would say going by the standards most people use for thriller and horror, Devil's Advocate falls into horror because 1) It is the devil, 2) it isn't about thrills, it is about the horror of losing your soul, 3) to the other poster's point, the cinematic techniques all feel very much like horror. But I think always making this distinction, 'is it horror' or 'is it a thriller' isn't something I am especially interested in....Genres are always tricky and the older I get the less concerned I am about how things get categorized. I do think though the broader a genre is, the healthier it tends to be. The more it narrows, the more it shifts towards a narrow audience. Horror in particular has been pretty broad. As others have pointed out, a movie like Dracula isn't particularly scary. A lot of horror movies are more campy than scary. Many slasher films have thriller and horror elements to them. I've always been a little cold on the distinction between those two subgenres, as many movies will straddle a lot of lines (the difference between thriller or horror to me is pretty unimportant as I find grouping them together, makes it easier for me to find movies I would like to see for example). I would say horror includes a lot of stuff that is humorous. When I was a kid I got into horror because I had an uncle who loved monster movies, but some of his favorites were films with goofy concepts he found amusing (things like Christine, the old Fly, etc). And I found the same thing with my horror movie friends in school: half the time we were seeking out horror movies because they were genuinely scary, the other half because they made us laugh (this is why Freddy Krueger has one liners I would say). There is a type of horror that is meant to be fun, but with a horror atmosphere. Also what is scary is going to vary a lot from person to person. Nosferatu scares me more than any other movie. I'm sure plenty of people have a non-reaction to that film. Exorcism films scare me quite a bit. Again plenty of people don't find the exorcist scary. I'm not particularly afraid of werewolves, but I adore werewolf movies. Some people find modern horror movies with their various techniques more scary than old ones (personally I feel they specialize in tension and rely heavily on sound design but aren't particularly scary or horrifying to me----especially the longer I grow familiar with the techniques around sound they employ). And this isn't a knock on modern horror movies. It is just going to show how subjective this all is</blockquote>

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