Something doesn't cease to be "horror" because one individual finds it passé. :32 Dracula is still Horror, and was always camp. Newsflash: slasher stuff like Saw is also camp. All Horror is.
Whilst I agree re: one individual, I think you're oversimplifying here.
It's not true to say all horror is camp, for example. It is true to say the majority, perhaps the vast majority of horror, in the
very broadest sense of the term camp, is camp. However, the level of camp varies quite widely, as does the type, to the point where I think it's actually unhelpful to say it's all camp. Why? Because that highlights how useless the term "camp" is in this situation if used as extremely broadly as you are. It ceases to convey any information at all.
Saying Dracula is camp conveys useful information, because it's close to the central meaning of camp (even to the original root to some extent). Saying Scream is camp is certainly true, but not particularly useful because the level and type of camp is pretty much present in most '90s teen movies, so you're really just saying it's a '90s teen movie. Saying It Follows is camp, might, technically, in the broadest sense, be arguable as true, but at that point it doesn't convey useful information. It's merely linguistic points-scoring.
I don’t find that many modern horror movies scary at all. And plenty of classic horror remains scary for decades (I would say the original Nosferatu is still way more scary than most other horror films from any era). What catches people is an inability to view things from another period and get past the conventions and aesthetics of the time. But all eras of horror have weird quirks people in that tune don’t see but look silly later (including films made today). I think it is less about evolution and more about taste and what you are familiar with. I think this idea that things get less scary over time is somewhat overblown. Try watching a horror film from the mid-2000s. In many ways a lot more dated than something from the 30s, 70s or 80s
I think you're really claiming to know an awful lot more about how other people think and what they feel than they do in a way that is perhaps not as helpful to your argument as you seem to be convinced it is, given you claims re: conventions and aesthetics. There's some truth in it, but I'd caution against overstatement on your own part and excessive mind-reading, especially of people younger than you.
I think what we actually have is three things going on at once which you're conflating. There is evolution, in that clearly, unarguably, horror learns from horror. This is incredibly easy to demonstrate. There are books where it's a major part of what they discuss. People didn't forget 1930s horror in the 1970s, or 1970s horror in the 2000s, even. New ways to scare people are found, both in terms of psychological techniques, and in terms of what can be done with film-making. So there is evolution, and older movies tend to be more narrow in their approach to horror (sometimes even by the standards of their era).
A second point is that, as you correctly point out, each era has peculiarities. Sometimes those peculiarities are of a nature such that they undermine the long-term scariness of a film (though who knows if it will start working again later), and sometimes it's because a particular technology is being used that looks okay in one period, but looks laughable in another, or sometimes it's because a particular approach to scaring people is being used which goes on to be so ridiculously overused that it becomes un-scary.
Thirdly, you're not comparing like with like. You're stacking up the mid-00s against effectively the very best of the 1930s, 1980s and so on. If we were more honest and say, stacked all '00s horror vs all '80s horror say, i.e. not just a section of '00s movies vs the very best '80s ones, I don't think you could confidently say that the '80s would come out ahead. The fact is, lots of horror movies just aren't very good in any given era, and often as a result they aren't very scary (if they even intended to be). The ones that work, for whatever reason, get remembered. This is gets more extreme the further you go back into history.
Finally as a minor point I suspect you're confusing mid-00s with the very late '90s and early-00s re: bad horror. Both periods had some remarkable movies in them, but the like 98-2003 period is notable for a very specific and now quite dated "teen horror"-style being common.
I am not saying no movies today are scary. There are good horror movies, but I think we are far, far from the apex of horror movies today
Old people
always think that though. I am also an old person in that context.
I used to be a horror buff in the '90s (all of the '90s). I read a lot written about horror movies, and I watched them over a wide period, and every older person thought "horror movies today aren't that great", whereas once horror movies kind of "rose from their grave" around the time of Scream, younger people tended to universally think the opposite (prior to Scream things were a little more complex). Reading stuff written by people in their 20s today I can see the phenomenon continues.
It's particularly amusingly ironic that you say this in a Ravenloft thread. I'm hoping you know why, but for those who don't...
Because the original 2E Ravenloft boxed set basically opens with an old person (who was probably what, 30s, 40s? Practically a skeleton!) insisting that modern horror sucks and is lame (and by modern he means the '80s and onward), but Hammer and Universal was awesome and actually scary and TRUE HORROR and any TRUE HORROR FAN, much like a true Scotsman, will like that stuff.
www.enworld.org
