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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 2350527" data-attributes="member: 812">Holy crap yes.Obviously we're very very very different on this score. Dawn and Night remain two of the scariest movies I've ever seen. They scared the crap out of me. Shaking, curled up on the couch, whimpering, couldn't sleep, nightmares, the whole ten yards.I don't find "jump in your seat" stuff very interesting. Sudden loud noises and suddenly appearing indistinct images are easy to do. Not scary, just startling.Neither Ju On nor The Ring REALLY scared me. Nor did A Tale of Two Sisters. They all got close, closer than much else has done in a long time, but the conclusions of both films just ended up too unsatisfying -- you got to the end and just sort of felt, "What was the point?"Although the moment when the girl walks out of the TV will forever remain seared in my memory. Good grief.It's HARD. A scary movie has to walk a line that is so fine, so easy to trip off of, either into ridiculousness or into mudanity, that it's very rare a film doesn't go awry at some point. You've got to keep your audience guessing, but at the same time you need to deliver something that makes sense.It's not so much the zombies. It's the hopelessness, and what that does to the characters involved. What Romero's proven to be such a genius at is telling zombie stories in which the people are far scarier than the monsters. What's really horrifying in his movies is how the bonds between people fall apart under stress, and how willing they end up being to sacrifice each other in order to survive. THAT'S what freaks me out about his films.For me, zombie movies are scary in the same way that Alien was scary -- they provide a personification of the uncaring maw of Death, against which there is no reasoning, no appeal, no negotiation. This is why slow zombies are scarier than fast zombies -- the point of zombies is that even though you're smarter, quicker and stronger than they, you will still lose because they will never stop coming. It's the unfairness of it that's horrifying -- the notion that the world doesn't care if you're BETTER. You will still fail, because there isn't any way to win.A story in which the hero comes to a bad end because he isn't sufficiently good is a tragedy, not a horror story."Hey, barsoomcore, could you pop in on this thread and mumble pointlessly about movies?""Sure. Happy to help."</blockquote>

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