When it comes to movies, what constitutes "scary"?
The answer is subjective, obviously. Horror movies from the 1930s are cool, but their quaintness keeps them from freaking me out. I'm a huge fan of "Rear Window," "Get Out" and "Silence of the Lambs," but they're about tension, not scares. Although I have a weakness for the goofball "Final Destination" series, slasher movies have never done it for me — too many cat-screaming-in-a-tree fake shocks and random spurts of blood. I like humor and horror together, but the "Scream" movies don't frighten me; neither does the Japanese "Audition," which is squirmier than it is frightening. I like ghost stories such as "The Others," but to creep me out, I suspect they need an element of existential dread that connects them to the real world.
That eliminates a lot of titles — there are so many good, scary-ish movies that you have to — but there's still so much to scream about.
The movie probably has some sort of monster, right? But the monster is most effective if, in some way, it is us. That's the case with "Alien," which I've seen, and been scared by, many times. And it's true of favorites that did not quite make my list: "Night of the Living Dead," a zombie movie but also a man's-inhumanity-to-man movie; "Train to Busan," the Korean thriller in which a zombie outbreak takes high-speed rail from town to town, fueled by human selfishness; "Rosemary's Baby," which is powerful because, like the toxic stew of Nextdoor.com, it's driven by curiosity about what neighbors are doing when their door is closed.
That sort of fear is in all of what I'd call the best scary movies: There is something around the corner and it's awful. The best horror movies use suspense, warning us about the possibility of the awful thing, but then upend our expectations. "Train to Busan," for instance, seems to end several times, eliminating major characters and changing settings as swiftly as TV's "Homeland" used to do, where you'd think, "How are the writers going to get out of this situation?" That could fall apart fast but when it's done well, as in "Busan," it is delirious fun.
It's possible to do horror in the great wide open — "The Blair Witch Project" proved that in a forest — but tight spaces are a better bet. Just about everyone can be creeped out by a confined space, like the remote lab in "The Thing," and it gets even worse when most of the fun happens in the dark.
Another common kink, in most horror and in my faves, is the shot from the bad guy's point of view. John Carpenter is credited with the best use of this tactic in "Halloween," which makes us identify with the killer. (Carpenter gets bonus points for composing that eerily simple music, which plays like an homage to the famous "Exorcist" score.) If we're looking at mayhem through the killer's eyes, whose side are we on? Forget the neighbors, do we even know what we are capable of ourselves?
If you believe these dandy scary movies below, we're capable of almost anything.
