things you love most in horror
 

an antidote to the hate thread. Things that you really love to see in horrors.
For me it's simple, the chainsaw

god i love good chainsaw scenes, it's the noise it makes, the length of its blade (yeah i know, something disturbing about that) and the effect that you know it will have that gets to me.

Unfortunately, it is also the ultimate 'teaser weapon', unlike the standard machete/axe. You see it it many horrors, (tcm particularly)but it isn't often used, or if it is, it's only the standard 'cheap looking slash to the belly' scene that you see.

Even the tcm's and its sequels and remakes, which you think with titles like that would have over excessive use, don't

Not many horrors, that i can think of', have it as the main weapon, and have good prolonged scenes of it. One of my favourite scenes is at the end of the remake of the evil dead. The girl who uses it really goes to town on that girls head, actually forcing through her head with venom, rather than the standard 'stick in', and the effects, for a change, look pretty good as well.

anyway

The severance of body parts

Blue or green lighting

Monsters (I'm human, so I know what to expect from human villains)

Inventive cinematography

The contemplation of death

The evoked fear of the unknown

An actual storyline, as opposed to a series of set pieces stuck together with jump scares leading to gruesome kills.

A director with enough talent and confidence to attempt taking the subject seriously, as opposed to "camping it up" because that's all they can do.

Atmosphere.

Actors with range.

Ditto. Moreover, whatever the 'horror part' is (i.e. an evil force of nature or monsters, psycho-killers, supernatural entity, tough survival condition etc.), good character developments are also necessary where character(s) gets tested in terms of moral dilemma or "how far a man can go" sort of totally challenging scenarios.

That's the main conceit of the Saw franchise.

I think most people like to spend time with the characters, even when general expository and descriptive material does not forward the plot. Do we really need to, say, watch a family eating breakfast to relate to their familial situation?

We have to see SOMETHING. If we know nothing about them, there's nothing to care about. If they are just stick figures put there so they can be dismembered the only thing you are able to appreciate is the mechanics of how the image was produced. It's pure viscera, there's nothing deeper to make it memorable.

Such exposition can be skillfully added via dialogue or narration. If you're writing a scene in a novel, you wouldn't generally use three paragraphs to describe the scene and then provide the dialogue. The same theory applies to cinema.

i don't know why, but i generally find it really hard to feel sympathy for people in horrors, in fact i often scream 'get on with it' when they delay the brutality. Probably being exposed to far to much torture porn and video nasties. That's not to say i never relate to them, i always root for the tortured geek in movies and pray for his/her brutal revenge, guess that's why i love revenge horror movies so much. Sometimes the effect of fleshing out a charcter can have a negative efect though, as it's obvious that's wwhat the director is attempting to do.

So true. For most, it all boils down to the science of the mind. Extroverts and e-dominant ambiverts have a slow empathetic response to impersonal media. They need to hang out with or get to know a person, character, etc before they can commit to an authentic empathetic response.

Dialogue happens in a place and time- such as a family eating breakfast, or whatever. Narration in a film is used as a last resort. It's often a symptom of a lazy writer or director. Not that it's never effective, just as a rule, it's avoided.

In a scene in a novel, you might not have three paragraphs in a row, describing a scene, but a writer may break it up - description... dialogue... description... dialogue... description. Or there might very well be three paragraphs of description. It depends on the style.

The original question was "what do you love most in horror." I gave my answer. I want a strong story. Roshiq added an element of character development and motivation. I agree with him. Those are the things we like, even if others may not.

It's true in this day and age that people raised in these hyper-kinetic times may not have the patience for a well crafted story, and only want the visceral thrill of jumps and "kills." Different strokes, as they say.