[stygianwitch]

For me, a true horror movie is one that has fills me with tension and fear, to the point where the smallest thing will make me jump and i'm looking for escape routes cos all i wanna do is run, it also has to be full of atmosphere, the creepy kind

There are various ways of doing it, one is to never fully show the bad guy/alien/creature that the film is about, an example of that would be Alien, never saw the thing in it's entirety until the very end of the movie, for me, seeing the whole creature took away all those 'i'm scared' emotions

Another way is with the soundtrack, if that is done right then the score alone will build you up to a point where you are on the edge of panic

My preferred horror is the purely fictional, the weird creatures/mutations, experiments gone wrong, evil aliens, scary monsters, vampires, zombies etc. not the slasher type movies

Movies such as Saw and Se7en i personally would class in the thriller/suspense/drama genres, i think they get called horror because there is so much blood and gore in them, and because we, as human beings, don't want to believe that there are really people out there that would perpetrate these acts in reality.... there are, a lot of them, and the things they do to other human beings and other species are far more horrific things than anything a screenwriter could imagine into existence so we blind ourselves to it, label it horror and sell it for profit