Horror films gross outs versus scares

OHMSS69

I may be a prude but I don't see the fascination with grossing audiences out with horror films. WTF? Horror should flirt and tease the viewer then using mood, music, shadows and leave some to the imagination have at it. I was watching a film the other night and the bad guy cut out the victim's tongue, fried it then cut it up and ate it. That was way over the top. Maybe audiences today have no imagination and need to be shown this sicko crap rather than just setting the mood and then using a great deal of subtlety. The Asian horror films seem to get it right and some American cinema has caught on but still some film makers regress to the gross out.
Which do you prefer and what are some of your favorite horror films?

The Haunting (1963) The classic black and white is always more preferable to that trashy 1999 remake with Liam Neeson. Funny thing about this classic ghost movie: you never actually see a ghost in the entire film. Now that's art.
The Others (2001)
The Eye (Hong Kong) recently remade with Jessica Alba but if you don;t mind reading sub titles, I highly recommend it but leave the lights on.
The Ring (2002)
Halloween (1978)

HASEROT

oh i've had many a discussion about the death of true today - because most audiences don't know what it is - or too dumb to appreciate it... "horror" movies today aren't true horror, it's gore porn... it's a deliberate attempt to gross out the audience, and repulse them, rather than take them a suspensful ride.... modern horror can be summed up by 2 things - GORE and JUMP SCARES ..... i remember walking out of the remake of Nightmare on Elm St, and hearing teenagers saying "that was scary"... really? - then i wondered if they had ever seen the original, because the original urinates from a very high story onto this one.....

as an aspiring filmmaker, that was one thing I was trying to accomplish with my short film THE HARVESTERS... though it was shot with no budget, very cheap gear, and is only 20 minutes.. i made a point to show absolutely no blood, and no gore - everything is implied, or off camera... even though it was my very first time behind the camera, I knew the path I didn't want to go down... to me, effecting the audience cerebrally, instead through eye candy leaves a much longer lasting impression - than splashing blood across the screen every 5 minutes...

some of my horror favorites...

Halloween
Psycho
The Shining
Night Of The Living Dead
Dracula
Frankenstein
House On Haunted Hill
The Last Man On Earth
Dementia 13
The Phantom Of The Opera
Nosferatu
The Horror Of Dracula
The Birds
Friday the 13th
Dawn Of The Dead
Nightmare On Elm St
The Exorcist
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Saw
What Lies Beneath
Stir Of Echoes

Virage

Scaring Me makes me Laugh,
Gore makes me cringe. (Yet Hot Fuzz is my favorite comedy...)

DarthDimi

I may be a prude but I don't see the fascination with grossing audiences out with horror films. WTF?

It's the essence of art: some like it, some don't. It'll always be like that. Also, one mustn't forget that after a hundred years of horror cinema, we've grown pretty desensitised. Gore seekers seem to be getting younger and hungrier for extremes every decade. Luckily, it's mostly a phase. Once a certain age is reached, Saw and more extreme stuff just doesn't thrill them anymore. A few die hards, myself included, will always be on the look-out for more but then we've learned to consider things in the appropriate context. For example: I don't watch a Lucio Fulci film because I feel a strong desire to see zombies squeeze the brains of a living person to mash. I watch such a film because I'm intrigued in the history of horror cinema and in certain trends and sub-genres, their impact on society and film in general and their hidden messages. My fascination with gross horror films is thus not that of a psychopath, but that of a student of the horror genre.

Horror should flirt and tease the viewer then using mood, music, shadows and leave some to the imagination have at it.

No, that is not what horror films should do. That is what certain horror films do. They are the scary ones, the ones that thrive on the sensation of terror more than on the sensation of horror. Terror equals fright. Horror equals repulsion.

I was watching a film the other night and the bad guy cut out the victim's tongue, fried it then cut it up and ate it. That was way over the top. Maybe audiences today have no imagination and need to be shown this sicko crap rather than just setting the mood and then using a great deal of subtlety.

In Hannibal, Sir Anthony Hopkins cuts out a bit of the victim's brain, fries it and feeds it to said victim. It's a Ridley Scott film and not necessarily considered a horror film - more a thriller but that's pure semantics of course. All I'm saying is that gruesome images are not strictly reserved for unconventional or exploitative horror pictures. Also, it really all depends on what the filmmakers' intention is with the scenery. Curious as it may seem, it can all be part of subtlety. And in some cases, you're not really seeing what you're seeing. You see subtle cuts and certain things are implied through smart scripting; your mind fills in the gaps and responds with repulsion. That said, I'm not saying what you saw wasn't there for obviously, I've had my share of explicit material too.

The Asian horror films seem to get it right and some American cinema has caught on but still some film makers regress to the gross out.
Which do you prefer and what are some of your favorite horror films?

I'm afraid your view on Asian horror is a little naive. The Japanese (and Thai, Koreans,...) are known for being into seriously extreme stuff, though it may not necessarily find its way across the Pacific. The likes of Miike Takashi and Tanit Jitnukul aren't exactly about mood without gore. If you dive deep into Asian cinema, you may find that American horror films are, by comparison, mostly sweet and lovely.

The Haunting (1963) The classic black and white is always more preferable to that trashy 1999 remake with Liam Neeson. Funny thing about this classic ghost movie: you never actually see a ghost in the entire film. Now that's art.
The Others (2001)
The Eye (Hong Kong) recently remade with Jessica Alba but if you don;t mind reading sub titles, I highly recommend it but leave the lights on.
The Ring (2002)
Halloween (1978)

I accept your choices. Halloween is among my favourite all-time horror films too. However, some might argue that Halloween is even more painful to watch than the film you referred to with the tongue cutting-and-eating psycho. The latter seems to be about just explicit material, which has but a mere superficial impact, whereas Halloween's subtexts, of suburbia being faced with the deadly destruction of the family unit for example, have a longer lasting psychological impact on many people.