One of the things I hate is (usually amateur stuff on YouTube) in which the person is getting overly scared even when it makes no sense.
Like they'll over act and start hyperventilating at a leaf and saying shit like "Oh my god what is that?!?!?! WHAT IS THAT?!?!" at like...a thud in the distance.
YouTube and Ghost Hunting shows seem to be the worst offender.
Another trope I hate is a horror game one but it's somewhat related; I hate it when the game tells you when to be scared by having a "sanity" effect or by the player character gasp or scream or whatever. Worst is if they have some kind of heartbeat sound effect that plays when you're supposed to be spooked.
But yeah, if a character starts saying shit like "WhAt ThE FuCk WaS ThAt?!" then I just get more annoyed than scared.
Shakycam. It completely destroys immersion for me, my brain just goes, "HEY DUMBASS THIS IS A MOVIE! IT'S ALL FAKE! You're in a theater with friends or at home on a couch, you're perfectly safe and there's nothing to be afraid of." Really anything that tries too hard to convince me that it's real.
Listen, movie, let me give it to you straight. I'm here to suspend my disbelief and play pretend so that I can get spooked for fun. But here you are being like, "No, suspending disbelief isn't good enough, you need to actually believe," and that is a) not your job, and b) going to trigger a response from my mental immune system and bring out my most critical and skeptical brain functions, which is the exact opposite of the headspace you want me to be in if I'm supposed to enjoy a horror movie. I need to be able to trust the movie enough to let my guard down.
I just hate jump scares. Give me crushing inescapable dread instead
Characters being unconvincingly incompetent or foolish. Alien and Aliens are some of my favorite horror movies to this day because the characters behave in a consistent and believable fashion based on who they are and what they know. The space truckers aren't at all equipped to handle the situation but they apply their knowledge as best they can. The marines are totally absorbed in their self image as gung ho badasses and so wildly underestimate their enemy while making foolish but believable decisions.
Basically; I like when the characters behave competently and lose not because the writer's made them carry the idiot ball and behave foolishly, but because the threat overwhelmed their competence and resourcefulness. It makes the threat more legitimately frightening; these peopkle did their best and were still wiped out, so hwo could I expect to do better?
well put. much better articulated than I would have.
Extreme skepticism/refusal to believe what's happening.
I'm an absolutely annoying skeptic, never seen anything i would consider paranormal in the slightest.
People in horror movies will see something completely fucking bonkers and still be 20 movie minutes from believing the one character who says there's a problem. I can't think of any examples right now but especially when a child continually describes horrible things happening and the parents say "is just a series of bad dreams that are escalating and oddly coherent" like buddy at least spend a few nights in their bed to see what's going on
As a Marxist I subscribe to a materialist worldview and therefore have no belief in ghosts whatsoever, but if my furniture started floating I would run screaming from the house
Exactly. Guess what the couch materially flipped over 4 times and all the pots and pans materially flew out of the cupboard so I'm materially getting the fuck out
But like after you calm down, you probably start thinking of ways to make furniture float (or your daughter's head spinning in circles while she vomits everywhere). There should be some explanation for what's happening, even if it's a supernatural one.
This trope is silly because no one thinks to experiment or investigate. Okay, so my child is possessed. Clearly some things we thought about the world are wrong. But you'd think people would be ask questions like "How does possession occur? Are there ways to prevent it? Where do the demons come from and how does culture change our interactions with them?"
For real! My fundamental understanding of the world has been broken, time to learn. "Ok so if it can manipulate objects, is it just avoiding touching me when it's not causing Havok?" You know, next time the couch lifts up have a jar of flour and throw it around to see if it's just an invisible guy being a dick.
There's a comedy script somewhere in here about a ghost realizing far too late that the young professional that just moved into the house its haunting is a lab assistant hungry for grant money whose response to seeing her furniture float is to start fantasizing about the Nobel prize she's about to win.
The moment she realizes the spirit is trapped in the house she immediately starts setting up an exact perimeter of ghost territory and setting it up like a containment area
Yeah I hate this one. It's probably my least favorite, too. You'd think with the SCP Foundation being over a decade old at this point, writers would realize you can do some creepy shit with the scientific method, skepticism, and experiments.
For example, let's say a house is haunted. Some science nerds go to the house to start investigating how the house became haunted and they conduct a study the same way you'd study animals in the wild. Lions are still really fucking scary when they rip your colleague's head off when something supposed to protect them didn't work.
It's also one of the ways that unintentionally makes characters unlikable. We, the audience, know the protagonist is experiencing something real. Then having some asshole brush them off (especially a man being skeptical of his wife) just makes us frustrated with the film as a film and not with the plot. It Follows was great because even though only one person could see the monster at a time, everyone who cared about the protagonist believed her that she was experiencing something irregular.
It follows is a good example of characters having their decision making affected by the stress of the situation but also acting rationally and seemingly caring about their friends and family
I have so much hatred for "The front room" and they were egregious in this troupe .
Guy: by the way my grandma is pretty racist
Black wife: I don't believe you(?? Literally what black person says this)
racist things happen
Black wife: you're right she is racist
Guy: no she isn't, it's all in your head
Oh yeah the character who starts skeptical becomes a believer based on evidence and is derided for it.
Using music or loud sounds to startle, it's the definition of cheap and hackery
The ritual of hear noise/turn around/see nothing/sigh of relief/turn back/die
I can easily imagine that it was once a masterstroke of tension-building, because otherwise every movie for 50 years wouldn't have copied it. But now it's so easy to see coming that it actually flatlines all tension and leaves me knowing exactly what will happen and just waiting for the formalities to occur.
I can easily imagine that it was once a masterstroke of tension-building
Similar to the "Cat Scare." I see alot of people griping about fakeout jump scares itt, but it was a great idea and novel trick in referring to notecard 1942 when it first appeared.
My biggest gripe of comically incompetent characters has already been well addressed elsewhere, so I'll go with my second least favorite trope: every single character being unlikable to the point where I have no investment in them.
There's this running undercurrent of horror films involving the worst people getting their comeuppance (which I'm cool with), but if every character in your movie is a serial abusive partner or a hyperaggressive asshole or the least charitable alpha cheerleader archetype or whatever I'm not going to feel any reason to care when they start getting offed by a ghost. It can be cathartic if there's one or two characters that fill this role, but if I can't make any connection with any of your characters then the film is just boring and painful to sit through.
Between these two tropes, there's not a lot of horror I actually do like.
Edit: One other thing that's not entirely on-topic, but relevant both to my general distaste for horror and the fact that someone mentioned Nope elsewhere: I think horror falls apart for me because it mostly only works if all your characters are useless. Nope is a fantastic film to me because the main characters are all competent, smart people who leverage their skills and strengths to overcome something much bigger and scarier than them, and outside of outright supernatural immortal slasher villains there's not a lot of horror antagonists that can't be felled that way, but it rarely happens. Nope is two hours of metaphorically watching neolithic humans take down a wooly mammoth because they bothered to use their brains, and it's awesome.
I absolutely hate when a horror movie has some kind of cool premise and makes you wonder what’s going on the whole time and at the end of the movie it was “just in their head the whole time” or “they were crazy.” If you can’t write a proper ending for your movie don’t make the fucking movie. Also “they were dead the whole time” annoys me too. But not as much as the crazy cop out.
Also I hate when a horror movie spends the first 40 minutes developing boring characters and nothing scary starts happening till half way through.
In zombie related media they never call them "zombies". It's a super problematic genre to begin with, but it just feels so stupid to me. Like, how are you going to have a character ask "what are they?" or "what's wrong with them?".
Also, black dude who's clearly written as a token character, golly gee I wonder what's going to happen to him.
When the entire plot depends on the (usually affluent liberal) POV characters being incredibly passive, naive, and dedicated to politeness over their own well-being. recent example is Speak No Evil.
Eternal Darkness broke the mold on sanity effects in console games. The only thing that's compared to that for me, since then, was haptic vest heartbeat effects in Half Life Alyx.
Anyway, least favorite trope is the racist black guy first to die trope. Followed by whomever had sex. Seems prudish.
Damn you really nailed both of my most-hated horror tropes in one post
lol, it's just USA as a Horror Genre. Maybe throw in that it's all on an Native American Burial ground to really cement the hierarchy of marginalized peoples.
Don't forget the bad guy has to be disabled. Physically deformed, neurodivergent, something that somehow translates to them being evil.
CW transmedicalism
Alternatively, the character can be clearly coded as a closeted trans woman, but then you need to have some psychiatrist lecture people "no, this is actually not a transs***al, but somebody who is only consumed completely by dreams of living as a woman full-time because of this contrived fetish that nobody has ever heard of before (because i just made it up)."
Yes, this means that Ray Blanchard is literally Hanibal Lecter if Hanibal Lecter was a complete idiot.
The movie, Bone Tomahawk, takes this one step further and has a Native American man talk to a group of white people and tells them "these aren't real Native Americans you're up against." I was expecting eldritch horrors with tentacles and bird heads who spit acid or some shit. Nope! Just some cannibals coming to steal white women!
At least we got to see a settler cleaved in half from crotch to head, so that was nice. Really fucking weird decision to do the "not really trans" trope combined with a racism.
Eternal Darkness was so, so good. Just amazing. It deserves a re-make so a new generation can experience the absolute bonkers terror of it.
I was in college when it came out and we legit stacked couches on tables to make stadium seating and had like twenty people watching someone play like it was a horror movie in a theare. Whenever some new mind-screw faked everyone out the whole audience would start shrieking and going omg omg omg. It was a wonderful experience.
Lol, that sounds awesome. I rented that shit from blockbuster and it became a test of bravery to see how long I could play it with the lights off.
I'm okay with "found footage" style horror, and last year watched a lot of it because of a friend who likes it a lot better than I do. The peeve I developed watching them was dependence on brief glimpses of something in the darkness. Yes, horror thrives on the unknown, but if I have to be looking at exactly the right corner of the screen for the right 250 milliseconds without any hints that I should be looking there, and I have to try to puzzle out what the characters are scared by (or rewind and go frame-by-frame), it's not going to produce the desired emotional effect.
More broadly, I don't think horror is really a genre. Horror is a feeling, or rather a broad set of feelings (fear, disgust, alienation, existential horror, dread, etc) that some works of art can provoke. The horror genre is when you take the tropes from those works and deploy them without much regard for the feelings they were used to convey.
The peeve I developed watching them was dependence on brief glimpses of something in the darkness.
YES, absolutely. In fact, you can break new ground if you just set the camera on the darkness or whatever seems aberrant for an extended period of time.
People making obviously horrible decisions or not questioning blatantly strange things
That and it's opposite, very bizarre and strange things happening in front of someone and they are told by people in the know what's happening but they just hand waive it away after seeing a gate to hell open in front of them or something lol
All of them I can't think of a horror movie that hasn't just been either unintentional comedy or plain shite. Also its always gore and body horror like therr are other drivers for fear.
Games do horror a lot better but its still quite rare to get a truly good horror game.
A lot of horror misses how the mundane is scary. How normality is scary. Focus on some real existential fear based on real things not just some stupid monster or ghost. My favourite horror movie is possum which focuses on horror of having to live in England.
Mouthwashing not to spoil anything is a perfect example of finding your own personalised aspect of horror in a game with many layers to it. It does shoot itself in the foot leaning into some traditional horror game tropes that didn't really need to be there tho
All of them I can't think of a horror movie that hasn't just been either unintentional comedy or plain shite. Also its always gore and body horror like therr are other drivers for fear.
Try The Endless (2017). There's almost no gore (just a few blood splashes, where what it's splashing from is offscreen), and no body horror, but just cosmic "wrongness" and existential dread as you gradually figure out what's happening.
The most recent Alien movie dusted off the “handsome male love interest’s aggressive asshole best friend” archetype and it was as painful to watch as its ever been
I liked the tension he brought to the group, and I also enjoyed that they rooted his 'assholeness' in the personal and political. He wasn't just being a jerk for no reason, something happened just before the film began to explain his agitation and confrontational attitude.
