| | "Frankly, I wonder if you even read what I write?"
Likewise, Ted. However, I have read every word. Yet you never responded to why I brought up Jurassic Park. You also never responded to the idea that people watch edited horror movies, and enjoy them as horror movies. Editing gore or the disgusting never reduced a horror to a thriller.
From Wiki about Rosemary's Baby:
"Rosemary's Baby is a 1967 best-selling horror novel by Ira Levin."
"Rosemary's Baby is a 1968 American horror/thriller film written and directed by Roman Polanski"
"Roger Ebert... called it "a brooding, macabre film, filled with the sense of unthinkable danger. Strangely enough it also has an eerie sense of humor almost until the end. It is a creepy film and a crawly film, and a film filled with things that go bump in the night. It is very good...much more than just a suspense story;"
Rotton Tomatoes has it under the genre, horror/suspense.
IMDB classifies it as horror/mystery/romance/thriller (romance? What the...)
I too considered asking if we should list the movies we wish to capture under horror, but I decided it isn't worth adding to what has been discussed on this board. You and I would find ourselves in a circle, because our definitions will determine the concretes we'd list. To do otherwise would be to surrender our criteria to someone else's. Perhaps if we had started a list of movies before coming to our definitions in the first place....
Behold the power of a definition.
When you mentioned Psycho, I remembered that "monstrous" needed to be clarified. In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and the villain are the monstrous because of their psychology and motive. That it goes beyond the calculating psychopathic criminal into the terrifying psychopathic monster. The psychopath antagonist can find himself firmly in horror, thriller or somewhere between. I think this fixes the first problem you pointed out, without abusing the term I chose.
The second is where I defer to an existential theme or tone. I had played with nihilism as part of my definition (see my post 13), but there is an absurdity and grotesqueness found in nihilistic art that is qualitatively beyond horror.
An existential story is one where there is such thing as a protagonist (often tragically flawed, or an unlikely hero). The character strives to survive or make his world better, etc. There are values in existential art, in a sense. It's just that the malevolent universe (using that term more literally than Rand) just has it in for our dear protagonist. Alienation is a common theme. The tone is often dark and bleak, but can be whimsical and quirky. In horror the dark tone is important. Examples: Edward Scissor Hands, Waking Life, Momento, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Graduate. I dare say that existential art has some goodies. I love all of these.
If a horror were nihilistically grounded, on the other hand, pain and suffering would be welcomed like anything else. Absurd existence meets absurd characters. Perhaps the Final Girl (thanks Landon) character, upon learning that Hannibal was eating her alive, decides to pass Hannibal a fork, put a dinner napkin upon her neck, and fight for her own intestines. I can't think of a movie such as this, but there is a cartoon on Adult Swim that approximates this called Super Jail.
So going back to my triadic definition of existential scary movie with a supernatural/monstrous/psycho villain. Will the films you mentioned in your last post fit?
Alien, Psycho, the Blob, The Shining, The Omen
Again, the hour is late. I'll await your comments. Are you talking about The Blob from like 50 years ago with the funky theme music?
(Edited by Doug Fischer on 8/25, 1:16am)
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