Horror needs to be free to be not scary

Odradek

I genuinely believe this

Sredni Vashtar

What do you mean by this?

Odradek

A lot of times when people read a horror story, or watch a horror movie, they treat "It's not scary/doesn't know how to be scary" as the end of the discussion when it's not because 

A: Scaryness is a deeply subjective thing, just like comedy

B: It's entirely possible creating visceral fear was not the main point of the work, and getting angry at it for not doing that is extraordinarily point-missing

Salix Babylonika

I thought you meant like, financially free.

glennmagusharvey

Sometimes people say that the Castlevania series isn't horror.

I don't really get that, honestly.  Thematically, it totally is.

Maybe it's just not jumpscare horror.

Crystal

CarnEvil said:

A lot of times when people read a horror story, or watch a horror movie, they treat "It's not scary/doesn't know how to be scary" as the end of the discussion when it's not because 

A: Scaryness is a deeply subjective thing, just like comedy

B: It's entirely possible creating visceral fear was not the main point of the work, and getting angry at it for not doing that is extraordinarily point-missing

You know, agreed.

MetaFour

Yuyuko Saigyouji said:

I thought you meant like, financially free.

Heh, same. "You need to give away horror without charging anything in order for it to not be scary."

Anyway, that other thing is a sentiment I can get behind, too.

Sredni Vashtar

CarnEvil said:

A lot of times when people read a horror story, or watch a horror movie, they treat "It's not scary/doesn't know how to be scary" as the end of the discussion when it's not because 

A: Scaryness is a deeply subjective thing, just like comedy

B: It's entirely possible creating visceral fear was not the main point of the work, and getting angry at it for not doing that is extraordinarily point-missing

I can get behind that. But by the same token, I feel like horror is defined by that emotion more than any genre trappings, plot structures or story elements, so the wording feels anathema to me, particularly as someone very focused on shortform literary horror and weird fiction. However, I feel like what kind of fear a horror work should invoke certainly need not be the same: Home invasion movies do not work in the same way that the Aickman/Lane/Etchison-style "strange story" does, for the most part, nor should they.

Odradek

I see what you're saying.

I mean, I recently saw the movie Candyman which is excellent, and at no point in the movie would I say I was scared in the way that I was scared watching, say, The Babadook, but I'd also say the emotions the movie made me feel were a kind of horror

SF_Sorrow

(talking about my obsessions again)

We Know the Devil is a great example of something in the horror genre that's not supposed to immediately invoke visceral fear at all, instead going for horror in the sense of something very subtle, yet deeply-rooted in the psychological and realistic - while at the same time having undeniably supernatural elements as well