As time moves on, films are continuously becoming scarier and scarier. When you compare a modern horror film to one that came out a decade or so earlier, typically you would find that the latest one is significantly more terrifying. This is because of the fact that moviemakers have gained more techniques when it comes to things like cinematography, music or writing techniques.
Cinematography and special effects have grown through the ages, and now we are able to see gore that looks more realistic. When we see, for example, a man chopping off another guy’s head in a film, we see a lot more detail in the attack, making it scarier. Music has a major effect on filmmaking too. The score can create a large amount of suspense building up to a scene. Even though most people already know that something is going to happen, the sudden break is always frightening. Those techniques and many others have developed over the years to make movies a lot more scary. But why is there is such a high demand to make movies scarier?
A lot of scary movies only target people who want a motion picture to make their spines chill, the same way comedies are targeted to make people laugh. This generally means they don’t care as much about having a good overall story as long it is tolerable and the viewers get enough of a rush from seeing it. People like the thrill of horror films — it increases people’s adrenaline. To give people this thrill, filmmakers to work on making movies look more believable.
As the industry gets more advanced, all movies have to try to keep up with ever-changing technology because people gain a tolerance as they view the movies with the greatest cinematography. When they see something with great cinematography, it makes the last movie they watched look worse and, consequently, the next film they watch needs to match or beat that. People also gain a tolerance to things that make them scared in the movies. As children, things seem much scarier, but when people age and watch more scary films, they gain a tolerance to the scary aspects.
Today, there is a lot of scary media. For example, American Horror Story is on its third season on FX and is still scaring people. Other shows, such as Supernatural and The Walking Dead, are not that scary to us, but if you showed it to an audience from the ’80s then it would have probably been quite frightened.
As a matter of fact, my younger brother used to be afraid of just looking at the zombies from The Walking Dead, but after a moderate amount of exposure he ca›n now tolerate watching full episodes. Also, watching scary movies that are a little bit older now than they used to be is now laughable compared to the original audience that they terrified.
This has created a specific demand to how scary and well-produced a movie needs to be, and filmmakers have to meet that demand or else the movie will flop.
Abdalah El-Barrad is a freshman studying economics and a columnist for The Post. Do you think movies are scarier now than ever before? Email him at ae738513@ohiou.edu.
