Do You Like Horror?

Absolutely!

Mothman Prophecies was really good. Watched it a bunch of times.

If you like psy movies watch The Game with Michael Douglas. I think around 1997. I have the DVD and rewatch a lot.

For me, the heart of horror is Satan. Not frigging zombies, who haven't been properly portrayed since I Walked With A Zombie. (And that's one of my major problems with pop, teen, quick-buck horror: their makers know literally NOTHING about folklore, legend and the occult.) Not torture-porn. Not psychotics. The Prince of Darkness, Old Scratch, Asmodeos. Submitted for your consideration: Angel Heart, Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist. Honorable Mention: American Gothic on CBS, created by Sean Cassidy and starring Gary Cole, not the much more recent dreck series that made a blasphemy of the show's name. Satan's greatest trick is convincing humankind that he doesn't exist.

I think that a more important question is, not do you like what we call horror, but what draws us to it? I think that horror is popular because it is easy to understand. Somebody gets hacked to bits, and we are glad that it didn't happen to us; plus, knowing what getting hacked to bits requires, on the face of it, zero intelligence; but do YOU have the training, skill, and knowledge of human anonymity to hack someone to bits? That is a rhetorical question, because you don't. In your fantasies you do, but you don't. You would just hack away. You cannot in fact do horror. For you, unless you see yourself as a victim, horror is a vicarious experience, and I believe that living vicariously is sad.

So then we turn to being drawn to horror because of fear, and standing up to fear makes us feel alive. We are adrenaline junkies! We want to defeat the monster! Who the hell would not? But defeating the (supernatural, because, you know, horror) monster takes more than guts. It takes brains, as in Dr. Faustus-level brains, not as in teen, quick-buck horror-movie-shit-luck-bunny-rabbit-out-of-the-hat (okay, deus ex machina)-level brains. An intelligence that is never present in quick-buck teen horror. In the legend of Faust, he mastered every scholarly discipline and only then turned to the occult. He was a learned man, a scholar and professor; he wasn't a kid trying to get laid. Therefore, while I respect the horror genre, and see it as a niche where filmmakers (for example, Sam Raimi, who went on to do the wonderful Music Of The Heart), I feel that most horror is tantamount to porn, or comic book movies, to create a false distinction. There is some great horror, but most of it is McHorror. Do you want to Supersize that?