Horror Films Increase Fear Factor
Horror movies today have a tendency to get bloody within the first half hour. The 2007 version of "Halloween," for example, takes less than 30 minutes to make your skin crawl. I am a big fan of slasher movies, but "Halloween" freaked me out to the point where I may never watch it again.
Technical advances in film production methods have changed dramatically over the years, and these advances allow for more realistic bloodshed and death scenes in modern horror films. For example, "Stay Alive," released in 2006, actually uses a video game aspect to kill people. In this movie, a group of kids start playing a video game. As the kids die in the video game, they then die the exact same way in real life. The bad thing about this movie is that it is based on a real person, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who tortured young girls and drained them of their blood to bathe in it because she thought it made her skin look younger. She was eventually locked in a tower in Hungary where she was left to die.
Suzanne Schultz, a UCC psychology professor, told me about a term used in drug therapy called "tolerance" which helps explain the growing intensity in the horror genre. Tolerance refers to the human tendency to need more of a drug to get the same high. She believes that this applies to horror movies as well. "Once you see 'Psycho' so many times, you need to see something scarier," she said. She also explained that fear causes a rush of chemicals, mainly epinephrine, to flow throughout the entire body, creating a chemical thrill for some people.
"Psycho," for instance, which was released in 1960, was rated R, but I have seen that movie, and I have to say that it is not scary at all. I'm sure it was scary when it first came out, but there are far worse things to be scared of now. Janet Leigh, who played Marion Crane in this version of "Psycho," was said to have had some serious issues that resulted from acting in this movie; she was supposedly not able to take showers for many years due to how long she was filming her shower death scene in "Psycho."
Leigh's experience makes me wonder what actors in more recent horror films go through after their last days of filming, especially the younger ones like Bailee Madison who appeared in the 2010 horror film "Don't be Afraid of the Dark" when she was 11-years-old.
The point is that what was scary 50 years ago is now mocked and laughed at for being completely ridiculous. The sad truth, however, is that today's horror movie viewers are getting pleasure out of seeing people in pain.
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