Bug

(This post is coming perhaps a bit late, since the movie's pretty much gone from theaters by now, but bear with me)

One of the main problems with the average horror movie is that they spend more time trying to startle you than actually frighten you. I guess I can understand this, I mean spending lots of time building up a tense mood, slowly getting under the audience's skin, that takes a lot of work and finesse, and can easily be ruined in theaters by one asshole sitting near you deciding to ruin the mood by talking or laughing or something. It's much easier to just make a horror movie that's intent on startling you a bunch of times -- having people and animals jumping out from off camera while the soundtrack suddenly screams in your face once every ten minutes or so, well, that's much less effort. It's also much less likely to be ruined by obnoxious people in the audience, since this way there really isn't any kind of mood for them to ruin in the first place.

This is kind of my long-winded way of saying how annoying it is that what's almost certainly going to go down as the best horror movie of the year, Bug, completely flopped in theaters. At last check it hadn't even cleared ten million dollars, and doesn't look like it's going to. That is despite this being one of the most intense, truly scary movies I have ever seen. I'm a pretty jaded person when it comes to violence. I've seen so many horror movies (it is my favorite genre, after all) that most gore doesn't make me bat an eye. There is one scene roughly halfway through this movie, however, that, while really not all that bloody, to be perfectly honest, made me squirm in my seat as it was happening. The last twenty to thirty minutes of the movie, there's (almost) no violence at all, and it's still some of the most intense filmmaking I've seen in a very long time. Not to ruin the movie at all, but it's pretty obvious right from the beginning that there really isn't any external threat coming to harm the two main characters, they're just spiraling into madness together and you get very concerned about the increasing likelihood that they're going to badly hurt themselves in their frenzy. When it was done, I walked out of that theater almost shaking, it had gotten to me so much (since I was doing a double feature that day, I then watched its greatly inferior polar opposite, 28 Weeks Later, which was a complete waste of my time, but that's a story for another day). Even then, when I had gone to like a noon showing so I was one of only two or three groups of people in the whole audience, there was still someone there who was talking and complaining about it the whole way through, I guess because it's not manly to actually get scared by anything so he felt he had to show how tough he was by breaking the tension for himself and his unfortunate partner throughout like the waste of oxygen that he was. I hope he was in such a bad mood because he has syphilis and couldn't afford treatment so he was just stoically waiting for his dick to rot off.

Just so this can be an interactive rant, what do you guys like to see in your horror movies? What ones have you seen that you really love and wish were more well-known, and what ones became famous that absolutely didn't deserve to be? Let's hear it.