Jaded - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/39/halloween

Honestly, I haven't been scared in a while.

I know that just by saying that I'm going to wind up in some super weird situation that makes me poop my pants, but really, things aren't that scary because there's a difference between horror and gore, and sadly a lot of fear based things are based more off of unsettling sights or sounds, rather than something that legitimately is frightening.

Let's go with a big one that really pushed the gore up to maximum - Saw

These movies are gorey. There's no real other way to say it. They play off the blood and guts of the horror genre like it's going out of style, and then they just try to one up themselves every time they do a new entry into the series. The guts, the gore, the painful death isn't scary, it's just shocking, but shocking isn't fear. It might rustle my feathers a bit, make me uncomfortable, or anything like that, but it's not the feeling of fear.

Even things with media that relies on the jump scare (Paranormal Activity for movies, and Dead Space for games quickly come to mind) the jump scare is effective at first, but it's not frightening or scary to have something randomly jump out at me and cause my body to jump. That's normal reactions to anything. You can have me on a normal day at work and something jump out at me and of course it's going to get my heart going faster, BECAUSE THAT'S NORMAL. If my heart didn't beat faster or get my adrenaline pumping just a bit when a random thing lurches towards me I would be dead when it actually matters. That reaction does not mean fear, that reaction is a simple human response to needing to make an instant reaction to making sure that the thing jumping at you isn't going to kill you.

You know what is scary? Mental, psychological based, horror. You want me afraid of the shadows? You want me to jump at the sight of fog? You want me to get the jitters any time I hear static on the radio? You want me to permanently fear a specific thing? Get in my head and play with the psychology of a topic.

The tricky part to psychological horror is that it isn't as universal as gore or jump scare. What can cause one person a lot of fear and horror through an experience can make another laugh, and that's where I start to draw the line between good horror and bad horror. When someone creates something that is truly frightening it doesn't just scare you, it scares most of the people that come into contact with it.

I've talked about this before, but the one that to this date will be my horror go to is a game. I think games have a good way of playing with the psychological aspect of fear and horror because the audience is involved with it. Silent Hill 2 is a game that will stick with me mentally for a long time. I can (and have previously) gone on about it for a long time, but simply it's a blend of a lot of different elements all coming together to make one mentally terrorizing game that is also entertaining and riveting to play. It's not based in gore, and it's not based in jump scare, it's based entirely on getting into your mind and toying with your brain.