Haunting of Hill House is more of a drama than a horror show, unfortunately.
Red Letter Media did a good review on it, tbh

But they still recommended it. Then again, Jay adored The Witch, a movie that basically epitomizes the "dour drama masquerading as horror" genre.

Yeah they recommended it, but not as a horror-centric show from what I recall. They said it's well made, but not too heavy on the horror.

Horror lost its edge in the early 2000's sadly.

And like most stuff these days, its all rehash's/reboots and terrible takes on characters that humanize them or ruin the mystique behind them.

Example, the Rob Zombie Halloween remakes. Now mind you I am no fan of Micheal Myers even though I have seen all of the Halloween movies, Jason all the way, but the remakes humanize Myers. Hell, the first one does a good job at making him look like a misunderstood protagonist instead of a villain what with every one in the damn movie being a massive asshole in one way or another.

But then he was barely in the second one, we got to see his face, AND he SPOKE. All things that go against the very nature of "The shape".

There are a few decent ones out there, but, most are just lame now.

Yeah, Rob Zombie's Halloween movies fell hard into the modern horror sensibilities, making every character a horrible person so you don't care who dies, or you actively enjoy seeing them get killed rather than feeling scared for them.

Yup, used to be that the asshole character was the one that everyone knew was gonna die. Typically in the most horrible way. But when every character EXCEPT the killer is an asshole?, might as well just throw them all in the woodchipper.

On a slightly unrelated note, have you ever seen "The Haunting"? The 1962 version, not that horrible CGI remake. There is very little special effects, but it managed to do what most jumpscare-laden gore-fests don't do - it managed to legitimately give me chills.

Yeah, it's a great movie, but I haven't seen it in ages, unfortunately. It never seems to show up on any streaming services.

I have a fondness for that CG-laden remake, but mostly because... fuuuuuck, that HOUSE was gorgeous, and I want to live in it forever. Forget the people and those goofy ghosts, that house! Woo!

There are some horror games out there that I like, but I haven't been inclined to watch any of the more recent horror movies at all for some time.

Which games might those be?

Even though it's not nearly as scary now as when it originally came out for me, Amnesia is one of my favorites. Detention is another, and while it's still in early access, Visage is one that creeped me out some just from playing about half an hour. I remember that last journal you did on what your thoughts on horror games were too, and odds are none of these will change your mind, but to me I still enjoy games like that.

Have you heard of Betrayal at Hill House? It is a build as you go horror themed board game where sooner or later, one of 50 scenarios can happen where a single player becomes a traitor, and everything from big boss monsters to hoards of monsters can happen, and the Traitor controls them and it becomes a fight of who will win; the Traitor or the Survivors. I enjoy when I get to play with my friends, and while it's no movie, I at least thought it worth suggesting to you.

Sounds neat enough, but sadly, board games require friends, and I don't have any of those. XD

If you have Steam, there is a lot of versions folks have made for Tabletop Simulator in the Workshop! So you can still enjoy the fun without the table.

I rather liked the Haunting of hill house, loved that they started and ended the series with the quote from the original movie which I loved. I do agree it’s more of a supernatural drama than horror per se. I guess we look different things in horror movies, what I like is the psychological threat, the implied menace and mistery, but I don’t like body horror or gore (and least of all, jump scares, cheapest of tactics). I prefer the menace to be unknowable, once you know what it is and seen it, it becomes just a chase/ escape “let’s team up and defeat the monster, gang!”

Mind you there ain’t nothin’ wrong with liking that! In fact one thing that miffs me about my dislike of gore is that I don’t get to enjoy D’Argento’s movies which I heard are really good!

In any case, you seen Hereditary?

https://youtu.be/V6wWKNij_1M

I mean, Alien isn't just my favorite horror movie, it's my favorite movie, period. So I have a certain fondness for horrible monsters picking people off. Most movies just can't do it with the same level of production value. XD

Still, I love The Shining too, which is more subtle. However, it has that oppressive sense of isolation and the dread associated with Jack's increasing madness. I don't feel dread in Hill House. I feel annoyance from all these unlikable characters.

And I never saw Hereditary, but isn't that mostly a family drama too?

Alien is an awesome example of the unknowable menace I mentioned above. When Giger was designing the creature, the director wanted them to have eyes and Giger said “No, it’s far more menacing if they have no eyes, you can’t tell what they’re thinking or feeling” . Makes them more... alien

And even when you have fully seen the creature, your sense of foreboding and dread never goes away. Alien is truly one of the best designed horror beastie there is!

Hereditary... well no.. one of the rare cases where the trailer actually misleads the viewer.. or so the wiki says. There’s actual supernatural shenanigans about. I haven’t seen the movie yet (a friend recomended it to me) and since I don’t mind spoilers I went and read the wiki about it. Seemed interesting enough with some cool camera tricks.

And now for admiting one of my deepest, most embarassing secrets... I haven’t seen The Shining yet! It’s been on my bucket list for fuck knows how long, but I never got around to see it! (interestingly enough I’ve read there’s a sequel in the making supervised by Stephen King.)

The Shining is fun. Incredibly well shot and acted. Nice and fun, but it won't be mind-blowing or anything, especially since you've gotten a drip-drip-drip of 40 years of spoilers.

Stephen King hated it, and it works for probably all the reasons that actually faithful Stephen King adaptations suck; The Shining has interesting characters with interesting motivations. Generally, Steven King cannot write good characters. His characters really suck. He's fantastic at plot and world building, but then he'll come up with stupid characters and burden them with ridiculous daddy issues or other weirdness. Remember the Langoliers, that horrible TV movie with some of the worst CG ever? Ok, aside from the CG, the premise and plot was someone interesting, but again the characters sucked so the movie sucked. That's what a faithful King adaptation is like.

So if the sequel to the Shining is being supervised by Stephen King, that might not be a good sign. :-D

That's probably why when MattPat did his Film Theory on an interconnected King universe he determined that people Shine because of trauma. King just can't make a character without deep trauma, especially daddy issues. He seems to have warped his conception of cosmic horror into this idea not of an oppressive father god per se, but more a generic Daddy icon or archetype, the stern, imperious and Mold-Form Prime example of The Adult. Mothers will be comforting, and if they aren't they're evil monsters like in Carrie. But fathers or other older male Daddy creatures will be out there, being driven insane by the cosmic horror that is The Adult and all Adult things. Adults who can't be children, and who lack any chance of being able to Shine are subsumed by the horrible darkness that is IT, or which IT is a fragment or perhaps dominant characteristic of the gestalt. IT is The Adult, the bad Daddy that hurts children. Look at some of the kids from IT, who were traumatized by Adult ideas like sexual assault, body shame, racism. Adult things hurt the children who Shine and then try to kill them. So... it really gets old because he's a one-trick pony. But he tapped into something that people buy over and over again. He's like a Lifetime or Hallmark movie. He has one trick but the rubes eat it up.

In fairness he’s aware of it. Think I once read an interview excerpt in which the interviewer asks him how he feels about being in the great halls of the horror writer genre, and he said he doesn’t understand it, “people like Wes Craven and others make delicious meals, while I’m just the mcdonalds of the horror genre”

Or something to that extent. The feel I got was that he’s flattered so mang people like his stuff, but doesn’t really understand why, when he thinks there are so many better writers than him.

My officemate strongly recommends the Haunting at Hill House. I haven't seen it yet.
She did warn me that the first few episodes of the series are VERY slow. Intentionally so, but that the stuff there informs the rest of the series. We'll see!

But I tend to hate 95% of horror anyway.

Yeah, horror is probably my favorite genre, but I dislike so much of it. The Babadook, The Void and Halloween 2018 are probably the only horror movies I've enjoyed in the last half-decade or so.

Having finished, I ended up really liking it, even though I was pretty ambivalent after the first few hours. It's 10 hours, and I think they could have cut it down to 8 hours or so, since the series does...well, it doesn't meander, but it does take awhile to get to its various points. It doesn't ever go _hard_ horror, which is good, because hard horror sucks. It really does, and as much as I used to like it, I've lost most of my respect for the horror genre. This series is psychological horror, like John Carpenter's The Thing when the monster isn't on screen. There are a few jump scares, and towards the end it gets more sadistic than you'd think after watching the first few hours. Not in a torture porn Saw/Hostel method, because again, those types of movies suck. It doesn't go down that route, which again, I'm happy for. It doesn't need to. And I'll be damned, but I don't think there were any annoying plot holes that bothered me, even though I thought there were some major ones going into even the last half hour of the show (turns out, I was wrong).

Is there human misery? Sure, there is. But the house feeds on you, even from afar. And that causes some nasty problems..
I like TWD, but writing-wise, this is definitely a league above.

This series is going to stick with me for awhile. After watching episodes.. 5/6/7 or so, I have to admit I kept the phone flashlight on to illuminate my way to bed, which I haven't had to do in a long time, then I had pretty amazing dreams, which I sadly can't remember.

I actually pushed through my incredible anxiety to try and go back to my old days of loving cheap horror movies by just going on a NetFlix dive and watching a movie that had a suitably curious premise and one image looked to have excellent practical monster effects. it was a crock of shit wrapped up in sociopolitical fallout from the Balkan war. The monster may or may not have had good practical effects. I don't know. It was on screen for like... a minute and mostly in shadow. I can't even tell you what it looked like. Long ago I realized that horror movies are just mostly bland morality tales with a weird skew that either need good practical gore effects to invite commentary and artistic judgement or REALLY good practical monster effects, with a bonus if the monster are hot or sexy. For example, I rather enjoyed The Howling: Marsupials because the fem-were-marsupial was hot, AND she gave birth during the movie, largely on-screen. Anyhow... never was "The Maus" on NetFlix unless you really love being reminded of the Balkan war and can accept an in-movie kill count of TWO. Plus a dog. Fuck you horror movies. Rule number one: Don't kill pets you bastards.

That always bugs me though: you can kill any number of people in any horrible, twisted, depraved ways you want and audiences will eat it up, but kill a single dog and people will FREAK OUT and never shut up about it. Meanwhile, the original Friday the 13th had someone's pet snake get chopped in half and killed for real, on camera, but nobody bats an eye because hey, a dog didn't get fake-killed! :P

I like reaction videos. It's a weakness of mine. I'm in bliss if my favorite reactors are reacting to Game of Thrones. So... I've seen many a reaction to the Red Wedding.

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

It's interesting how similar the reactions are. People are shocked when Talisa Stark is stabbed, stunned when Rob and Cat are shot, but they still have hope... until the soldiers kill the wolf Grey Wind. When you hear the wolf yelp, it's like.. all hope drains out of the viewer, and they're just dead inside.

Seriously? Really killed? Fuck that. That's some Amazon Cannibal shit right there. That went out with the 70's. Brad Jones gets in a few knocks against that, which is why I respect him so much.

So maybe F13 is a classic. I don't really care: just thinking about it makes me ill.

It was a long drawn out drama with some jump scare sprinkled in. Had enough in it to keep me watching though I was also playing some game at the same time.
The ending was... well, it was ... just ... because where the fuck are the answers to the why beyond the family drama.

Then again, when you watch the news, can you really disagree with that sentiment?

: /

But that's what I'm saying: I'm constantly being made aware of this fact in my day-to-day life, so I don't need to be reminded again in my entertainment preferences; I get it already.

The new Halloween was pretty nice, although that's technically a thriller. And although a bit old now, you can never go wrong with Event Horizon.

Event Horizon gets a pretty bad reputation, but I've always been a fan. It's about the closest we'll get to a watchable Doom movie. XD

And I'm a big fan of the original Halloween so I had to go see the new one. I'd describe most of it as fun rather than scary, but the finale was definitely tense.

I think Event Horizon has a pretty good first 2/3s. I think it falls apart at the end, majorly, when Sam Neill turns into an unstoppable slasher. I found that aspect to be fucking laaaaame. And that he could be seduced so easily just didn't ring true to me either. But as atmospheric horror, it's pretty good.

But my favorite "horror" movies of all time are Poltergeist (light horror), The Thing (heavy horror, does atmospheric well), and Evil Dead 2 (the perfect blend of demonic horror and the right touch of humor).

The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting (both versions), The House on Haunted Hill...

It's all starting to blur together. On a slightly related note, have you watched many screwball comedies? I think you'd like a few.

Bizarrely, The Haunting (of Hill House) and House on Haunted Hill seem to be entirely unrelated. There's also Hell House, which is one of my favorite horror novels.

And I'd need some examples of screwball comedies before I can confirm whether I'd like them. XD