ehhh horror aint entertaining to me :I

This answer is going to run a bit long.

My preferences for what is scary (and thus entertaining) in a horror movie or television are pretty much exactly as yours: I prefer fear of the unknown and psychological horror over big monsters or maniac killers that keep coming back from the dead.

To me, western horror almost exclusively rely on fear of dying, so all the scares are based around mortal danger, and try to generate the "fight or flight" reaction in the audience; movies such as this tend to be heavy on gore or jump scares for this reason. Japanese horror has the right idea: make the audience uneasy with fear of the unknown, dangers not easily understood, because no physical danger presented in the movie can truly affect them from the safety of their movie seat.

Things that creep me out most tend to revolve around psychological scares with a bit of physical danger and gore mixed in. My favorite horror movie is Stanley Kubrick's The Shining because the film spends most of it's time building suspense for when Jack Torrence inevitably snaps and tries to murder his family at the request of the malevolent spirits haunting the hotel. Everybody knows it's coming, and is powerless to stop it Only a few scenes of gore and one real death appear in the film, but the mood is impenetrable.

My first (and perhaps favorite) horror experience in a video game has to be the early entriesSilent Hill series, which blends the mood and approach of Japanese Horror with occult symbolism, gore, and references taken from Western horror films. Those games seemed to utilize the best of both approaches in their construction. As for Amnesia, I have never played it, although I probably should.

Yep. Original Silent Hill on PS1 is my No.1 scariest game ever.

OMG me too. I bought the collection on Xbox 360 to replace my old games, and was sad that only 2 & 3 were on it, not the first one. First game still has the best scares and "Nightmare World".

I'm not one for the subject of Horror, this comes in full-spectrum from gaming to movies. Though I will at times watch people play said games, just to say is this is scary at all.

Not sure if your a Silent Hill fan (Original Playstation set), The premise of Jacobs Ladder can be scary if one is a Spiritual or religious individual due to how messed up the human mind can be, therefore can create one's outlook on what is their heaven or hell.

Deadspace (Which I only seen glimpses of the game so forgive me), Can be scary at times. I would go into details of this one, but I do lack knowledge on what to go by.

There are many levels of horror, There's the: Your are a Defenseless human trying to survive against Human/Unhuman contacts. OR you are a Prepared Human/thing going into the unknown and ready to face the human/unhuman thing. In the end, it boils down to "How Psychological can we get".

Does that make sense? Cause this is my general outlook on Horror in general.

original Silent Hill on PS1(not Silent Hill: Origin) is my top scariest game of all time.

As for level of horror, if that make sense for you then, sure. As state in this journal, horror is different from person to person.

The reason Amnesia worked so well is because most of the monster jump scares were caused by the player running into them rather than being scripted events. There need to be more games that just set up scary situations instead of scripting the whole experience.

Repetition of situations kills horror games for me. Outlast is guilty of this.

Tried Silent Hill : Shattered Memories? It's got the same chasing problem, but other than that does really interesting things with its story and has pretty good mood.

I like amnesia yet, I still find Fatal frame to be one of the
scariest games I've ever played, it's just something about
how they create the sense of isolation in that game, plus
being an American person playing a game centered in an
old Japanese Temple makes it even more creepier, because
it all become intensely alien to me as well as a lot of
the artifacts that are found throughout that game are really
unusual because the pertain to actual torture devices and
rituals that have based on actual discoveries... giving it a
sense of reality making it all the more scarier.

but I agree what you mean, scary is very debatable and is
only effective to the people who are scared by given
situations that it applies to.

and for most is isolation,
that's why games like fatal frame and amnesia work well,
because these games both play on those strong points,
not to mention both games also do not provide guns
or very much light but simple objects like a lantern
or a flash light with low batteries that create a more
"weak" or "helpless" feeling to the player.

but that's my 2 cents.

Ahhh Fatal Frame. Play one on PS2 and can't finish it. So scary

what!?
I love those games, I play them over and over,
but it's just sad to me that everyone kinda has that
same response...."too scary", and here I am waiting
on something even more scary than that one, or at
least an appropriate updated version of the fatal frame
games.....because fatal frame 4 sucked.

It's a compliment. Beside I didn't own PS2 so I can't finish it lol(play it on my friend's)

oh no,
too bad,
well the first game is available for download on the
playstation network, so at least the games are still
in circulation.

And old Japanese dolls. oh my god. Those things give me nightmare.

I avoid horror at all costs because I'm pretty prone to nightmares if sufficiently terrified. stuff that creeps me out usually tends to stay in my head forever.

so, I don't really watch horror movies or video games.

but in general: anything really visceral and bloody, especially body horror. stuff involving the grotesque alteration of body parts, removal of skin, and ESPECIALLY if it involves the head and face. can't stand things like heads exploding/melting. ugh.

I don't really count slasher (Halloween), gore (Saw) or monster (too many to number) movies as horror movies anymore. Sure, they might disgust or startle me, but not really the deep-down kind of fear. Those kinds of movies are way too overt for my tastes.

A really scary movie or game is really subtle about scaring you, and above all else goes by the principle "Less is more". In a really good horror movie, it takes a *long* time (if ever) before you see the actual threat, but you get *hints* aplenty that there is *something* dangerous going on.

Take "The Ring" (the American version) for example. Throughout that entire movie you have the main character running her ass off trying to find away to save her son, and all the while weirder and weirder shit keeps happening around her. You don't even get to see the actual monster (Samara) until near the end of the movie, and even then you don't get to see her actual *face*, just her figure.

Another example. In the 2012 movie "The Woman in Black" the hero and his partner are in a seriously creepy house at night. The hero is upstairs and the partner is downstairs. We get a shot from downstairs where we see the partner sitting in a doorway down the hall with his back towards us. We just see an empty room with lots of little paintings and mirrors on the wall, the partner in the doorway, and we know there should be nothing downstairs. but then we get a *glimpse*, a *hint* of movement in *one* of the *smaller* mirrors, so small I barely even caught it the first time, and then the camera starts zooming in on the partner. There are over a dozen such instances in that movie, where something tiny but disturbing happens either just out of a character's field of view, or right in his face for just an instance (most of those are jump scares, except a few that completely silent and all the creepier for it).

Something else that's very under-appreciated in horror movies is silence, or the *stopping* of sounds. Absolute silence can be terrifying under the correct circumstances. How many movies have you seen where there's been a moving toy, a swing that's going back and forth without anyone on it, or a rocking horse bucking loudly, and *just* as the character get's too close or is about to touch it, it stops moving? That to me is terrifying, because to me, when the creepy motions or sounds stop in an instant, that means whatever was doing it actively stopped it, because you just got inside it's kill range and something *really* awful is about to happen.

Tell me if this scares you: You're in a small group of people in a really dark house. Some of you have already died to something you didn't see. One of your group decides (a guy, 'cause only guys are that dumb), for whatever reason, to walk through an open door into a really dark room, and within a few footsteps you can't see him. A few more steps and you can't hear him anymore either . You wait. And wait. You can't hear anything. You can't see anything. And then, completely soundlessly, a small pool of blood on the floor starts spreading into the light where you see it. This happens completely in silence.

This implies several things. 1) Your friend is most likely dead. 2) Whatever killed him must have caused some *severe* damage to him for that much blood to leak out. 3) Whatever killed him wasn't bothered by the dark at all, since it obviously found and snuck up on him. 4) It killed him in utter silence really close to you. That would scare the crap out of me.

Bonus scare if it turns out that one of your group vanished without anyone noticing between you seeing the blood and turning around.

Like I said, monsters that only leaves hints of its existence (and sometimes leftovers, usually bits of group members), for a long time before actually showing itself will always win over monsters that show themselves within the first 10 minutes of the movie (Piranha, I'm looking at you).

The 1992 movie "Sphere" is classified as a "science fiction psychological thriller", but it scared the crap out of me far more than the whole Friday the 13th franchise.

Very interesting insight.

As for the situation. I'd be more scary if your friend just disappear without a trace. Living you wonder what happen to him/her(is he dead? is he need rescue?)

The original FEAR did something like this, and indeed, it was intensely unsettling.

While I personally like the Saw movies (I agree there's hardly anything Horror to them, though) I definitely agree with you about the subtler things in movies like Woman In Black. Haven't seen the American Ring yet, but I have the first Ringu on DVD and I love it. Psycho's a good one too.

Anything that isn't stupid run-away baby games like Amnesia. Blegh.

It may not have been the first, but the last scene in the original movie 'Carrie' is the standard to which others aspire. Before that, jump scares were confined to low budget horror movies that featured the obligatory bust victim.

Indeed, horror is extremely subjective. A lot of people say the Resident Evil games were never scary, but they always tied my stomach up in knots with tension. (At least the old ones did, especially RE3 with its randomizers and, of course, Nemesis.) Some people say Dead Space isn't scary either. A lot of people say Doom was never scary, but it filled me with utter dread when it was new (and I still thought Doom 3 was creepy no matter what people say).

So yeah, very subjective.

First Silent Hill is the best one, without a doubt. I played it so many times I never got bored or tired of it. Years later I found that Shattered Memories was almost as terrifying as the first Silent Hill and I loved it.

The Clock Tower videogames were pretty good too. Especially the first one for snes and the sequel for psx.

Another horror game that I found pretty scary is Corpse Party. The graphics are pretty old-school, but the music, voice acting and sound effects are top notch. Certainly a must try for horror games aficionados.

I think the whole jump scare thing is total bullshit. You aren't scaring me, you're startling me. Those are two very different things in my opinion. A real scare stays with you after the movie/game/show or whatever, if all you're doing is throwing random shit out of the shadows, it's going to get annoying fast.

I like the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith for that weirdness they convey; the unsettling, dream-like events coupled with a sense of dread or impending doom is something I rarely can get from movies or games. I get startled easily (even watching LPs) but that's not the same. One of my favorite horror movies is "Knowing".

I remember when I went to see The Blair Witch Project and the theater was packed with people. When it was over most of them were bitching about how unscary it was, while me and my friend were sitting on the curb shivering in shock. ~X333

You might like the film Pontypool; there's almost no jumpscares and the whole film is based around intense dread and the threat is oddly physical and psychological at the same time.