As Halloween approaches, the WriteMovies team give their list of favorite horror films and why they love them. This time, Ian Kennedy on BLACK SWAN as a horror and why horrors struggle to scare sometimes.
I like the psychological ones best, they can really get under our skin – isn’t BLACK SWAN a kind of horror movie really? – but ones that did also grab me for other reasons were THE DESCENT and the modern version of THE HILLS HAVE EYES, because both find convincing justifications for the horrors that their characters stumble into and become trapped by. My problem with most horror movies is often being convinced that this could really be happening (especially in the sequels, when the villains have come back from the dead!), and I didn’t have that issue with these two at all. For a long time I thought THE DESCENT was doing such a good job of creating an unnerving mood and scenario that the monsters were going to be unnecessary – there’s plenty fear enough just putting a team of cavers into an unexplored cave system where they get trapped, they could have just played that out and saved the monsters for the sequel. The fact it was a team of can-do, adventure-seeking women was another neat step for giving it distinctiveness – even if it chose the weakest one to be the protagonist in the end.
Check out more of our favorite horror films here.
So far our favorites are: ALIEN, THE HAUNTING, [REC], BLACK SWAN, THE DESCENT, THE HILLS HAVE EYES…
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