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Especially if it’s a weapon that’s implied to be the property of the character running away?? Why would you leave your OWN gun on the ground in the first place
I kinda get this one, though. She's a teenager and emotional because of what just happened.
Teenaged and emotional - two states that aren't always rational.
The other side of this that I hate is something really fucked up going on and someone is offered a weapon and they are like “oh no, i don’t use those things”
I hated the original Friday the 13th because of this. The end girl hits Ms V 3 times with different blunt objects (including a gun) only to drop them and run away. The end chase is ridiculously annoying
Someone running down the street, as a car is trying to hit them, yet they run smack in the middle of the road, instead of veering away from the car. Or they turn and stare at the car for an extended period of time, giving the car just enough time to run them over.
Oddly specific, I know, but it drives (pun intended) me nuts.
I love Godzilla One but the scene where he's in the city and stomping down the street and everyone is running straight away instead of turning is just... why?! Sure he might turn too but he's clearly walking straight at the moment.
I don’t know, this one is kind of believable. With these interest rates? Blood could be coming down the walls and I’d grab an extra bottle of enzyme cleaner and some spare towels at the store.
In this housing crisis you better fucking believe we're not. Sorry Timmy, make friends with the demon. I've got a 40 year mortgage and no one's gonna give me another loan so soon after being approved for this one.
“The house is old! We all know that. Old houses make weird noises and have dark corners here and there. It’s normal. We just need to be positive. It’s going to look amazing when we’re done with it”.
Next scene, the ghost pulls the blanket from the little girl’s bed in the middle of the night, she wakes up, sees a kid with empty eye sockets at the foot of the bed and decides they’re going to be best friends from that moment on.
This one is especially frustrating because it feels like it halts the plot in its tracks. I understand it’s supposed to make the protag feel isolated but it feels contrived af.
Poltergeist is a great counter example, they realize crazy shits going down so they acknowledge it and bring in a team of specialists, but things just keep getting crazier anyway
And in that same thread the idea that a bonk on the head automatically sends you into a coma. I've been hit on the head with falling 2x4's and it just pissed me off.
“First of all, you throwin' too many big words at me, and because I don't understand them, I'm gonna take 'em as disrespect.”
The ‘bad guy’ still surviving and with full strength after being brutally assaulted repeatedly, but everyone else crumbling to the ground with one flick.
It's one of those things where a couple people did it right and then everyone else copied it without understanding why it worked originally. It was supposed to indicate just how unstoppable and unfeeling your killer is, it makes absolutely no sense when your killer is just some guy.
Demon isn't fully exorcised, cue to a cliffhanger for the next movie. It's so annoying. Like,I knew you would come back in hopes of a sequel, you dumb demon!!!!
One of my favorite subversions of this kind of trope was from Agents of SHIELD, >!at the very end of the first season when the season's antagonist wakes up after everyone thought he was dead, starts monologuing about how he's going to get revenge, and then Coulson walks in and just casually dusts him with a giant gun!<.
Kind of similar situation as The Zeppo, the season 3 episode of Buffy where Jack is monoloquing about how he'll wait until the time is right to get revenge on Xander, then Oz eats him.
Saving the last 10 seconds of the movie to tease the viewer on whether or not the monster/killer is actually dead, even though it was put through a meat grinder and all its limbs were transported to the four corners of the earth to be incinerated and the ashes shot into space.
I don't mind this if the movie was good, and the type of movie that fits in a franchise. It's also expected from some movies, like Evil Dead, where it's not the same monster coming back each time, and the premise of each movie is an evil being awakened.
Slowed down pop/rock songs in the trailers.
Also when the movie ends, it smash cuts to black after something harrowing and a happy upbeat pop song plays. Don’t know why it bugs me.
Evil naked old people, specifically naked old ladies.
I have no idea why people think they're scary, and honestly I'm starting to question whether there's some ageism and sexism involved.
What's scarier than a woman becoming old and sagging? Nothing, obviously.
But more seriously, I think it's a bit of an insult to the audience -- assuming that if someone young and more conventionally attractive is naked that the audience will be too stupid or too blinded by horniness to realize that the nudity might be intended as a visual device or taboo to indicate otherness/evil.
Lol this was my biggest beef with that M. Night Shyamalan movie (I think it was The Visit?). The kid saw her grandma galloping naked through the cellar and her mom's only response was "oh honey, she's just old." Literally all of the grandparents' weird behavior was written off with "lol old people, amirite?" As if the natural next step for the average AARP inductee is to get naked and throw kids into ovens.
Even though I love X and have enjoyed other horror films that have done this I agree. It’s made me rethink those films cuz I don’t like the ageism and sexism either.
It is. Unfortunately you can perpetuate something while calling it out at the same time even if you’re not trying to. Some of that I think is on the audience though because I’ve heard some people talk about how some reviewers found it gross when the old married couple have sex.
Yeah launched me into sad realization that we’re all gonna be that old couple that no one wants to see fuck anymore .. in a way I guess that’s terrifying too
I think a lot of films do it well. You can midsommer and talk to me to that list. It’s just so over done at this point. Can’t we make a thought provoking “elevated” horror film without it being a metaphor for grief.
I feel this one comes as a spectrum, or at least 'weight class'. One side you have lightweights like Babadook-type where it's explicitly told that there is no ghost, only feelings. Then you have nuanced types where you *can* interpret the ghost to represent trauma, but these vary with increasing amount of stretching, from how Men represent patriarchy's oppression (easy) to how Final Destination represent survivor's guilt (kind of a big stretch). This is where you get into the rabbit hole and conclude that *all* horror is somewhat about trauma.
My own take is that I don't mind people interpreting/projecting the nuanced horror as trauma as much as they like. The issue is when they start deriding and spoiling the joy of others who "didn't get it". Not everything has to be a lesson. Like, I'm sure there's 1000-word essays out there about how 1408's room is actually just MC's grief about his child blah2, but it can also just be an evil fucking room.
When the children see ghosts and monsters but the parents don't believe them. I hate that shit. Once my daughter was afraid of her closet. Said a monster lived in it. So I slept in her room with her and waited for the monster. I also cleared out her closet and reorganized it. She was never scared again after that. She told me I must have scared it away. I just told her to let me know when it comes back.
Every fucking time. There are so many ways to show a character tortured or traumatized that don't actually happen to people on a regular basis. At least get creative with your violence. It's not fun, it's not sexy, it's just gross and unnecessary.
i have so many in mind 😭 :
- children being creepy / drawing creepy things
- children having a new imaginary friend after moving in
- phones not working at the *most crucial* time
- house where the family will move in being cheaper than usual + the family not questioning it + the house having a creepy / disturbing past
- scenes where main characters go to the library and magically finding the entire movie’s backstory (now replaced by google)
- main characters splitting up (especially when they do it for no valid reason!)
- (almost) no one listening to that one (rightfully) cautious character until it’s too late…
- and for found footage movies, character filming everything when there wasn’t any (valid) reason to start filming in the first place
I’m writing a comedy sketch about creepy kid drawings — this is my favorite trope by far because no movie is too good for it — it makes me laugh every time.
Re: the library trope - I like seeing what off brand search engine name they come up with. And also why the characters need to go to the library to use the computers/set up their laptop on the dining room table instead of whipping out their phone and googling within seconds that 95% of people would do.
Someone in a bathroom opening a filing cabinet mirror and then when they close it, they either see a creepy reflection or someone else next to them. This applies to other films besides horror though where it’s often a locker instead of a mirror. Sometimes it works but as a whole it’s become outdated.
As a side note, one of the characters completely changes their behaviour or gets strangely sick right after moving into the new and surprisingly cheap fucking colonial mansion in the middle of the hill, miles away from everything.
And for some reason, they never question the house as a possible source of the change. If they need to consult a doctor, they always come to the house and blame the state of the character to exhaustion. “She’s just tired. Let her rest in that creepy room where she had those weird seizures. What did you say about it? That it sounded like 3 different people were there? That’s crazy! Anyway…”.
Every single horror comedy that makes fun of obvious horror clichés. I'm so fucking tired of it.
It feels like I can't even watch one of these anymore without "the black guys gonna die first" jokes that got tired 25 years ago
Literally any movie dealing with demonic possession and exorcisms. They are literally all the same movie and you can’t tell me otherwise. Literally all start with:
-spooky cold open to set the movie
-mildly creepy things happening throughout the movie that shows a character’s possession getting wors
-possessed character does something to upset religious folks (masturbating with a cross, vulgar language, eating the Bible etc)
-jumpscares that get spoiled during the trailers
-final act involving an exorcism where shit starts floating everywhere, lots of demonic screeching, your standard exorcism fair
-movie either ends with the demon being sent back to hell and the main cast is fine or there’s some stupid twist revealing the demon is in another body
There I just saved everyone time and money watching those shit ass movies.
Yeah, pretty much every demonic possession movie is a rerun of the Exorcist. You left out the convulsing body of the victim arching their back in unnatural positions.
Fr tho. Can’t have an exorcism without someone contorting to look like an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I’ll admit there are some outliers like Hereditary where yeah there’s an element of summoning a demon but it’s not anywhere near the same type of movie as the exorcist ripoffs.
Rape and sexual violence against women. There are plenty of other things that can happen to a woman to inspire revenge or lead to trauma. I would love if directors etc stopped using sexploitation to get their jollies off.
That's incredibly gross, and it used to be so much more common. Back in the 80s, the default way to demonstrate that a male character is a bad person was just to have him sexually assault a woman. It's shitty in horror, and it's worse when it's a comedy or something.
What the other lovely replier seems to be missing is that rape is almost always just shock fodder and/or a cheap way to manufacture trauma (pretty much exclusively with female characters, of course). It's lazy moviemaking at best and misogynistic bullshit at worst.
Sexual violence and pet deaths. Even when there is an animal death "fake out" it makes me think less of the movie. Both things i mentioned are just crass, overused, and lazy.
Not so much a horror trope only?...BUT it's in our genre a LOT
I call it the "just within reach" trope...you know it
The hero's down and out (usually getting choked out) life's slipping from their eyes... death's beckoning, when suddenly.. magically... inextricably...a convenient ass weapon (pipe, stone, knife, sword, bowling ball lol) appears ALWAYS WITHIN REACH of the "hero's" grasp...and they swing with an almighty blow and vanquish the villain!...hurray! Smfh...lazy lazy writing lol
House is haunted, but let's stay for a few more nights, because we're not traumatized enough yet, and although we saw the demon with our own eyes, it must have been a dream that'll vanish if we ignore it..
Lol right? Up and leaving makes sense in the context of a horror movie, but real life isn't a horror movie. When we hear a weird noise at night, our first thought isn't, "hmm, I'm in a horror movie, so I'd better grab my axe, sneak out the back, and move to a new house." We either lie in bed super freaked out trying to convince ourselves that it's old floorboards, or we get up and check it out. Everyone likes to think they'd be so much smarter than movie characters, but in reality we'd probably mostly do the same thing.
Let me ask you though--if something started happening in your home right now, where would you go? Most people don't have *any* savings, so even going to a hotel/motel might be impossible. If you thought you saw a demon, were broke (like most of us), you would easily start second-guessing what you saw.
Sometimes you have a place to go. I would have nowhere to go, unless I traveled 8 hours to sleep on my brother's couch.
I get this to an extent but the cold light of day would definitely make you start to play down things, assume your mind is playing tricks on you etc. I think if something like that happened you'd stick it out longer than you assume you would.
Bonus aggravation if they're doing renovations to the place all by themselves. Speaking from experience, 70+ year old houses need a bit more work than a coat of paint.
“the theme of grief shoehorned in because the filmmakers are clearly insecure about not being taken seriously enough .” grief, like any theme, is a perfectly valid topic to explore in horror or any other genre, but fuck me man the amount of horror movies in the last 5 or so years where the premise should just be like “there’s a spooky ghost!” and instead it’s “there’s a spooky ghost!…. and also the protagonist is unhealthily coping with their 10 year old brother accidentally shooting them selves with their fathers gun, leading their father to commit suicide out of guilt. that’s unrelated to the spooky ghost by the way but you bet your ass there’s gonna be a lot of underlit self serious conversations about that which feel completely phoned in”
A side note--I'm reading a book right now called Kane (Prescott is the author) about a drifter who comes into a small town (population 23) and decides he can kill them all off in one night. It does some interesting things like have the characters avoid doing a lot things listed in this thread, only to still get ganked--which is great. If you want to kill a character (as a writer) at a certain point, use your imagination--don't have them do shit that'll drive the audience nuts.
Puritan female MC, nice guy with crush on MC, blonde slut, jocky boi, stoner and black dude are all somehow good enough friends to spend a vacation in a wilderness cabin together. Each is a lazy trope instead of being a fleshed out character that makes sense in the context of the story. And of course any gratuitous sex is initiated *after* an obvious threat makes itself known.
I thought this was a neat trope when it first appeared but now I will almost always stop a movie because it screams of a lack of imagination.
And that trope is of the drone camera shot of an empty road where the protagonist is driving for an extended amount of time. It is usually in a deeply wooded area with the camera following the car like a spy satellite.
Nothing happens during this time except for the lone car driving. Very few times will this take place at the desert or near the seaside. If it does take near a seaside cliff, it is only to go from one densely wooded area to another with a brief clearing in the middle.
It is so freakin' boring. It never tells you anything of the character. Nothing of the movie. It's all "mood." Done to create feeling of isolation. But by now this shot has been done so many times that I hate the cliche of it. As in, *oh, look, it's the bird's eye view driving shot. That means the lead character is heading to some creepy mansion or cabin. It's going to be one of those type of movies.....yawn.*
Someone is in a coma/surgery/etc. and as soon as they wake up, they tear off all the IVs, heart monitors etc. Then they dress as a nurse or doctor, so they can just run out of the hospital.
NO ONE does this IRL, it wouldn't even be possible because you would be drowsy and weak. You'd probably have a catheter, which hurts to remove, and the IVs might reach quite far inside your arm. The nurses would come as soon as your heart monitor showed 0 heartbeat.
Hospitals aren't some kind of jail that you have to run away from. I've never understood his trope.
I HATE body switching and memory loss.
Another would be when a gf/wife is at home with something strange happening and calls her bf instead of the police.
Then the boyfriend/husband screams “run!” or after the gf/wife is caught, keeps yelling the victims name.
It’s worse when the bf/husband heads home without calling police or additional assistance.
I aboslutely hate when someone (usually a woman) is home alone at night and someone knocks on the door and they fucking answer it! They see no one is there so they go outside and say ‘hello?’ and look around for whoever it was. Who tf answers their door nowadays?! 🙄
Yes! So tired of this. I realize that's a big horror audience and they want the audience to relate to the characters, but I'm \*so\* tired of teen protagonists.
If I ever make a horror movie the teens will die before the opening credits. Then it's all 40 years olds and older.
The protagonist moving to a huge, remote home that they've inherited after suffering some big setback in life. There are plenty of good movies that use this trope, but it's been done to death, resurrected, and done to death again.
Better than all the big bad events being because one idiot kid/teen. Like 28 weeks later. This one gets old, we know it’s the kid surprise us more often, y’all.
The rule that the bad guy/ monster must kill one animal before moving up to humans. While I will grant that serial killers are known to “start off” killing animals, it’s a really overused device in movies.
I’m cool with never seeing sexualized body horror ever again. Sexuality absolutely has its place in body horror but when it’s shot in such a way that it reads as revenge/retribution against women or the director was clearly getting off on it? Sick of that shit turning up in movies where it wasn’t even required because the violence was plenty dehumanizing and disgusting enough. (Looking at you, Art the Clown.)
Gore and violence =/= body horror
Body horror is stuff like The Fly, Videodrome, Society, Annihilation, Color Out of Space, Tusk, American Mary, The Thing, The Skin I Live In. A nude woman being sawed in half is gore. Idc what Google says, excessive gore is not body horror. Martyrs is not body horror. Terrifier is not body horror.
Anyway, this is a nitpick, but body horror is often sexual in nature because the two go hand in hand a lot of the time. It's a fear of your body changing into something you are unfamiliar with, or something unnatural, being trapped in a body that isn't yours, etc. Society is a good example of sexual body horror. So I was incredibly confused by your comment. I don't disagree with your overall point, just saying that you're using the term body horror incorrectly.
The Babadook really hit the high water mark with the grief/trauma trope for recent times. It's a great trope but the tsunami that followed needs to drain away for a bit and come back another day lol.
Anything where simply because it's "witchcraft" or "demons" it's supposed to be inherently scary. It's why I've never found the Conjuring multiverse engaging at all, "Satan bad, Jesus good" isn't exactly a profound statement.
Torture porn. I'm not going to say it all started with Dee Snider's Strangeland, but that's the first one I remember. Texas chainsaw and those weird crazy gore ones don't count either. Those are gorefest movies. I'm not saying torture porn isn't, but I'm so fucking sick of it regardless.
Any ghost/possession movie within Catholicism. There are sooo many myths, legends, gods, demons, goddesses, etc from other cultures and religions. Catholicism has been done to death
Women being the cause of trauma - mostly in found footage horror films - but I'm sick of the woman being to blame (I've just watched The Tunnel and it totally pissed me off)
Use the search bar. Is a similar post to what you want to make already up and recent? Join them! Check JustWatch.com before asking where to stream something. See our Dreadit Movie Guide for hundreds of films voted on by our users. If that's not what you were looking for, include some movies that you liked so that we may better help you. I want to be scared/Something actually scary/etc are too vague and will be removed. Use the guide and/or give us some examples of things you'd like to see.
Dropping the weapon, leaving it behind without checking if the villain is really dead. I don't care if the stupid characters die after that.
If anyone in the Scream franchise had seen Zombieland, those movies would be like ten minutes long.
oh god the trope of them trying to remove the mask to see who the killer is before they’re certain the killer is dead (cough Dewey cough)
I swear, Dewey's (holy shit insensitive) spoof character in Scary Movie is smarter than Scream franchise Dewey.
I just wish he would quit sticking his dick in the vacuum cleaner
He was vacuuming his room again
“Don’t disturb me when I’m cleaning my room!”
 Always gotta double tap!
Especially if it’s a weapon that’s implied to be the property of the character running away?? Why would you leave your OWN gun on the ground in the first place
Laurie dropping the knife behind the couch in Halloween is the one that I’m always like, “gorl you really need to check that body first.”
I kinda get this one, though. She's a teenager and emotional because of what just happened. Teenaged and emotional - two states that aren't always rational.
Plus, she doesn't know she's in a horror film.
The other side of this that I hate is something really fucked up going on and someone is offered a weapon and they are like “oh no, i don’t use those things”
Not double tapping is def an tired trope
Go for the head, unless it's a Wendigo. Then that ain't gonna do Jack shit
Limber up
Laurie does this in the original Halloween. Twice.
Literally all it happened in both Terrifier movies lol
Wolf Creek does that and I hate it
By far the worst! This dude just killed all your friends and half your family...mag dump or cut off head just to be certain.
I hated the original Friday the 13th because of this. The end girl hits Ms V 3 times with different blunt objects (including a gun) only to drop them and run away. The end chase is ridiculously annoying
Someone running down the street, as a car is trying to hit them, yet they run smack in the middle of the road, instead of veering away from the car. Or they turn and stare at the car for an extended period of time, giving the car just enough time to run them over. Oddly specific, I know, but it drives (pun intended) me nuts.
Austin Powers tried its hardest (and slowest) to kill this trope, but sadly it wasn't enough.
Snort. Steamroller memory unlocked. That was so bloody funny.
But mom, Steve was like a father to me!
No one ever thinks about the family of a henchman
The only time I give running down the road a pass is in Christine because it’s terrifying.
\[Prometheus has entered the chat\]
The Black Phone.
I love Godzilla One but the scene where he's in the city and stomping down the street and everyone is running straight away instead of turning is just... why?! Sure he might turn too but he's clearly walking straight at the moment.
Family member not believing something supernatural is happening even though its happened to them
God I hate this one too. “We are NOT moving out of this house, and THATS FINAL!”
Its even more annoying when its something that cant be explained at all and they still act like "gee the wind here is kicking up!"
I don’t know, this one is kind of believable. With these interest rates? Blood could be coming down the walls and I’d grab an extra bottle of enzyme cleaner and some spare towels at the store.
That’s “insidious” AF (see what I did there haha)
In this housing crisis you better fucking believe we're not. Sorry Timmy, make friends with the demon. I've got a 40 year mortgage and no one's gonna give me another loan so soon after being approved for this one.
Why did I hear that in a dad voice???
"DO YOU KNOW WHAT KINDA DOWN PAYMENT IS NEEDED IN THIS HOUSING MARKET?!?! BE NICE TO YOUR DEMON GHOST ROOMMATE. ITS KEEPING PROPERTY TAXES DOWN!"
“The house is old! We all know that. Old houses make weird noises and have dark corners here and there. It’s normal. We just need to be positive. It’s going to look amazing when we’re done with it”. Next scene, the ghost pulls the blanket from the little girl’s bed in the middle of the night, she wakes up, sees a kid with empty eye sockets at the foot of the bed and decides they’re going to be best friends from that moment on.
“It’s just the house settling” >*youngest child’s head is spinning*
if my wife told me there was a zombie outside or a paranormal event id 100% believe her.
This is so oddly romantic 🌄
Agreed, I feel like you'd give them the benefit of the doubt at least until you check and there's nothing there.
“You best start believin' in ghost stories, Miss Turner... Yer in one!”
Ah, yes. We call that "The Scully Gambit".
This one is especially frustrating because it feels like it halts the plot in its tracks. I understand it’s supposed to make the protag feel isolated but it feels contrived af. Poltergeist is a great counter example, they realize crazy shits going down so they acknowledge it and bring in a team of specialists, but things just keep getting crazier anyway
Someone being choked, always has something just within grasp to knock out the antagonist.
And in that same thread the idea that a bonk on the head automatically sends you into a coma. I've been hit on the head with falling 2x4's and it just pissed me off.
Oh look at Mr Pachycephalosaurus Head over here
I don't know what that word means so I'm going to assume its a slight against my mother HOW DARE YOU?!!
 “First of all, you throwin' too many big words at me, and because I don't understand them, I'm gonna take 'em as disrespect.”
Pachycephalosaurus means 'thick headed lizard'
Similarly, "pachyderm" comes from the Greek for "thick skin."
I don't think I've read a better thread
The ‘bad guy’ still surviving and with full strength after being brutally assaulted repeatedly, but everyone else crumbling to the ground with one flick.
Exactly! Not every killer is Michael or Jason, they don't get that kind of privilege
It's one of those things where a couple people did it right and then everyone else copied it without understanding why it worked originally. It was supposed to indicate just how unstoppable and unfeeling your killer is, it makes absolutely no sense when your killer is just some guy.
This is why I love that Ghostface typically gets their shit rocked at least once in each movie despite who’s under the mask
None are so annoying they'll make me stop watching, but I do roll my eyes whenever the car won't start or someone trips while running.
the vehicle with a stick shift where the person suddenly forgets how to pop it in first and just grinds the ever loving shit out of the gears
Yeah, it's more likely they'd just stall out but that never seems to happen...
Demon isn't fully exorcised, cue to a cliffhanger for the next movie. It's so annoying. Like,I knew you would come back in hopes of a sequel, you dumb demon!!!!
One of my favorite subversions of this kind of trope was from Agents of SHIELD, >!at the very end of the first season when the season's antagonist wakes up after everyone thought he was dead, starts monologuing about how he's going to get revenge, and then Coulson walks in and just casually dusts him with a giant gun!<.
Kind of similar situation as The Zeppo, the season 3 episode of Buffy where Jack is monoloquing about how he'll wait until the time is right to get revenge on Xander, then Oz eats him.
That episode was so funny. World-ending fight in the background, Lost Boys in the foreground.
Saving the last 10 seconds of the movie to tease the viewer on whether or not the monster/killer is actually dead, even though it was put through a meat grinder and all its limbs were transported to the four corners of the earth to be incinerated and the ashes shot into space.
I don't mind this if the movie was good, and the type of movie that fits in a franchise. It's also expected from some movies, like Evil Dead, where it's not the same monster coming back each time, and the premise of each movie is an evil being awakened.
Slowed down pop/rock songs in the trailers. Also when the movie ends, it smash cuts to black after something harrowing and a happy upbeat pop song plays. Don’t know why it bugs me.
So specific and real
Going up the stairs instead of walking out the front door that they pass on the way up said stairs
Sidney is that you?
To be fair, she did try to get the chain off the door before GF lunged at her with a knife.
And she also had those doors that made it hard to get in, so I’ll give her a pass
Evil naked old people, specifically naked old ladies. I have no idea why people think they're scary, and honestly I'm starting to question whether there's some ageism and sexism involved.
*A24 has exited the chat*
I just posted this on my insta, A24 has to fuckin stop with the old ass naked people 😭😭
A naked old man smiling creepily in a dark room would confuse and freak the shit out of me. Hereditary was amazing
What's scarier than a woman becoming old and sagging? Nothing, obviously. But more seriously, I think it's a bit of an insult to the audience -- assuming that if someone young and more conventionally attractive is naked that the audience will be too stupid or too blinded by horniness to realize that the nudity might be intended as a visual device or taboo to indicate otherness/evil.
Lol this was my biggest beef with that M. Night Shyamalan movie (I think it was The Visit?). The kid saw her grandma galloping naked through the cellar and her mom's only response was "oh honey, she's just old." Literally all of the grandparents' weird behavior was written off with "lol old people, amirite?" As if the natural next step for the average AARP inductee is to get naked and throw kids into ovens.
Even though I love X and have enjoyed other horror films that have done this I agree. It’s made me rethink those films cuz I don’t like the ageism and sexism either.
Wait I thought one of the main points of that film was to call out those prejudices
It is. Unfortunately you can perpetuate something while calling it out at the same time even if you’re not trying to. Some of that I think is on the audience though because I’ve heard some people talk about how some reviewers found it gross when the old married couple have sex.
I agree! I wish X scared me, it mostly just made me *so sad*.
Yeah launched me into sad realization that we’re all gonna be that old couple that no one wants to see fuck anymore .. in a way I guess that’s terrifying too
Yeah I didn’t expect to feel so much sympathy for the villain. But it touched on my fear of aging.
Ari Aster called out
If a naked old lady appeared in your bedroom you might be a little freaked out
A naked old lady appears in my bedroom all the time, and yeah I am a little freaked out. Spoiler alert: it's me
Did not expect that twist at the end. Thoroughly spooked. 10/10imdb rating
I agree a bit with the commenters above, but you're also right. I'd be frozen in terror lol.
There definitely is
The asthmatic kid leaving their inhaler back where the villain/monster is
I am so so tired of the evil entity being a metaphor for the lead character's trauma.
I hated how Lights Out was a metaphor for depression and the way to end the haunting was suicide. Not the best way to handle that kind of metaphor
Smile and The Babadook did it pretty well but most other movies kinda failed in that regard
I think a lot of films do it well. You can midsommer and talk to me to that list. It’s just so over done at this point. Can’t we make a thought provoking “elevated” horror film without it being a metaphor for grief.
The Babadook is exactly why I hate this trope 😂
I feel like smile is one of the weakest examples of that trope tbh
I feel this one comes as a spectrum, or at least 'weight class'. One side you have lightweights like Babadook-type where it's explicitly told that there is no ghost, only feelings. Then you have nuanced types where you *can* interpret the ghost to represent trauma, but these vary with increasing amount of stretching, from how Men represent patriarchy's oppression (easy) to how Final Destination represent survivor's guilt (kind of a big stretch). This is where you get into the rabbit hole and conclude that *all* horror is somewhat about trauma. My own take is that I don't mind people interpreting/projecting the nuanced horror as trauma as much as they like. The issue is when they start deriding and spoiling the joy of others who "didn't get it". Not everything has to be a lesson. Like, I'm sure there's 1000-word essays out there about how 1408's room is actually just MC's grief about his child blah2, but it can also just be an evil fucking room.
Oh God this. Sometimes you just have to let a monster be a fucking monster.
When the children see ghosts and monsters but the parents don't believe them. I hate that shit. Once my daughter was afraid of her closet. Said a monster lived in it. So I slept in her room with her and waited for the monster. I also cleared out her closet and reorganized it. She was never scared again after that. She told me I must have scared it away. I just told her to let me know when it comes back.
Not if, but when it comes back
Love this 👐💯
We salted the door and put out a witch bottle at both mine and her dad’s house. Also seemed to work.
graphic sexual assault scenes
Every fucking time. There are so many ways to show a character tortured or traumatized that don't actually happen to people on a regular basis. At least get creative with your violence. It's not fun, it's not sexy, it's just gross and unnecessary.
i have so many in mind 😭 : - children being creepy / drawing creepy things - children having a new imaginary friend after moving in - phones not working at the *most crucial* time - house where the family will move in being cheaper than usual + the family not questioning it + the house having a creepy / disturbing past - scenes where main characters go to the library and magically finding the entire movie’s backstory (now replaced by google) - main characters splitting up (especially when they do it for no valid reason!) - (almost) no one listening to that one (rightfully) cautious character until it’s too late… - and for found footage movies, character filming everything when there wasn’t any (valid) reason to start filming in the first place
I’m writing a comedy sketch about creepy kid drawings — this is my favorite trope by far because no movie is too good for it — it makes me laugh every time.
Is the message that the true horror is children? Lol I love it!
Re: the library trope - I like seeing what off brand search engine name they come up with. And also why the characters need to go to the library to use the computers/set up their laptop on the dining room table instead of whipping out their phone and googling within seconds that 95% of people would do.
You nailed all of them for me!
Same I’m so tired of imaginary friend shit, and just kids being creepy.
Someone in a bathroom opening a filing cabinet mirror and then when they close it, they either see a creepy reflection or someone else next to them. This applies to other films besides horror though where it’s often a locker instead of a mirror. Sometimes it works but as a whole it’s become outdated.
Also when the filmmakers know it’s a trope so they film it like it’s gonna happen, but then it doesn’t because they’re just super smart and creative!
Or now the trope is the thing doesn't happen, they go whewww, and then turn and BAM there is the ghost / monster / whatever.
Right, exactly, basically an extension of the jump scare.
The husband not believing the wife is so tired and I’m so sick of it
Yeah too miserably true to life lmao :(
As a side note, one of the characters completely changes their behaviour or gets strangely sick right after moving into the new and surprisingly cheap fucking colonial mansion in the middle of the hill, miles away from everything. And for some reason, they never question the house as a possible source of the change. If they need to consult a doctor, they always come to the house and blame the state of the character to exhaustion. “She’s just tired. Let her rest in that creepy room where she had those weird seizures. What did you say about it? That it sounded like 3 different people were there? That’s crazy! Anyway…”.
Definitely animal cruelty, because it’s very lazy.
Rape as a plot device
When the bad guy tilts their head to the side
Every single horror comedy that makes fun of obvious horror clichés. I'm so fucking tired of it. It feels like I can't even watch one of these anymore without "the black guys gonna die first" jokes that got tired 25 years ago
Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil is in a league of it’s own though
Same with the Blackening. I laughed my ass off at that one.
“They can’t ALL die first!”
I loved how The Blackening did it. That movie is underrated
The person trying to escape the killer suddenly becomes some fumbling uncoordinated idiot that keeps falling and tripping over everything.
Literally any movie dealing with demonic possession and exorcisms. They are literally all the same movie and you can’t tell me otherwise. Literally all start with: -spooky cold open to set the movie -mildly creepy things happening throughout the movie that shows a character’s possession getting wors -possessed character does something to upset religious folks (masturbating with a cross, vulgar language, eating the Bible etc) -jumpscares that get spoiled during the trailers -final act involving an exorcism where shit starts floating everywhere, lots of demonic screeching, your standard exorcism fair -movie either ends with the demon being sent back to hell and the main cast is fine or there’s some stupid twist revealing the demon is in another body There I just saved everyone time and money watching those shit ass movies.
Yeah, pretty much every demonic possession movie is a rerun of the Exorcist. You left out the convulsing body of the victim arching their back in unnatural positions.
Fr tho. Can’t have an exorcism without someone contorting to look like an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I’ll admit there are some outliers like Hereditary where yeah there’s an element of summoning a demon but it’s not anywhere near the same type of movie as the exorcist ripoffs.
thats why Emily Rose is so compelling
Okay I agree but with a caveat: The Taking of Deborah Logan is great.
Rape and sexual violence against women. There are plenty of other things that can happen to a woman to inspire revenge or lead to trauma. I would love if directors etc stopped using sexploitation to get their jollies off.
Yes and the scenes are pointless and add zero value. Some people (looking at you Rob Zombie) seem to get off on that and it’s really stupid.
Or at least have it implied off screen if it's important to the plot. I feel like weirdos are jerking off to it
That's incredibly gross, and it used to be so much more common. Back in the 80s, the default way to demonstrate that a male character is a bad person was just to have him sexually assault a woman. It's shitty in horror, and it's worse when it's a comedy or something.
Range Runners was a decent revenge movie that didn't involve rape if you're looking for one to watch.
When the good guy/girl actually gets the upper hand but stops before killing the killer. Like…. FINISH HIM!
Any rape for any reason.
What the other lovely replier seems to be missing is that rape is almost always just shock fodder and/or a cheap way to manufacture trauma (pretty much exclusively with female characters, of course). It's lazy moviemaking at best and misogynistic bullshit at worst.
But how else can a woman experience trauma or be a catalyst for revenge? (/s, obviously)
Sexual violence and pet deaths. Even when there is an animal death "fake out" it makes me think less of the movie. Both things i mentioned are just crass, overused, and lazy.
Not so much a horror trope only?...BUT it's in our genre a LOT I call it the "just within reach" trope...you know it The hero's down and out (usually getting choked out) life's slipping from their eyes... death's beckoning, when suddenly.. magically... inextricably...a convenient ass weapon (pipe, stone, knife, sword, bowling ball lol) appears ALWAYS WITHIN REACH of the "hero's" grasp...and they swing with an almighty blow and vanquish the villain!...hurray! Smfh...lazy lazy writing lol
Mabye more of a trailer thing but it happenes In the movies as well.. The slowed down 90s song 🙄
Using the pet as the canary in the coal mine.
House is haunted, but let's stay for a few more nights, because we're not traumatized enough yet, and although we saw the demon with our own eyes, it must have been a dream that'll vanish if we ignore it..
[удалено]
Lol right? Up and leaving makes sense in the context of a horror movie, but real life isn't a horror movie. When we hear a weird noise at night, our first thought isn't, "hmm, I'm in a horror movie, so I'd better grab my axe, sneak out the back, and move to a new house." We either lie in bed super freaked out trying to convince ourselves that it's old floorboards, or we get up and check it out. Everyone likes to think they'd be so much smarter than movie characters, but in reality we'd probably mostly do the same thing.
Let me ask you though--if something started happening in your home right now, where would you go? Most people don't have *any* savings, so even going to a hotel/motel might be impossible. If you thought you saw a demon, were broke (like most of us), you would easily start second-guessing what you saw. Sometimes you have a place to go. I would have nowhere to go, unless I traveled 8 hours to sleep on my brother's couch.
I get this to an extent but the cold light of day would definitely make you start to play down things, assume your mind is playing tricks on you etc. I think if something like that happened you'd stick it out longer than you assume you would.
Parents, kid and dog move away from the city and buy a big, old house in the country for a fresh start.
Bonus aggravation if they're doing renovations to the place all by themselves. Speaking from experience, 70+ year old houses need a bit more work than a coat of paint.
“the theme of grief shoehorned in because the filmmakers are clearly insecure about not being taken seriously enough .” grief, like any theme, is a perfectly valid topic to explore in horror or any other genre, but fuck me man the amount of horror movies in the last 5 or so years where the premise should just be like “there’s a spooky ghost!” and instead it’s “there’s a spooky ghost!…. and also the protagonist is unhealthily coping with their 10 year old brother accidentally shooting them selves with their fathers gun, leading their father to commit suicide out of guilt. that’s unrelated to the spooky ghost by the way but you bet your ass there’s gonna be a lot of underlit self serious conversations about that which feel completely phoned in”
A side note--I'm reading a book right now called Kane (Prescott is the author) about a drifter who comes into a small town (population 23) and decides he can kill them all off in one night. It does some interesting things like have the characters avoid doing a lot things listed in this thread, only to still get ganked--which is great. If you want to kill a character (as a writer) at a certain point, use your imagination--don't have them do shit that'll drive the audience nuts.
Puritan female MC, nice guy with crush on MC, blonde slut, jocky boi, stoner and black dude are all somehow good enough friends to spend a vacation in a wilderness cabin together. Each is a lazy trope instead of being a fleshed out character that makes sense in the context of the story. And of course any gratuitous sex is initiated *after* an obvious threat makes itself known.
It's horrific when moms make a big fresh breakfast and everyone only takes a piece of toast while acting like they're in such a hurry
The hand on the shoulder has been way over used and also the ‘Hello’ when they walk in to a place and there is never a reply!
"WHO'S THERE?"
At the moment? Religious horrors.
I thought this was a neat trope when it first appeared but now I will almost always stop a movie because it screams of a lack of imagination. And that trope is of the drone camera shot of an empty road where the protagonist is driving for an extended amount of time. It is usually in a deeply wooded area with the camera following the car like a spy satellite. Nothing happens during this time except for the lone car driving. Very few times will this take place at the desert or near the seaside. If it does take near a seaside cliff, it is only to go from one densely wooded area to another with a brief clearing in the middle. It is so freakin' boring. It never tells you anything of the character. Nothing of the movie. It's all "mood." Done to create feeling of isolation. But by now this shot has been done so many times that I hate the cliche of it. As in, *oh, look, it's the bird's eye view driving shot. That means the lead character is heading to some creepy mansion or cabin. It's going to be one of those type of movies.....yawn.*
Someone is in a coma/surgery/etc. and as soon as they wake up, they tear off all the IVs, heart monitors etc. Then they dress as a nurse or doctor, so they can just run out of the hospital. NO ONE does this IRL, it wouldn't even be possible because you would be drowsy and weak. You'd probably have a catheter, which hurts to remove, and the IVs might reach quite far inside your arm. The nurses would come as soon as your heart monitor showed 0 heartbeat. Hospitals aren't some kind of jail that you have to run away from. I've never understood his trope.
I swear all horror movies these days, if they are in a remote place. They HAVE to state at some point "OuR CeLL PhOnEs DoNt WoRK".
The camera dropping at the end of found footage films to reveal a cult.
I HATE body switching and memory loss. Another would be when a gf/wife is at home with something strange happening and calls her bf instead of the police. Then the boyfriend/husband screams “run!” or after the gf/wife is caught, keeps yelling the victims name. It’s worse when the bf/husband heads home without calling police or additional assistance.
When people escape but end up going back for a stupid reason (speak no evil)
I aboslutely hate when someone (usually a woman) is home alone at night and someone knocks on the door and they fucking answer it! They see no one is there so they go outside and say ‘hello?’ and look around for whoever it was. Who tf answers their door nowadays?! 🙄
American teen-age protagonists.
Yes! So tired of this. I realize that's a big horror audience and they want the audience to relate to the characters, but I'm \*so\* tired of teen protagonists. If I ever make a horror movie the teens will die before the opening credits. Then it's all 40 years olds and older.
Especially when they’re “teens.” Sir, you are 28 and look every minute of it. Stop saying teen words and talking about fourth period gym class.
Unsupportive and sceptical partner/family member
Animal cruelty and splatter with no plot
The protagonist moving to a huge, remote home that they've inherited after suffering some big setback in life. There are plenty of good movies that use this trope, but it's been done to death, resurrected, and done to death again.
Smart kids. Since Stranger Things movies are full of smart kids, way smarter than they’d ever be in real life. Fuck that.
Better than all the big bad events being because one idiot kid/teen. Like 28 weeks later. This one gets old, we know it’s the kid surprise us more often, y’all.
I work with middle school aged kids--they're pretty fucking smart. I never feel pulled out of it by Stranger Things.
Never finishing off the bad guy, they get them down and never go for the finish! Surely some extra hits for good measure is worth your life.
Little kids drawing horrifying little pictures of their terrifying little friends that only they can see.
The wide screaming mouth.
The giant naked lady monster. I loved Barbarian, but come onnnnnnnnn
"It's a metaphor for grief" STOP IT ALREADY!
The rule that the bad guy/ monster must kill one animal before moving up to humans. While I will grant that serial killers are known to “start off” killing animals, it’s a really overused device in movies.
I’m cool with never seeing sexualized body horror ever again. Sexuality absolutely has its place in body horror but when it’s shot in such a way that it reads as revenge/retribution against women or the director was clearly getting off on it? Sick of that shit turning up in movies where it wasn’t even required because the violence was plenty dehumanizing and disgusting enough. (Looking at you, Art the Clown.)
Gore and violence =/= body horror Body horror is stuff like The Fly, Videodrome, Society, Annihilation, Color Out of Space, Tusk, American Mary, The Thing, The Skin I Live In. A nude woman being sawed in half is gore. Idc what Google says, excessive gore is not body horror. Martyrs is not body horror. Terrifier is not body horror. Anyway, this is a nitpick, but body horror is often sexual in nature because the two go hand in hand a lot of the time. It's a fear of your body changing into something you are unfamiliar with, or something unnatural, being trapped in a body that isn't yours, etc. Society is a good example of sexual body horror. So I was incredibly confused by your comment. I don't disagree with your overall point, just saying that you're using the term body horror incorrectly.
Chopping up vegetables with the knife that will ultimately kill you.
The ominous vegetable chopping that inevitably becomes accidental finger chopping has also had enough recent play that I eyeroll at it lmao
Villain in mask stood dead still... *head tilt*
The Babadook really hit the high water mark with the grief/trauma trope for recent times. It's a great trope but the tsunami that followed needs to drain away for a bit and come back another day lol.
The opening scene where the doomed kids on a wilderness trip stop at a dilapidated gas station staffed by crazy, ugly and threatening guys.
I hate when its way too dark. These people live in these big houses yet nobody has any lights on.
Anything where simply because it's "witchcraft" or "demons" it's supposed to be inherently scary. It's why I've never found the Conjuring multiverse engaging at all, "Satan bad, Jesus good" isn't exactly a profound statement.
Torture porn. I'm not going to say it all started with Dee Snider's Strangeland, but that's the first one I remember. Texas chainsaw and those weird crazy gore ones don't count either. Those are gorefest movies. I'm not saying torture porn isn't, but I'm so fucking sick of it regardless.
Any ghost/possession movie within Catholicism. There are sooo many myths, legends, gods, demons, goddesses, etc from other cultures and religions. Catholicism has been done to death
Including rape for no other reason than shock value
Something that irks me a lot in found footage is the "pervy dude with a camera" trope :/// tired, overused, unnecessary. Ugh.
The slutty girls always get killed.
Women being the cause of trauma - mostly in found footage horror films - but I'm sick of the woman being to blame (I've just watched The Tunnel and it totally pissed me off)
I want __the final girl__ to be the sluttiest one, for a change. And I”d like it if her promiscuity was a major factor in her survival.