Is it just me, or does it feel like horror movies have gotten overall less violent over the past 20 years?

The thing is, horror has always been psychological and metaphorical. Jacob's Ladder, pretty much every Stephen King story, Silent Hill. Elevated horror, as a genre, has delusions of grandeur

the 80s films were all direct to video shit where they filmed it for like no budget and figured they would make most of their money back on rentals if the theatrical run wasn't great. like said all the 90s stuff was either like friday the 13th part fucking 9 or self aware stuff like scream or scary movie that was making fun of the 70s and 80s shit

The 90s were a culturally bankrupt years for film. It's very bizarre. 80s and 2000s movies have such distinct, unmistakable cultures and styles. But what the fuck was going on in the 90s? It was just a really bad decade for film in general, and horror is no exception

Is it just me

Yes, still a lot of violent horror out there.
youtu.be/64kBF8XtRIw?si=41Fv_SprJLvGf6S3&t=86

90s was the decade of Tarantino and Tarantino wannabes.

Seven was good

more of a thriller

The 90s was the decade for prestige horror movies that started with Silence of the Lambs. These movies would hire A-list actors as their leads and usually had sizeable budgets in the 10s of millions of dollars. Stuff like Interview With The Vampire, Se7en, Wolf, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sleepy Hollow, The Sixth Sense and even Scream can be considered as one as it had both Drew Barrymore and Courteney Cox amongst a cast of relative unknowns. It was also the decade for serial killer horror thrillers like the aforementioned Lambs and Se7en but also Cure.

only like 2 movies you listed were actually horror. thrillers arent horror movies.

I don't really understand the appeal of Terrifier and why its so popular. Its really nasty and mean spirited, almost like Maniac with Joe Spinell. A lot of gore films are fun and ridiculous like Dead Alive but Terrifier just seems cruel. Even Cannibal Holocaust doesn't feel as gross as Terrifier. I've seen pretty much every gorehound flick and Terrifier still didn't sit right with me. Anyone else?

thats part of the charm for me. art never leans too much into the funny shit and always maintains a certain level of meanness. most horror movies would be afraid to do this but not terrifier

1) the shock gore makes the movies memeable
2) Art being so nasty and mean-spirited in such an over-the-top way makes him a fun villain

i like ravenous
youtube.com/watch?v=OjvXL0vXt8Y

Between the success of Terrifier, the new Final Destination, and Smile 2 (this one was surprisingly gory, seemingly chasing the Terrifier crowd) we're hopefully going to see gore become more trendy again.

I get that but I don't really understand why normies like Terrifier. It can't be as popular as it is without a huge normie audience. I can understand why horror fans already used to extreme violence would like it but I don't get why the ultra violence, especially the ultra violence towards women, is popular. This kind of movie used to only be liked by the creepy guys who read Fangoria.

I must be the only nigga that likes All Hollows Eve more than Terrifier. I love anthologies, I love the meta stuff and I love that redhead.

women love terrifier. idk why or how normies heard about it but it still seems pretty niche, but then i hear they have an art skin in call of duty so idk

it became popular the exact same way something like Saw did, the franchise that popularised the term "torture porn". people are curious, want to egg each other on to see who can handle the new hardcore flick to top all other hardcore flicks before it, and are generally sick fucks even if they don't like to admit it.

Silent Hill 2 was graphic as hell, no way they are just ripping that off.

I personally find the Terrifier movies fun. Maniac and Cannibal Holocaust are grimy and mean, Terrifier is more comedic and wacky.

Silent Hill 2 is great, but the fans are gay as hell, and some of those fans went on to make gay horror movies and gay retro survival horror indie games.

I feel the same way as you. I was perplexed by people comparing Terrifier to 80s slasher movies. It reminds me more of something like Wolf Creek.

I think what's jarring is the tonal dissonance between the antagonist and the way the victims are depicted. Usually either both are gritty and serious, or both are kind of goofy. In Terrifier though the victims are mostly depicted in a way that seems to genuinely evoke their fear and misery, but Art the clown is just this bizarre sadistic goof mocking and playing around.

These movies have a really demented energy

I was perplexed by people comparing Terrifier to 80s slasher movies

If you watch Terrifier 2 it's very much an homage to Dream Warriors.

the first movie is really dark but it's novel because it feels lower budget and Art has a strange charm to him. the second movie was peak, Art's charm is set to maximum. the scene where he's fucking with Sienna at the Halloween store is a Hall of Fame worthy bit. the third movie feels the most mean-spirited to me cause the director wanted to remind and reinforce to the audience that he's a sick, evil nigga you don't actually wanna root for. so you get scenes like the Christmas Eve cold open, shorty using a box cutter as a dildo, frozen Santa, chainsaw anal, and the gory off-screen deaths of Sienna's loved ones. i would show Terrifier 2 to a normie, but i probably wouldn't show them the first and third movies unless they responded surprisingly well to the second one.

Saw (1) wasn't really that violent.
They just turned it into gory torture porn in all the sequels.

I would say we have less that focus on violence, thanks in part to the Conjuringverse, conversely the one's that ARE violent are A LOT more violent. Terrifier never would have been released outside of specialty theaters in the 1990's. Smile 2, also, would have had much less graphic violence back then.

80s was a lot of VFX people trying to show off. I think "The Thing" really started that trend... or at least popularized it.

My bad...I posted before reading your full post. Yes, the 1990s were notoriously tame for horror from studios - the era of the "it's not a horror film! It's a le supernatural thriller!" that got Fangoria butthurt. The early 2000s was the remake and torture porn wave. Then cams the Conjuring/Insidious wave. Are still in the A24 slow burn wave?

the tonal dissonance between the antagonist and the way the victims are depicted. Usually either both are gritty and serious, or both are kind of goofy.

That's actually a great way to describe what I personally like about the movies. I love it when characters stuck in a pulpy setting or situation take themselves seriously. You can have a fun genre flick AND feel for the characters. The writing and acting in Terrifier isn't the best, but still.

Saw (1) wasn't really that violent

Girl is vaginally and anally knife raped

I don't know if we saw the same movie

Slasher boom. Then in the late 80s the MPAA pitched a fit and started gutting every film, followed by media hysteria about films like Child's Play 3. So studios started making really watered down stuff in the 90s. Or channelling it into the serial killer trend. Then Saw and TCM remake did huge business in the 2000s and gore was back on the menu (especially because DVD started eating up profits)

Women love slasher movies for the same reason they love true crime. They find the idea of an ultra-violent alpha male very exciting

The stars aligned when Terrifier 3 released and it became a meme online how "that other clown movie" overtook Joker 2 at the box office. Meme marketing like that and Barbenheimer and Rocky Horror Minecraft shit gets normies curious and gets them to buy tickets.

Terrifier is also the only one with a good final girl.

Girl is vaginally and anally knife raped

That doesn't happen in any Saw movie.

The 90s were exceptional for films if you look at the Oscar bait and independent genre. Everyone associates the 90s with the kino indie boom, but if you go back and look at the Srs Adult films Hollywood produced then, it might be the best decade, on par with the 70s. Genre films just weren't as good as the 80s. For the most part.

Not the theatrical release. Only the directors cut.

Terrifier doesn't feel 80s at all. Like you said - it immediately reminds me of the 2000s. Not even Wolf Creek, but the glut of extreme horror we got on DVD, like August Underground etc. That's why it's mainstream success genuinely surprises me.

You watch too much shit from Anon Babble, OP

1) those movies are made for like 10 million dollars or whatever and none of that is going to any overpriced actors
2) studios get tunnel vision about shit when like there's two successful "elevated horror" movies in a row and decide that's all they're gonna make now, but in reality even normies like variety, and gore festival slasher movies (relatively speaking) were popular enough at various times in the past that the market definitely exists and can be captured again
Terrifiers 1--3 are of course gorier than any Friday or Nightmare sequel, but as with most things a new generation wants more and more of something

If it wasn't Terrifier, it would've been something else, but the point is the market has always been there. It would be the same if a serious western movie came out and did big numbers, you'd see another boom of those like the 50s and 60s or the revisionist movement

For some reason, zoomers have this weird habit of obsessing over 80s "aesthetics" while having no actual authentic concept of said aesthetic. The ultimate example is "synthwave music". Sounds literally nothing like actual 80s synth music, but it's all about the """aesthetic"""

No, not in that either.

Terrifier had already been growing in popularity since 2 and mostly because even boomer talk shows were talking about it because of le gore
It's hilarious when people claim Terrifier's success is due to hollywood marketing and shilling when it literally started as a fucking short 10 years ago and Leone even used kikestarter for 1 & 2

Good one actually got me there

Terrifier's mainstream success is easy to understand
1. charismatic villain in an era where basically any remaining horror icon still relevant is literally 20-40+ years old
2. extreme gore and long drawn out kills the likes of which has never ever been mainstream at least on wide cinema releases, especially in an era where most horror has been bloodless jumpscare shit for the past 2 decades.
This adds a taboo factor and makes it hyper popular with the college and teen aged crowd which are the ones keeping horror alive now and since forever, plus the taboo factor of it also makes random boomers likely to check it just to see what it's all about

Interesting on the second point. On the first point, people tried. Chromeskull etc.

It's still shocking to me as a boomer, since when I was a kid this material was purely confined to the horror fanbase and VHS/DVD rentals.

Candyman, The Blair Witch Project, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Jacobs Ladder, Urban Legend, Childs Play, Braindead, Leprechaun, Funny Games, Cemetery Man, The Craft, The Faculty, Buffy, Jawbreaker, The Cube, Wishmaster, The Ring, Audition, Cure, Suicide Club, Uzumaki, Tomie, Cronos, Mimic... probably more foreign ones I can't think of

why didn't you guys tell me terrifier 2 has prime cunny in it

The Chromeskull movies were ahead of their time. But also the marketplace of gore in horror wasn't as dry as it was when Terrifier 1 gained a following on Netflix and then Terrifier 2 owned the box office.

Nah it's as gory as ever if not more.
Tusk, Hannibal, Dexter, the new Evil Deads, Grotesquerie, the VHS series, pretty sure the Fear Street trilogy featured some gory moments.

Also helps that Terrifier 2, while a still technically a shitty kickstarter gore flick built for DVD, was also extremely well made (by the standards of it's sub-genre) with a charismatic lead etc. Compared to some shit like Bunnyman.

prestige horror

Don't forget Mary Reilly with John Malkovich and Julia Roberts and End of Days with Arnold Schwarzenegger which had a massive budget of $100 million

Fear Street is another good example. When you look at 90s equivalents like Disturbing Behaviour and Summer series, they are essentially bloodless.

As a 36 year old boomer it's weird to this kind of extreme violence celebrated. The extreme gore genre was almost completely confined to a small group of horror fans and you were a fucking freak if you tried to talk about it or show it to other people. I think if you tried to show Terrifier fans something like Dr. Lamb or The Untold Story or Cannibal Holocaust or Men Behind the Sun they wouldn't like it.
Oh yeah, Chromeskull. There were a bunch of those extreme horror straight to DVD movies in the 2000s. When Blockbuster was on its last legs those movies covered the new release wall. Most of them were awful.

horror

Ahem, "supernatural thriller", thank you. I don't do low brow "horror".

when I was a kid this material was purely confined to the horror fanbase and VHS/DVD rentals.

Yeah because the MPAA would rape your ass then, and you'd never get the film distributed, which is why a lot of 80s slashers were censored to hell and back even if some directors/producers actually tried to make some kills more similar to Terrifier.
Now nobody gives a shit about it anymore especially since you have multiple ways of getting a movie to cinemas.
Also why italian horror from the same era goes way crazier
Even then Terrifier 3 had the balls to go fully unrated, which wasn't really heard of in Horror before, or most movies in general.
Terrifier has reached quite high normie levels already considering the sequel made 80m+ or whatever, stores in murrica are filled with Terrifier merch too
People complain that Art isn't Jason or Freddy etc. levels yet, sure, but it's not like he has any fucking competition at the moment that's not a 30+ year old carcass.

On the first point, people tried. Chromeskull etc.

yeah but those never really got wide releases, I guess Hatchet series at least had some minor cinema releases?
desu Terrifier was also helped by the times, since the first apparently was quite a hit streamer wise, and Leone was smart enough to make the poster just a huge creepy face of Art which definitely helped get people to click
Anyways the first had a super minor cinema release but was a hit streaming wise which helped Leone get funds for Terrifier 2
If anything I was surprised Terrifier 2 was such a success at the movies for its budget, since it got delayed to hell and back due to COVID, but once again the extreme gore helped since it was virtually unknown of in wider releases, and that's what got all the boomer talk shows talking etc.
Cunts will cry about how 2000s movies had gore, but it's still no fucking where near the likes of Terrifier with its minutes long drawn ass torture gore scenes.

Of those, only Blair Witch, Jacob's Ladder, Cure, and Ring had any cultural relevance whatsoever. You're using fucking Leprechaun as an example? Child's Play is 80s and Buffy isn't horror. And we're talking about movies, obviously Uzumaki and Tomie aren't fucking relevant

Terrifier has reached quite high normie levels already considering the sequel made 80m+ or whatever, stores in murrica are filled with Terrifier merch too

Yep. I see complete normie boomers talking about it. Like their kid showed it to them as a tiktok challenge or something. I'm trying to imagine my parents sitting down while I show them Guinea Pig or something lel.

Hatchet

Actually that got fucked by exactly what you said. First Hatchet did huge business on DVD. They did a big cinema release plan for part 2 and last minute theaters pulled it due to being unrated and it absolutely killed it's box office. It WOULD have done Terrifier 2/3 business.

There's like 12 live action Tomie movies, it was a very successful franchise in Japan.
And there is also a live action Uzumaki, which remains the best adaptation despite being just okay.

the Fear Street trilogy from a few years back is one of my favorite horror series. they SMOKED that shit. i'm excited for the new movie even though it doesn't appear to be a direct sequel involving any of them same characters. all my niggas rock with R.L. Stine.

The film was scheduled to be released in Toronto and Montreal theaters in Canada on the same day, but it was pulled because it was not rated by the cities' provincial rating agencies.[16][17] The film was also pulled from U.S. theaters on October 4.

Cunts will cry about how 2000s movies had gore, but it's still no fucking where near the likes of Terrifier with its minutes long drawn ass torture gore scenes.

This is why the popularity baffles me. Even the French extreme horror movies like High Tension, Frontiers, Inside, and Martyrs aren't as sadistic as the Terrifier series.

Yeah and now we're going to get backroom liminal space horror.

AHHHHH THIS ROOM IS JUST SO... UNNERVING! OH MY ANXIETY

It's because the average 16--24 year old has literally never seen actual gore in a horror movie, and anyone older than that hasn't seen in it a movie in like 20 years.
It's novel.

To be fair, the French films don't completely fit into the 2000s DVD aesthetic like Terrifier does. They are proper "films" and regardless of the explicitness of the gore, very disturbing and intense. There IS a level of removal in Terrifier 2 and 3 where it feels somewhat hokey/silly.

I suppose it helps that Art is extremely charismatic and entertaining.
Most of the french stuff you mentioned for example is indeed gory but also rather bleak and mean if not downright depressing in the case of Martyrs and Inside

I don't get it, I always found liminal spaces a favorite not due to being scary but because it's very atmospheric and quite familiar too since it's usually spaces you're used to in daily life like subway, stores etc.
It's nice exploring something big that would otherwise be filled with people but for some reason isn't

I remember Lola being better at running.

I don't even view gory horror as being real horror, it's coomer adjacent. Every person who is way into gory horror is always a coomer of some sort. It's a form of warped titillation. This is especially true of all the misfit geeks in the B-Movie horror scene.

Only psychological horror is proper horror.

You sound so gay.

I'm not saying they are all great films, far from it, but the trashy slasher ones were huge at the time and along with scream contributed to the change of what was a standard cinema horror film. The 1990s tone/style was distinctive enough that lampooning it in scary movie was and still is recognizable to everyone.

There was higher quality films as well that may not all be horror strictly speaking but pushed the boat out and encouraged a push towards experimentation which os what had lead us to the A24 psychodrama 'horror'we have in abundance today.

Also uzumaki + tomie had film adaptations?

James Wong transitioned away from that style

Cold War ended and we threw a comfy decade long party.

Terrifier 1 sometimes kind of feels like a "film" to me. The parts with Art dancing(?) alone and when he's crying with the woman for example are not the sort of thing you'd see in those 00s faux snuff films. There is also a lot of attention paid to the art design.

I agree that those french movies, especially Martyrs, are a different thing altogether though.

coomer adjacent

ohboyherewego.jpg

This is used to be more pronounced in the 90s - when extreme gore was sold through catalogues or conventions, just like porn. I prefered it.

The good old days where you had to be an adult shut in perverted weirdo in your filthy studio apartment to be able to watch gore flicks

60 bucks (more like 120 now) so you can watch a 10th generation player-to-player pirated copy of Driller Killer

Nice.

I hope you fucking shoot yourself

t.

My local video store had a massive VHS/DVD horror collection in the basement right next to the waist high table box of porno tapes. I would browse the horror section as a teen while the gooners rifled through the porno table and gave my twink ass furtive glances. It was a very uncomfortable situation.

yes, that is you

how bad was your twink death as you got older?

yes, that is you

Terrifier 3 kind of sucked. Mostly because the “shocking” part was he killed kids but obviously they don’t really show that so it was just kind of boring. And the lore stuff is the most boring part of the series. Disappointing. Wouldn’t shit in the capitol city for it tbqh

Watch Bring Her Back when it comes out this weekend.

gore isnt scary, in most movies its just gross
also you are wrong i cant think of any other gross out movie like terrifier with that level of cartoonish puke inducing gore being that mainstream successfull if anything todays stuff is way more rare overall but also way more gory

Same here. I really fucking hate how much the people, particularly the girl in the bedroom scene, suffer. I don't mind splatter horror, or ridiculous gore. But when it's the pain and misery that they play up, then it comes across as degenerate and fetishistic.
It's got a similar mean-spirited energy to cocaine bear. Just nasty and cruel.

The 90s was the decade for prestige horror movies that started with Silence of the Lambs. These movies would hire A-list actors as their leads and usually had sizeable budgets in the 10s of millions of dollars. Stuff like Interview With The Vampire, Se7en, Wolf, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sleepy Hollow, The Sixth Sense and even Scream can be considered as one as it had both Drew Barrymore and Courteney Cox amongst a cast of relative unknowns. It was also the decade for serial killer horror thrillers like the aforementioned Lambs and Se7en but also Cure.

everyone always forgets about room1408 which is awesome

silent hill 2 inspired

More like Hereditary inspired (which was inspired mainly by The Shining).

now idk where were at

We are in a strange, ironic homage era now. Movies can be slashers and torture or ghost supernatural films, but they often are a homage to the genre along their direct inspirations and not really trying to hide it. They often have a tounge in cheek ironic twist to it. I'm mainly thinking of this due to stuff like X, Pearl.
PG-13 became a thing by the end of the 80s. 90s blockbuster Hollywood movies, in general, tried to market themselves way more to kids and teens, so they really tried to water things down to a PG-13 rating (or a light R) with stuff like The Faculty or I know what you did last summer.

I'm not sure if you're being serious or not. Terrifier kind of feels like a Guinea Pig movie but with a silly clown killer to make the depravity palatable.
This anon summarizes it pretty well.

They hated him for he spoke the truth

you can always spot a fake silent hill fan when they think silent hill 2 is the best one. part 3 is better in literally every single way. it does everything better but you barely hear anyone talk about it because people just parrot the same opinions

3 does have a kinda nothing story but its also the scariest one it has the best hospital by faaar, also the room is underrated

Is it just me or does it feel like horror movies have gotten less scary? Like there is a shift towards either to make it gory or have disturbing taboo themes(cannibalism/incest/cp) or (the worst of all) it was a cult all along.

No, I'm being serious.
I watch a lot of horror, and there's a stark difference between the stuff I'd say was "mean spirited" and what was just shocking.
People, particularly innocent people, suffering over a long period of time is always mean spirited. When they play their suffering for laughs it makes it worse. In cocaine bear, they do it with the guy who gets disemboweled in the tree. He's just crying for help pitifully as he gets mauled, and it's meant to be funny? Nah. Not for me.
Same with the people in the ambulance. It just gets to a point where the focal point is the pain and fear, instead of the actual violence. Its hard to explain how they're different, but they are.