The original was not Hard-Core Horror
. . . and some of you who will settle for nothing less than gratuitous gore should quietly move on. You have an (unfortunate) abundance of horror titles that are a mile wide and an inch deep to choose from. View them; they were made for you. I don't judge your taste; don't pretend to be capable of appreciating mine.
An unidentified character in T.S. Eliot's play "THE COCKTAIL PARTY"* observes:
"When you're going downstairs and come to the bottom step, there is one more step than your feet expected and you have the experience of being at the mercy of a malevolent staircase."
*summarized
By placing everyday objects in a context unfamiliar to us Rod Serling created an entire sub-genre of the conventional horror story, The Twilight Zone (1959).
At one end of the Horror spectrum you have the Film 101 exercise known as The Blair Witch Project (1999): a production that lives in infamy as being the first and only film I've seen with no story. I congratulate them on bilking over $1.5 Million out of a gullible American public but you'll never get my wounded vanity to admit myself one unless I am very, very drunk.
At the other end of the spectrum I would place Paranormal Activity (2007) -- a film that scared me to such an extreme that I couldn't sleep!! At the date of this post Paranormal Activity (2007) has a User Rating of 6.3; nonetheless, I consider it one of the most terrifying films I have ever seen and I'll never look at a sheet the same way again!!!! lol
I don't understand why so many IMDB members have given Paranormal Activity (2007) what I consider to be a mediocre User Rating, but I at least recognize that my taste in scary films is more subtle, due in no small measure to my being a reader. I wouldn't expect the hard core Thir13en Ghosts (2001) fan to be capable of grasping the nuances of films such as The Haunting (1963), The Sixth Sense (1999), Peeping Tom (1960) or The Others (2001) any more than you can understand how spectacularly boring I consider something like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).
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