Ilosar said:
People do need to get off their high horse about what they consider "acceptable horror", because there's more than just one way to go about it. The Thing wasn't absent of gory fright; it had plenty of it to serve up shock scares, yet it's still considered a cornerstone of sci-fi horror. Perhaps Silent Hill 2 is the pinnacle of psychological horror, but that's still just ONE way to go about achieving fear in a target audience. Tension and dread over the fear of what may be ready to pounce at you from around any corner are just as viable, and games like Doom 3 and the Dead Space franchise refined this method to perfection. It's a dimension and method of horror. Get over it.
Goodness, no need to get so defensive. Look, I find Dead Space's horror elements chessy and cannot take them seriously (and let's not even get into the utter mess that the story is). It doesn't make me some superior being with vast intellect and a ''high horse'', it's just not my cup of tea, and makes the serie throughly average in my eyes. You like it, fine. I don't.
[Stares long and hard at comment, raising finger in protest several times, but dropping it each time, in futility, sighing.]
Seriously, I don't know how people do this. Did I say "Ilosar needs to..."? No, I believe I said "people". Your particular criticisms about its "lack of horror" may have triggered my response, but that doesn't mean I was targeting you. Who's being defensive, here?
PEOPLE generally get uppity and elitist about such matters as "what classifies as true horror", and the comments that followed my point are no different. Horror is MORE than just psychological. There's more to fear than the unknown, because if there's never any payoff at the end, then the fear dissipates. The anticipation is IN ANTICIPATION OF SOMETHING. The opposite is also true, of course, in that repeated "payoff" will get dull, fast, but that's where really good horror strikes a balance. There's JUST enough eerie and unsettling anticipation, and JUST enough scary thing that you've been fearing to justify the scare.
The Fly is a prime example of this. You spend most of the movie fearing his transformation, and his moments of losing control before finally becoming a mute and grotesque monster are what give you jolts and tide you over from the finale of him ultimately losing his humanity entirely.
In short, you guys are simply praising ONE aspect of Horror as if it's the end-all, when it's just one aspect of it, while simultaneously denouncing its other virtues as not being a facet of the same thing. I'm not saying
Dead Space was perfect horror, nor am I saying that
Dead Space 3 was the best horror of the series. I'm saying it HAS horror, and the horror it has is good. Yeah, it leans more heavily towards that which we're afraid of than the fear of it, and as I previously mentioned this means we become accustomed to it, thereby we stop fearing it. But this isn't inherently a flaw on the game's part; it's still good. I'm simply correcting people who say "That isn't horror", because they're wrong. It is, it's just perhaps not the best.
The Dutch Ghost said:
SnapSlav, you do understand that the horror of The Thing wasn't as much that the alien could take on various disturbing forms and slaughter the main characters in gruesome ways, but it's ability to mimic its host completely, making it almost impossible to tell who is human and who is not.
[Insert the same dumbfounded reaction of the above.]
Really? I just went and explained how horror is MORE than one single thing, and you ask me if I'm aware that there was more to
The Thing's horror than one single thing? You do see the irony in that, I hope?
Yes, OF COURSE I understand that the bulk of the movie's tension was the suspicion of "who is it?" and less so the mutants that could be lurking in any of them. But that doesn't mean that the fear OF said scary mutants wasn't a part of it. Besides, what I said to begin with wasn't that the animatronic Things were what made it scary, but that the movie HAD it to accomplish that level of scaring, at times.
. . . . .
EDIT: Question to those of you who complain about it "not making any sense": WHAT is wrong with the story? WHAT is so hard to follow about it? (I'm not talking about Tagaziel's previous criticisms of "SHOOT HIM, STOP HAVING YOUR EMOTIONAL CUTSCENE AND SHOOT HIM!!!!!" because that's absolutely true. Many moments of the plot could have just been avoided if the manner in which the cutscenes depicted them simply hadn't happened. Or they would have been fine if the cutscenes had depicted them more practically. I'm talking about those who say that the story doesn't make ANY sense. Please explain.)