I'm used to horror films/TV Shows. Nothing I can't handle.
My son and I were just talking about this last night. We were driving home from having seen
A Quiet Place, which we both thought was decent if a bit overhyped, and I said that with the success of that and
Get Out, horror movies were becoming the new trendy genre. My son said he wasn't sure he'd call AQP horror. My son thinks of it as more like scary sci-fi.
So then we got to talking about different kinds of horror films. I'm not a big horror fan, but I like some kinds more than others. My son already knows I hate human torture-porn ones -- like
The Texas Chainsaw Massacres and that classic's more modern iterations, like
Saw. And although those movies are kind of over-the-top outlandish situations, I hate any horror movie about something I could potentially read about in the paper, like a home invasion or Jeffrey Dahmer. I also don't like those because they're too gross and, well, horrifying.
I hate horror movies involving supernatural things, like ghosts or poltergeists or films that kill people who watch them or mysterious creatures that occupy houses and torment the residents in weird ways. I don't like those because I don't take them seriously. I thought
The Exorcist was almost laughably stupid, and only later did I realize that people who were brought up in more religious backgrounds than I was found it truly scary.
I kind of like zombies as a horror genre, if only because zombies themselves usually aren't that scary (especially not on T
he Walking Dead, where they can be outrun or killed pretty easily). So the plots become less about zombies vs. people than they are about people vs. people, which I find more interesting.
I think my favorite subgenre is alien movies, like
Alien or
War of the Worlds or
Signs or
A Quiet Place, because although I don't see them as likely to happen they theoretically
could happen. The adversaries have some overwhelming power or technology that the humans know nothing about, so the humans have to figure out how to fight them even though they're far more powerful. And if movies are gross and horrifying it's at least usually in inventive ways (like that one scene in
Alien).
As I write this, I can think of all kinds of exceptions. For instance, I kind of liked
Paranormal Activity, thouh mainly because the actors seemed so natural and realistic. But I liked it less once it got into more supernatural things. I liked the original
Halloween, because it seemed almost like a tribute or homage to classic horror movies. But I bailed on the sequels.