Hacker News Reader

Comment by newobj | Hacker News Reader

Hardly.

28 Days Later / Shutter Island / Donnie Darko / Let The Right One In / Jeepers Creepers / The Ring / Drag Me To Hell / Saw / The Host / The Others / Cabin In The Woods / It Follows / ...etc

View on HN

I never thought of Donnie Darko as a horror movie. Care to elaborate?

And Shutter Island. Good movie, but not in any way a horror movie.

Would you consider The Shining a horror movie? I seem them as very much in the same vein. The Shining of course, being the better of the two :)

I would, but it's borderline. The supernatural element of it pushes it over the edge for me.

I've watched a lot of horror movies and none of them came anywhere close to scaring me. It's too easy to remember that they're not real. Donnie Darko however has scenes I'd call "philosophically scary", and knowing it's not real does nothing to lessen the impact. Despite not being officially horror I found it more horrifying than any horror movie.

What do you mean? Isn't it just a time-travel movie?

The precognition scene with the forward trails specifically. Makes it harder to ignore the question of free will (which is the only sane thing to do).

There is a sliding scale of time travel, but in general the idea can quickly get freaky.

Even just viewing the past can be disturbing as it breaks some privacy concepts, aka camera that can see into anyone’s homes or future crime. Going to the outer edge starts to get really freaky especially if you start getting into the head of the main character.

Did you have a sense of dread while watching it? I agree it doesn't include almost any of the standard tropes, but it made me feel a lot more uneasy than most 'horror' movies did/do.

I think you skipped over the "great" part.

I assume you haven't seen most of those, as several of the movies he lists are among the greatest, genre-defining horror films of all time. So, yeah... Blair Witch is hardly the last great horror film.

Also the ones I've seen are much, much better than Blair Witch.

And the "horror" part too:

> 28 Days Later / Shutter Island / Donnie Darko / Let The Right One In

Pretty good list of recent horror from The AV Club

http://www.avclub.com/article/25-best-horror-movies-2000-227...

Shutter Island (2010) Mystery, Thriller

"Rec" -- it was the original inspiration for quarantine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com