Horror - The best of the best.

[Mauve Shirt]

Aw. I just finished This Book Is Full of Spiders.

Spoiler

It's pretty alright. It's not as unique as John Dies At The End. The villain is ultimately the same, but when the confrontation finally happened it didn't even resolve anything. Not that I expect them to ever be beaten, but the unsatisfactory resolution makes me crave a third book.

John Dies At The End is great comedy/horror. Its sequel is less so, or at least I found it to be less good, but it still works.

[Serpentine]

Originally Posted by Eldan

Difficult to find a movie by that name that is Horror. All I find is about 400 adaptions for children. Which one are you thinking of?

try looking for "Hansel and Gretel korean movie" on YouTube (the subtitles are terrible on the one I eatched, though).

[Winter_Wolf]

In general I prefer slow, creeping horror to "gotcha" scare tactics.

I find that I've had better luck with Japanese horror films than others for this kind of horror.
Ring was good. Hollywood's remake was significantly less so.
Kakashi was good, and plays to a particular paranoia of mine, i.e. things that aren't alive and should not be moving around coming to life and moving around with murderous intent, inexorably and inevitably.
Much as I love a lot of things about Japan, sometimes I get really skeezed out by the things that have been produced by Japanese media.

Also, zombie movies (yes I'm serious):
Return of the Living Dead is comedic, but also horrific in its way.
Biozombie is a movie out of Hong Kong, also comedic and horrifying.
I consider them horrifying in a similar vein to fridge logic: not so much at the time, but you really get it after it stews for a bit in the back of your mind. For me the horror is seeing what happens to people trying to survive, but ending up losing their humanity anyway. Hope is a delusion, but without it, there's only death to look forward to. And you can keep fighting and running but eventually you'll beg someone to kill you before those things tear you up and/or make you into their latest recruit. Also tip of the hat to The Walking Dead for similar reasons.

[Cikomyr]

For me, the scariest things is when the implied message is "This could happen to you, it's very real".

So for things that keeps me awake at night, Threads.

[Yora]

What would you say are good horror movies/books/something that work without the characters obviously doing stupid things because the writer had no idea how to keep things dangerous in other ways?

Again, I think The Thing is a strong contender. Lots of people are having bad ideas, but at least most of those are rational plans where you can understand why they thought it was the best thing to do.

[The Succubus]

I always doubted the medium of paper as being effective at horror. I've lots of Stephen King, James Herbert the Dean Koontz here and there and while some were a little creepy, never to the extent that I slept with the light on.

Then some complete (unkind person of questionable parentage) linked me to the Engima of Amigara Fault and I literally could not sleep for a week.

I've always liked creeping horrors, such as Ringu, Ju-On and The Eye. Ringu will always be my "favourite" though, if by favourite I mean "method of combating narcalepsy". Hell, just think about it makes my spine crawl at times.

For this Halloween though, I'm going with something less "scary" and more "awesome" - I'm going to have an Evil Dead marathon. =D

[the_druid_droid]

Ah, horror - probably one of my favorite genres. To clarify my post, I think I should say that I like two separate types of horror for distinctly different reasons. The first group consists of things that actually deeply frighten me, and the second is mostly just things which I enjoy because they're darkly atmospheric, although they don't make my skin crawl.

That said, some things from the first group:
"The Color Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft (Wells, man... wells...)
The Ring (I have a long-standing fear of the Children That Aren't Children device)
Event Horizon (The possession angle was what got to me most, I think)
Marble Hornets (The paranoia and sense of inevitable doom is great)

From the second:
Alien (Fantastic, but not skin-crawling)
Most of the rest of Lovecraft
Halloween (Arguably one of the epitomes of slasher horror)
The Shining
Arthur Machen's stories

I'd also like to add The Thing, but I can't seem to settle it into a single category. It has some very creepy things, but I don't know if it's quite as heart-stoppingly terrifying to me as some of the others on the list.

[turkishproverb]

Originally Posted by the_druid_droid

"The Color Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft

Look up a german movie called "Die Farbe". It's an adapation of this story.

[Bastian Weaver]

The Birds.
Good old Cabinet of Doctor Kaligari.

And F. Paul Wilson's Adversary cycle.

[hamlet]

A new one: the HP Lovecraft Historical Society has done a black and white adaptation of The Whisperer in the Darkness and it is good. Really good.