this needs to be addressed because this annoyed me. i hate when people say: "classic horror films suck because they're not scary." i need to put this in perspective. let's take a silent horror film for one; nosferatu might not be frightening to modern watchers because it wasn't made for this generation or generations in the 80s either, so you won't find it scary because they're relying on tactics that will terrify the audiences who lived in the 20s. I mean they didn’t have talking in films yet so they had to rely on other things.
you also have to take in account that the internet did not exist to these people, so yea a lot of people today have seen some gory things and are desensitized to some of the horror shown in these classic horror films, that doesn't make it a bad horror film that you were not terrified by it. not to mention horror is subjective anyways.
even further back, house of the devil is 1000% not scary to anyone today, but in the 1890s all this technology advancing was terrifying to them. like the use of appearing and disappearing on screen is very simple to do nowadays and some people won't find it scary, but for people in that era it was fucking terrifying because this technology didn’t exist out in the public so freely.
the exorcist, I’ve come to seen that to modern day watchers don’t find it scary (I’m not saying everybody but there’s a new influx people who are saying this stuff and I mean a lot of people) , but they never had people from the 2000s-2020s in mind when they were making the film. they weren't saying "ooh we need to make sure it's scary to people in the future." no they knew their audiences in the 70s was either overly religious or not religious whatsoever and a movie using religion as a form of terror, got people in those seats.
people that say "horror movie classics are terrible because they're not scary," bother the hell out of me. horror is all about it’s context!
