People conflate being startled with being scared

You do you. Alien aren't scary but it's intense and well made, and i only watched it recently. The Thing too. They both excel without relying on cheap jumpscare.

Counterpoint: cinematography and story is more important to whether a movie is good than if it makes you jump

The shining is not a particularly scary film by modern standards, it's still rightly regarded as one of the best films of all time despite that

You can just say that some horror movie simply isn't your cup of tea.

It's not enviable if you can only enjoy horror movies if you're surprised, but it's valid to have that kind of taste.

But Psycho and Alien are masterworks of tension in filmmaking (although Psycho is technically speaking a Thriller). And Evil Dead 2 is simply the perfect movie, so, this is my verdict on the meme:

You make me sad

Hard disagree about horror films and 'scary movies' needing to be 'scary'. That's an extremely subjective measure that just starts useless arguments.

Just like any other film, what it actually needs is good writing, good acting, and good cinematography, parts which are more concrete than whether something's scary. The horror part is essentially just an aesthetic which a movie can sit within.

Also, quite often the view that 'scary movies should be scary' just leads to directors creating films that are hard to watch, period - full of vapid jumpscares, scenes made to just gross out the audience, and often just torture fetish content. It's a terrible metric to aspire to that generally degrades the entire genre imo.

House isn't scary at all, though it is scary that the director thought Hugh Laurie was more American than most Americans.

I have no idea what this meme is trying to convey

The Internet gives us access to the kind of depths of human depravity on a daily basis that most people wouldn't have been exposed to in 1968, unless they had just gotten back from Vietnam.

It’s a failure of imagination on your part in some cases. In others the studio produced a confusing mess that might be scary if anyone could understand it.

Who out there claiming old things aren't scary?

no movies are scary, wdym?

I think an element of being scared is surprise and the unknown.

When something is done well it gets copied and becomes a cliche, then it's no longer scary. Old movies are where the cliches come from, so revising them no longer packs the surprise and unknown from when they were first released. The movies you watch today might be scary, but in a few decades when they've been mimicked a few times they will no longer hold that potency.

So, in a way, yes, older movies tend to no longer be scary. I think some of it is also learning the film making techniques. When we watch the behind the scenes of an actor in a suit, it makes the film lose some of that unknown.

I re-watched the Exorcist recently. I found it scary, but in a different way from how people try to sell it.

The head turning, the vomit, the spider walking, that was all shocking (and cool) but not scary.

What I did find scary was all the science/medicine stuff. Doctors telling the mother that Reagan is faking it, or keeping her under sedation, or subjecting her to endless invasive tests. The real horror is the mother's realization that the material world cannot save her daughter. The horror of putting Reagan's life in the hands of faith.

So I'd say that it works on several levels, where for some people, scary is "OMG, a monster face!" and for others scary is the incomprehensible.

Upvote for mentioning House. House and House II deserve better than being forgotten.

Old not scary movies are also not scary → old not scary movies are bad. So are new scary and new not scary movies. Hence, movies are bad.

Do people think what induces fear is the same for everyone, we all have different triggers, what's scary for one person can be mundane for another, it's pointless to judge a movie by this one arbitrary factor, for me a horror movie is good or bad based on a lot more than just this one factor of how scary it felt

I'm sorry, I just have the kind of autism where scary movies are either cringe or hilarious.

'Scary movies' aren't scary.

Horror is a meme of a genre.

House is good, I prefer the sequel though.