Boo Moments

I love movies, and horror is my pet genre. But most horror movies suck and are a waste of time and money, like any movie made by Platinum Dunes (the remakes of The Amityville Horror, Friday the 13th, etc) or made by James Wan (Saw, Saw II, Dead Silence). Aside from this pattern of name recognition, I've worked out a system for determining the potential quality of a horror movie by watching its trailer and counting the number of Boo moments. What is a Boo moment? Anything that tries to invoke fear by startling you. The system is very simple:

1 point: A basic boo moment. Something jumps out or appears unexpectedly via a sudden reveal. Usually accompanied by a screeching orchestra hit.
2 points: An intermediate boo moment. This is when the something that jumps out does do directly at the screen or is revealed in such a way that it's looking at the camera.
3 points: Advanced boo moment. This reveal or pop out is preceded by several seconds of build-up. It usually but not always involves someone investigating a suspicious noise and finds nothing, only to have the killer or monster appear abruptly behind them, presumably having been standing there in anticipation of the hapless idiot backing up into them.

Got your boo moments sorted out? Good. Now here's the scale of quality based on the points scored by the number and type of boo moments in a given trailer:

3 points or less: Probably good with the potential to be great. Examples: Rosemary's Baby, Shudder Island, Daybreakers
4-6 points: Might be enjoyable, but could just as easily suck. Defer to track record of screenwriter and director when possible, but this is no guarantee either. Example: Land of the Dead
7 points or more: This is the cinematic equivalent of repeatedly hitting yourself in the junk with a meat tenderizer. Examples: Anything made by Platinum Dunes.

Why am I bringing this up? Because a lot of bizarrists want to do scary stuff and prove to have just as much sense of subtlety, restraint, and pathos as Michael Bay and his cronies. There's a difference between scaring someone and startling them. And to do so requires genuine pathos, intelligence, and an understanding of what actually scares people.

Jim Pace's The Web is a neat little effect and everything, but it's more of a gag than a horror routine. It's scary in the same way that Twilight is romantic: cheap, emotionally exploitative and quickly forgotten. It takes absolutely no talent to get reactions like that. If you want to actually do something that people will remember and enjoy, you need to have more of a method to your madness than just sneaking up on a person and screaming "BOO!!" at them.