Guest Blog: Response to The “Eeeee” Factor In Horror Movies – Jan Kozlowski

I definitely agree that, for me, today’s movies trend more towards ewww, than eeee, but sometimes I wonder if it’s more that we, as the audience, have changed and become less susceptible to the eeee?

I was just writing about this a couple of days ago when I did a Dreadful Droplets post about the 37th anniversary of The Exorcist being released. At the time, it was deemed the scariest movie of all time and there were reports of audience members fainting, vomiting and even possibly miscarrying. Granted, I never saw the movie in the theater, but when I did get around to seeing it, I wasn’t impressed. It was a decent enough horror story, but it definitely didn’t make my Scariest Ever list.

But then I started thinking about what movies WOULD make the scariest ever list for me and I realized that since I became an urban EMT back in the mid 1980′s, I can’t honestly say that any movie has really scared me. I can enjoy horror movies, I can appreciate the special effects or the gross out, and I can love or hate the storyline, but after all the real life horror, the movies just don’t touch those nerves any more.

The best scariest list of movies (eee’s) I could come up with were all the ones that I saw before my EMS work…The original Friday the 13th with Kevin Bacon getting the arrow through his throat, Karen Black being terrorized by the Zulu doll in Trilogy of Terror and Jaws.

So is it me? Is it all of us collectively, as a more jaded audience? Or the movies themselves?

Jan Kozlowski is a freelance writer. She sold her first story, Psychological Bacchanal to the EWG E-zine in 1997. Her short story, Parts is Parts, won awards in both the International Writing Competition sponsored by DarkEcho’s E-zine and Quoth the Raven’s Bad Stephen King contest. Another short story, Stuff It, was sold to an independent film producer and went into production as a movie short called Sweet Goodbyes. Her short stories appear in HUNGRY FOR YOUR LOVE: An Anthology of Zombie Romance and FANGBANGERS: An Erotic Anthology of Fangs, Claws, Sex and Love, both edited by Lori Perkins. Her websites are: www.jankozlowski.com , www.butshekeepsanicelawn.com and www.darkbitesdatebook.com .