There has always been a certain comedy to my horror love. I’ve always liked horror for the laughs, the cheesiness, the cool effects, and the usually quite outlandish plot which can be fun to critique and at the very least chuckle at. I’ve also always loved horror for some of the moral questions it raises, even when it’s just trying to make things bloody and nasty. But the one thing that I haven’t really been, at least not in years and years, is scared. Every horror fan probably reaches that point somewhere along the line, where you’ve watched loads of different horror films, as well as perhaps seeing a few real life horrors. At some point it just stops scaring you. You can still like it, it just doesn’t fulfill its intended purpose of frightening you, or filling you with horror. Oddly enough, one of the great things about being a horror fan is that you still have a chance to be frightened. Best place for that, is watching previews.

It may sound silly, but I think that the Horror genre is the single best genre to be previewed. Often the scare of the preview, or the slight anxiety and thrill of potentially being scared, is the best one. In my case no film lives up to the promise of the scare it promotes. Any horror film from the flashes of fear you see in many victim’s eyes in the Saw previews to the tales of ghosts and ghouls in such films are almost always at their best in the small doses afforded to you by film previews. The preview is, after all quite the tricky tool to use well. Generally speaking you want to tantalize, get someone interested and begging for more, and then finish. Now in many cases, that involves either a long tedious romp through some of the plot points, revealing most of the funny jokes, or stringing together some artistic visions and epic shots mixed in with meaningless dialogue. In fact, most of the time previews seem to have a way of looking pretty dumb. The new Batman movie, for example, took the scattergun approach of showing lots of clips (some of which it turned out were effectively spoilers for the plot) in some meaningless expose. Other movies, most mediocre comedies for example, take an even less appealing approach and show every funny joke. That way, avid cinema-goers and rental watchers can go into the latest Jack Black or Ben Stiller film and actually anticipate the joke. Good tactic, no. But with horror it is somehow different. We want to be scared by horror, and the most frightening thing to mankind has always been the unknown. Add a tocuh of creepiness to the unknown and presto, you have yourself a real horror premise that could frighten. You can show and imply just about anything with a horror trailer. And if you have an imaginative and willing audience, you can get a sense of fear out of just about anything. It’s the tell-tale sign of some of the modern era that flashy jumpy cuts and quick images are starting to dominate these previews, but no matter what the technique, previews are becoming effective horror vessels.

Is this a good thing. In my mind it is indeed a good thing. You can have your chance to be scared, and not have to invest too much time to be so. The only downside is that the movie itself will rarely hold the same kind of fright. How many previews have looked scary, only to have the real deal fall down flat. Well, I say flat, I mean that it is just not scary the way the preview was. We can still enjoy the films, but once you start devoting time to explain, expose, and to some extent rationalize the unknown then it ceases to be frightening and left to our imagination, and becomes yet another image in a long line of images we’ve all seen repeatedly. Which is why I have decided to stop watching horror films after the first 45 minutes. Let that fear remain.