10 Horror Movies That Are Actually Scary And Why

Tell me if you've heard this one before.

A group of unrealistically gorgeous twenty-somethings go out into the remote woods to get drunk and have sex when they stumble upon *insert random demonic zombie killing machine ghost creature here* and end up getting cut to ribbons.

Familiar?

Of course it is. Worse than the redundant storytelling, worse than the cheap jump scares, worse then the lack of originality, the problem with horror movies today can be summed up in one phrase: (to quote the great Magneto when he plugged Rogue in the back of the neck with a tranquilizer dart in the first X-Men): "Young people."

Young people running scared through the woods, Evil Dead.

Young people running scared through the woods, Friday the 13th (2009).

Young people running scared through the woods, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Horror movies have always appealed to young people, teenagers mostly, people who don't know enough about the real horrors of life to even know what's scary. They'll jump at anything that's thrown on the screen accompanied by a loud sound effect and a splash of gore. And most of the time you don't even need the gore.

I still watch the occasional horror movie, but I'm selective with what I see. The first thing I look at is the cast. If they fall into that "unrealistically gorgeous twenty-something" range, I move on.

There have been some decent efforts though. The Blair Witch Project, Scream, Evil Dead, The Hills Have Eyes, but mostly it all looks the same: Final Destination, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Prom Night, House of Wax, My Bloody Valentine, Sleepaway Camp, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Joy Ride, Wrong Turn, Rest Stop, and all their sequels, remakes, ripoffs, and retreads.

You can only watch teenagers running around acting scared for so long. Eventually, you realize they're all repeating every performance that came before them, and that's not scary. Not in the least.

The Older Protagonist

I sincerely believe the problem with horror movies today is the lack of older protagonists.

There's something different psychologically about watching grown adults be scared, people who have been through enough of life's hardships to know that everything that goes bump in the night isn't a mask-wearing serial killer.

It's not the job of creature effects or jump scares to sell the fright. It's the responsibility of the cast. If we're convinced they're scared, then we crap our pants. And a young cast just can't sell the scare factor like seasoned adults.

That's why the protagonist in my latest novel, Rabbit Punch, is a 62-year-old retired boxer. His feathers don't ruffle easily, and it makes the stakes feel higher when they do.

Here are ten horror movies in random order that nailed it in the scare department thanks to a cast of mature actors that knew how to deliver scary.

ONE
Alien remains the quintessential "how to make a horror movie" movie. The entire cast is made up of mature adults, weathered and weary "truckers" who aren't easily deterred. So when they start losing their cool, you know what just hit the fan. You want to know when the Alien movies lost all sense of scariness? 2004. When the studios watered down this R-rated franchise to PG-13, cast a bunch of gorgeous young twenty-somethings, and marketed it to teens.

TWO
John Carpenter's The Thing remains another one of horror's classics. You can point to the tremendous creature effects, the isolating locations, or the brilliant direction as the reason this movie is so terrifying, but, as always, it's the cast of grown adult males that make this bit of science fiction feel real.

THREE
Jaws. It's not the shark jumping up out of the water that's scary. It's Chief Brody's reaction as he backs away slowly in shock until he looks at Quint and says, "You're going to need a bigger boat." People always remember the shark, but they don't realize that it's Chief Brody that sold the scare.

FOUR
Dog Soldiers looks like a B movie, and it is, but the thing that makes this werewolf story one of the best in its genre is the cast of hardened Scottish soldiers who, during a training exercise, wander into the territory of a family of werewolves. Nothing's scarier than seeing grown soldiers frightened out of their fatigues.

FIVE
The Pack. I've never found dogs to be scary, so I watched this movie with a bit of nonchalance. To my delight, the cast was mainly a middle-aged man and his wife, their two children, and a local police officer. When a pack of wild dogs start invading their farm, the scares feel genuine because anyone who knows a farmer knows rugged ol' farmers don't scare easy.

SIX
The Exorcist was plenty scary, but having someone with the aged gravitas of Max von Sydow playing Father Merrin lent the film a tonal weight that chilled the bones. The Exorcist is considered by many to be one of the scariest films ever made.

SEVEN
Predator. As far as horror movies go, this is more action, but you can't deny this franchise lost a lot of clout when the studio began watering down its R-rated content for teenagers—remember my mention of Alien vs Predator above? Before that, nothing was scarier than watching Arnold Schwarzenegger's tough-as-nails team of soldiers be terrorized in the jungle by an alien who thinks he's a spinal surgeon.

EIGHT
Misery. Hollywood, take note. Stephen King is not the master of horror for no reason. He knows what scares, and his books generally feature older protagonists. Misery, one of the best screen adaptations of King's books, works thanks to the sweaty, agonized performance of James Cann alongside Kathy Bates' psycho with a sledgehammer. Try not to flinch. I dare you.

NINE
The Shining. Who didn't cringe watching Jack Torrance lose his mind in the isolated Overlook Hotel? It's his wife, Wendy, played by actress Shelley Duvall—who was often actually terrified on set—who convinces us what's happening is truly frightening. And it works.

TEN
American Horror Story. There's a reason this show is scaring people all across the world. Its cast is almost entirely adults reacting to supernatural horror situations like any logical adult would react. Watching their pysches break down is the most terrifying thing of all.

How I Saw The Hero Change - A Look At Heroes In The Movies

I was raised in a pretty traditional home in rural Vermont. My father was a police officer. My mother a God-fearing woman. So a strong sense of justice and right and wrong was instilled in me.

As a kid, the types of heroes I gravitated to were the heart-of-gold heroes, uncompromising and duty-bound. The heroes who believed in truth and justice. Superman. Batman. Luke Skywalker. He-Man. The Ninja Turtles.

In the early 1980s, there was no question that heroes were good. It didn't matter what made them good, just that they were good, that they fought the bad guys and won in the end. And that's pretty much all I cared about too.

Arnold Schwarzenegger as Handsome Stranger in Cactus Jack

When I was around eight years old, my mother introduced me to a movie that changed my perspective on what makes a hero. Cactus Jack, also known as The Villain, was a western comedy that starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as Handsome Stranger, a perfect cowboy who did what was right because, well, it was right. In my little eight-year-old eyes a hero couldn't get any bigger than Schwarzenegger. I mean, come on, he was Commando, Kalidor from Red Sonja, Detective John Kimble from Kindergarten Cop, and Dutch from Predator. He wasn't just a hero, he was the hero!

But the main character of Cactus Jack wasn't Schwarzenegger. It was the bad guy Cactus Jack Slade, played by Kirk Douglas, a thief and a scoundrel and a liar. Heck, he even had his own "Bad Men of the West" handbook. He was rotten to the core, but he was the hero of the story. Sort of. He was the focal point anyway, and it's the first time I remember thinking differently about what makes a character a hero.

Seeing the trend

As I got into my teen years I began to notice a trend in popular culture. Heroes went from being wholesome and good and chivalrous to dark and brooding and even more dangerous.

I didn't know it at the time, but the anti-hero was nothing new. The movement began, I think, in the 70s with films like Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw, Death Wish, and Dirty Harry—in fact, Clint Eastwood became the poster child for the brooding anti-hero for many years.

This wasn't just a film trend either.

In comic books, we saw the emergence of The Punisher and Wolverine in 1974. This ignited a dark and brooding anti-hero trend that exploded in the 80s with Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns—a title that redefined Batman as a nightmarish vigilante—and Alan Moore's Watchmen series, which gave a dark new definition to what makes a comic book hero.

In literature, we saw the popularity of the anti-hero rise with books like Steven King's The Dark Tower, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, and many, many others.

On the political front, Ronald Reagan began appointing conservative judges who cracked down on crime at a time when most of the public perceived crime rates as high. The sexual revolution and the Cold War era helped breed a mindset within American culture that had a lot to do with shrugging off society's standards and government control.

The public perception of what a hero was supposed to be was changing. No more Greek demigods or mortal "chosen ones." Heroes were becoming more human and more imperfect.

My favorite imperfect hero

For me, the next big milestone came in the early '90s when Bruce Willis took on his most iconic role, that being the tough-as-nails cop John McClain in Die Hard (1988), Die Hard 2 (1990), and Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995). I might not have been drawn to a character like John McClain with his drinking binges, foul-mouth, and bad attitude had it not been for the fact that my dad was also a cop.

The more I watched John McClain, however, the more I realized that underneath his imperfect exterior was a true hero. Sure, he was a nut, and he screwed up a lot, but you could always count on him in the end. Die Hard remains one of my all-time favorite movies.

Other movies that challenged my perception of what makes a hero included Sean Connery in The Rock, Martin Lawrence and Will Smith in Bad Boys, Wesley Snipes in Blade, and Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon.

The hero becomes the villain

Shortly after the turn of the century, I observed another change in how our heroes were being portrayed. This time dark took an even darker turn.

Sin City (2005), based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller, remains an incredibly grim and hyper-stylized story of bad guys doing the right thing. Its brutal violence pushed the anti-hero to the edge, even going so far as to make the audience root for the bad guys. (Let's face it, everyone was a bad guy in that movie!)

Also in 2006 Showtime presented us with Dexter, a hugely popular series that ran for eight seasons, based on the books by Jeff Lindsay. The hero of this series was a serial killer. Oh, sure, he was a conflicted serial killer, and the show did an amazing job at making him likable, but this kind of programming never would've been produced ten years ago.

The hero had changed again, and he was really, really bad.

How far the hero has fallen

Nowadays you'd be hard-pressed to find a film with a perfect, uncompromising hero. If you do, it's probably made fun of—i.e. Metro Man as voiced by Brad Pitt in Megamind, and Emmet as voiced by Chris Pratt in The Lego Movie.

The closest example would probably be Chris Evan's strong-jawed portrayal of Captain America in Marvel's Avengers franchise, but even he is depicted as being an archaic concept from a bygone era.

Has the concept of the "true hero" become a thing of the past? Why are we, as a culture, so averse to the notion of perfection? Why aren't our heroes wholesome anymore?

As much as we as individuals strive for perfection we know we can't reach it, and we're quick to tear down anyone who appears even slightly perfect. Tabloids hound celebrities for their dirty secrets. Politicians attack one another like rabid dogs to expose the skeletons in their closets. For some reason perfection makes us feel awful about ourselves, so when we meet people who seem to have it all together our impulse is to gossip about them, talk behind their backs, smear them, bring them down so we feel better. We hate perfection, and yet we're obsessed with it.

We want to see our heroes win, but it's like we can't buy the scenario unless we can perceive them as being worse than ourselves.

I guess all of this is to say as much as I've embraced the anti-hero with all of his foibles and problems, I kinda miss the heroes I grew up with.