Rationalist horror movies
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- The Thing: classic
- Eden Lake
- Misery
- 10 Cloverfield Lane
- Gone Girl: not horror, but I specifically like it because of how agentic the protagonist is
2., 3. and 4. have in common that there is some sort of abusive relationship that develops, and I think this adds another layer of horror. (A person/group of people gain some power over the protagonist(s), and they slowly grow more abusive with this power.)
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And afterwards you can watch Thingu, approved by John Carpenter.
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Honorable mention for “The things”, a short story by Peter Watts. It retells the movie from the point of view of the monster, revealing the sensible— perhaps even admirable— motives behind its actions.
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I'm not a particular fan of horror, but:
Get Out feels rational to me: the protagonist is smart and keen, he doesn't follow the title's wise advice as soon as he might but it's understandable (he doesn't want to ruin what he thinks is his shot at being well-liked by what he hopes will be his future in-laws), and in general there's no big Idiot Ball moment for anyone I can think of.
Cabin in the Woods is a very thorough and very funny deconstruction of the typical "bunch of teens in an isolated location get picked off by some evil entity" plot, and it has a lot of intelligent meta commentary about the genre as well as characters smarter than average (in fact, there's a plot point that lampshades their usual stupidity in similar movies instead).
Happy Death Day is perhaps not terribly rational but it's a Groundhog Day style loop about a girl getting killed over and over again by some mysterious maniac, so obviously it's a very puzzle-like kind of story. Dodge the sequel though, that one's awful.
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It's a TV series instead of a movie, and I don't know what the difference between horror and thriller and action are, but I enjoyed The Fall of the House of Usher. (I think it's like a 6/10 on them being smart and like a 7/10 on them being agentic, tho I think you could argue with both of those ratings.)
1That's created by Mike Flanagan. I haven't liked his recent stuff as much but he is responsible for two of the three movies on the winners list so sure seems promising.
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A Quiet Place
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What a great question! I realize in retrospect that my favorite horror films are ones in which people confront horror rationally, and the horror is rationally understandable. Some examples:
Splice (2009) They‘re not mad scientists, they’re perfectly sensible (albeit ambitious) scientists who have unleashed a manmade horror beyond their comprehension. Nice escalation of the reasons to keep the experiment around as the horror escalates, so you can see why they don’t just kill it while it’s small. A lot of movies would just let the characters hold the idiot ball.
Altered States (1980) More perfectly sensible ambitious scientists. Moral: if something incomprehensible and terrifying happens to you, stay in the lab until you figure it out; don’t go home and try to sleep it off.
This seems like as good a time to share this too-good-to-check fact as any:
Victorian haunted house tropes:
- residents getting progressively sicker for no known reason
- residents act strangely and don't remember it
- seeing things that can't possibly be real
- general feelings of dread
- house collapses or explodes for no reason
The victorian haunted house trope got codified shortly after the introduction of gas heating. Bad gas heating can lead to both carbon monoxide poisoning and explosions. Symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning include:
- general sickliness
- weird behavior
- memory problems
- hallucinations
- general feelings of dread
So maybe the haunted house tropes are rooted in part in cutting edge heating tech.
Somewhat related: does anyone else strongly dislike supernatural elements in horror movies?
It's not that I have anything against a movie exploring the idea of "what if we suddenly discovered that we live in a universe where supernatural thing X exist", but the characters just accept this without much evidence at all.
I would love a movie though where they explore the more likely alternate hypotheses first (mental issues, some weird optical/acoustic phenomenon, or just someone playing a super elaborate prank), but then the evidence starts mounding, and eventually they are forced to accept that "supernatural thing X actually exists" is really the most likely hypothesis.
I saw a review of a reality show like this. The contractor agent was just one "your door hinges were improperly installed" after another. One couple saw a scary shadow face on their wall and it turned out to a patch job on the paint that matched perfectly in daylight but looked slightly different in low light.
Oculus isn't perfect for this, she starts out already believing in the haunted house due to past experience, but has a very scientific approach to proving it.
I think my favorite [edit: ideal hope] for this sort of thing has 2-3 killers/antogonists/scary-phenomena, and one of them turns out to be natural, and one supernatural. So the audience actually has to opportunity to figure it out, rather than just be genre savvy and know it'll eventually turn out to be supernatural.
Don't leave me hanging like this, does the movie you are describing exist? (Though I guess your description is a major spoiler, you would need to go in without knowing whether there will be anything supernatural.)
Many of the feature length Scooby Doo cartoon films I watched as a child do a big reveal where, actually this time (because its a longer story) some aspect of the magic or monster turns out to be real. I think one actually has both the fake and real monster.
Oh, no I just made it up, alas. This is a sketch of how someone else should construct such a movie. (Maybe the movie exists but yeah if it did it'd unfortunately now be a spoiler in this context. :P)
1There is a narrative-driven videogame that does exactly this, but unfortunately I found the execution mediocre. I can't get spoilers to work in comments or I'd name it. Edit: It's
Until Dawn
Are you thinking of
Until Dawn?
(also it seems like I can get a spoiler tag to work in comments by starting a line with >! but not by putting text into :::spoiler [text] :::)
That's the one. I couldn't get either solution to work:
>! I am told this text should be spoilered
:::spoiler And this text too:::
Hmm, I have exactly one idea. Are you pressing shift+enter to new line? For me, if I do shift+enter
>! I don't get a spoiler
But if I hit regular enter then type >!, the spoiler tag pops up as I'm typing (don't need to wait to submit the question for it to appear)
This is an unrelated idea this topic reminded me of. I've had a question about why fiction becomes less compelling with age. There's a simple answer, mere familiarity, but this elides the question a bit. What exactly am I becoming familiar with that no longer grabs my attention? I think one of the factors is status. This will be obvious to people who are fans of Johnstone's Impro, but the basic idea is that interpersonal fictional scenes are mostly about status fights, deltas, negotiations, updates etc. This stuff is fascinating when you're young because it's good training data. It is less appealing when you feel that your position in life is somewhat settled.
1I've been rereading Sandman, which was deeply important to me in my young adulthood but has fallen flat for the last decade+. This reread has been filled with thoughts like "Gaiman is so overrated" and "what did I ever used to get out of this?" Until I got to book 9, where it out of nowhere started hitting me at levels of depth I had no conception of at 20.
So I think some of what's happening is that having a catchy beginning isn't that correlated with having a strong ending, and young people are easier to hook at the beginning due to less experience. There are lots of books with deeply satisfying endings but so-so beginnings, and people only get to the ending if they're easily impressed enough to get through the meh beginning.
This is really clear with good-but-cliched books: if it's your first time reading the trope you can just enjoy the good parts. But I think it's true for a lot of books on a more subtle level.
Becoming busier? (Becoming more aware of how little time you have in the world and how much other people need it.)
I've noticed that my intuitive perception of fiction has shifted from "almost like an alternate reality" to "clear artifice" as I've gotten older. Perhaps just from seeing enough fiction and enough reality that the ways in which they differ become obvious.
My tastes in fiction have changed as I've aged, but I still enjoy it quite a bit. I think your observation generalizes. A lot of tropes and conflicts in fiction (and in reality, for that matter) seemed critically important in my youth, partly because they were novel in that form. Having read/seen a lot more, I now recognize the shape of most conflicts, and am no longer particularly invested in the characters' reactions to them.
I STILL really enjoy the art forms, the presentation, and the new focus on aspects I hadn't noticed or had forgotten about. And sometimes I just let the critical thinker in me and just enjoy the ride, the same now as my youth.
What fiction, if any, have you found to be compelling in the recent years of your life? (And do you have a sense of what made it compelling?)
As an aside: I'm curious if you've read The Waves by Virginia Woolf, and if so, what you thought of it.
Haven't read The Waves, will check it out. I mostly find things like Project Hail Mary still entertaining, ie borderline rationalist fic where the main character is portrayed as deliberating. Once you start noticing how no one discusses options in most fiction it makes a lot of it difficult to stomach.
For me it's not that fiction would be less compelling, but my standards have crept up, and it would take more time and effort to find something that would really grab me.
It follows is ridiculously irrational. What a sensible person could quite easily do is fly over to Vegas and sleep with a prostitute, and then it's exceedingly unlikely that the curse could hunt all of the new bearers down faster than they could spread it around.
Easy enough for a male to do, trivial for a woman. And if you're concerned with the ethics of this approach (even if I suspect it would result in fewer casualties), consider simply flying around every now and again, faster than you can expect the entity to chase you.
The curse doesn't track multiple people at once, it would just get transferred to the very first person the prostitute slept with, then return to the prostitute after that person was killed. re:flying around, could work, although you'd have to worry about being ambushed at any time after a year or two. What I think you might want to do is create a private chat room for people who have been cursed where they regularly update each other about their status, so you know to worry if the people ahead of you in the chain stop responding. Or if you don't want to spread the curse, combine traveling with living in somewhere like a desert where you can see people coming from very far away.