Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

For as long as I’ve loved movies, I’ve hated horror. What was there to like? It’s a genre of cheap tricks, manipulating the cinematic space to produce scares and generally throwing plot and character development to the wind in favor of blood, gore and one absurd murder after another. But like all generalizations, mine has proven it’s not quite a perfect fit. The most popular horror films almost always appeal to the worst in us — slasher flicks were all the rages for years, with franchises like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street persisting year after year. More recently, so-called torture porn like Saw, Hostel, and The Hills Have Eyes has pushed the glorification of gore and violence to its limits, doing its best to scare the audience with a grisly sensory overload. And that’s not the horror worth paying attention to.

Tonight I watched Rosemary’s Baby, a deeply disturbing film perfectly crafted by Roman Polanski. There are no cheap scares produced by actors suddenly jumping into frame; there are no rivers of blood, eviscerated corpses or immortal murderers. There’s just the story of a young woman entangled in a surreal web of the occult, not comprehending or believing the terror of her situation until it’s far too late. Perfect pacing creates a taught, constantly unsettling film that grows more and more eerie as it goes. Polanski drops enough hints, employs just enough subtle music, to gradually increase the suspense to the bursting point. That’s what great horror is about — withholding information as long as possible, unnerving the audience and ultimately facing them with something relentless, impossible to overcome, something that strikes at the soul rather than the body.

Aside from the suspenseful filmmaking itself, Polanski accomplished this in Rosemary’s Baby by tapping into a primal instinct and subverting it — the innocence of a child. It’s because they should be so innocent that the reverse becomes so horrifying. It’s been used to great effect in classics like Village of the Damned and The Omen. Of course, plenty of not-so-great films try to employ the same concept — The Good Son, for example — but even then, the psychological angle still works better than any Jason or Freddy movie.

Where each film starring the terror of Camp Crystal Lake relishes in showing every kill, the most suspenseful horror films draw out the scene and subvert your expectations. The Hitcher might seem like it has more in common with slashers than Hitchcock, but it’s another example of a horror movie that triumphs by attacking the minds of its characters, rather than impaling them on a fishhook or giving them the old meat cleaver; it’s relentless insanity, presented against a serene and beautiful backdrop that makes Rutger Hauer’s chilling hitchhiker a scarier incarnation of evil than Freddy or Michael Myers.

Remakes of classic or cult classic horror films almost unanimously lack some quality of their forbearers; the new Hitcher passes up the grit and mental intensity of the original for more glamorous violence. Maybe it’s just the current trend, a newfound bloodlust in the wake of torture porn’s popularity. At least there are still movies every so often that are more about building tension than shocking the audience. Sunshine was a noble and entertaining effort in the sci-fi realm, though it was certainly no Alien. Maybe it’s time I got around to seeing The Descent…or maybe I’ll just explore the depths of Hitchcock, instead.