5 Ways Thriller Movies Are Scarier Than Horror (& 5 Ways Horror Movies Win) – Screen Rant

Are thriller movies actually scarier than horror movies? In some ways, yes but in others, no.

Thriller and horror are two perennially popular genres in Hollywood. Its not hard to see why. After all, each of them offers all kinds of visceral thrills for the audience, asking viewers to suspend their disbelief and to take pleasure in those things that would terrify them if they occurred in the real world. While there are many differences between the two genres, both of them are frequently scary, designed to send chills racing up and down the spine of the person sitting rapt in the audience.

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Whats more, each of them has something about it that makes it scarier than the other.

As a rule, thrillers tend to be more cerebral than visceral, that is, they tend to ask the viewer to engage with the mind more than the body. As a result, the scariness of the genre stems in large part from the ways in which it asks the viewer to think about things and people in new ways, ways that might be very challenging and that might encourage the audience to never be able to look at the world around them in quite the same way again.

Though slaughter and blood have always been a part of the horror genre to some degree, in recent years theres been a renewed emphasis on this aspect, and torture porn has become quite popular. Theres something deeply scary and disturbing about films in which this takes place, not only because it encourages the audience to see themselves in the bodies of the victims, but also because it shows just how awful humans can be to one another.

Theres a lot of fairness to the criticism that horror films are predictable. When a person goes to a slasher movie, they usually know what theyre signing up for, and theres not usually a lot of experimentation with the form. Thats definitely not usually the case with thrillers though, which are predicated on the fact that they want to thwart expectations and challenge the viewer.

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One goes into a thriller never quite knowing what to expect in terms of plot and character.

The horror genre by design intends to push the boundaries of whats acceptable to be seen on-screen. Indeed, horror films are often those that seem designed to highlight the very worst things in the world, whether that be chainsaw-wielding rednecks or monsters from the deep. Its for this reason that horror is, in some ways, the externalization of all of the things that a given culture would rather not acknowledge about itself and about its desires and fears.

Anyone whos seen a thriller knows that part of the thrill of watching the film is the enigma. In other words, theres a central mystery at the heart of the film that usually drives the characters, and the viewer, to try to figure it out. Very often, its something troubling or disturbing, and its precisely the fact that it remains unknown throughout much of the film that makes its final reveal so shattering, forcing everyone to question everything that has come before.

Horror is one of those genres that is in some ways at the vanguard of whats possible to show in on the screen. The genre wants to push the envelope, to force viewers to encounter new experiences and sensations that they might not have known before.

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While this does explain part of the reason these films are so popular across different periods of film histories, it also explains why more than a few of them have ended up being quite controversial, sometimes to devastating effect.

While horror tends to rely on thrilling people with bodily terror, the thriller opts instead to explore the depths of human psychology. One need only think about some of the most iconic characters of the thriller genre, such as Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter, and others, to see how thrillers offer up examples of twisted psyches. In fact, its precisely because such characters are so charismatic and compelling that thriller is very often scarier, and more real, than horror.

To give horror its due, it does have the uncanny ability to show the body in all sorts of extreme situations. Sometimes, its a body being devoured by a beastly creature, and at others its being dismembered. In some of the scariest horror films, its devoured by other people. Its precisely horrors ability and willingness to show truly barbaric things being done to the human body that forces that viewer to confront their own vulnerability and, perhaps even more chillingly, their own deep-seated desires and yearnings.

Part of the pleasure of watching a truly well-constructed thriller film is seeing the ways in which the narrative is going to work. Thrillers, more than any other type of films, really do seem to take a lot of effort to make their narratives compelling, to lead the viewer on and to keep them in absolute suspense from the first frame to the last. While theres a lot of pleasure to be had here, theres also something disturbing and scary about being suspended in the midst of a narrative whose end-point one cannot clearly see at the beginning.

Theres no question that horror is a genre thats basically obsessed with death. Though there are of course horror films that dont show people getting killed, they are increasingly in a minority. Whats more, even when people arent killed, death is still present in the form of ghosts and other forms of hauntings. Horror is a potent reminder of the ultimate finitude of human existence, forcing the viewer to confront the fact that it really does wait for each and every human being. It doesnt get any scarier than that, does it?

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5 Ways Thriller Movies Are Scarier Than Horror (& 5 Ways Horror Movies Win) - Screen Rant

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero