Creepy little girls and the trope of innocence turned into terror have lost their edge. Perhaps it's just me.
People driven mad by the haunting. Ghost paranormal stuff in general unless its done in a unique fashion. I am a horror genre writer, horror, fantasy, crime, science fiction. I fall under the branch of speculative fiction though, but the point remains. I read a lot of horror, a lot of horror genres. I am so sick and tired of ghost paranormal stuff unless it can be done right or in an interesting way. I once wrote a short story about a ghost who haunted a house for years and felt the living was haunting him.
In movies, I'm tired of anything that has to be dark in order to be scary. If your story isn't scary when brightly lit, then it's not a good horror story. In writing in general, I'm tired of psychics. There is always some psychic that knows exactly what to do to remove the spirit. Bullshit. Psychics are frauds, everyone knows that. John Edwards is a extortionist being fed information through an earpiece or saying things that are intentionally vague and generic and everyone like him does the exact same thing. Adding someone like that to the story is just plain lazy and immediately removes any concept of realism. Oh that and all the bullshit technical babble. Oh this camera is special modified to detect spirit light that's invisible to humans. Just freakin' no. Light is light, it's made of photons, UV and IR is not mysterious. EM auras around living cells or metal objects are artifacts of how the camera works, not spirit energy. All that crap needs to just stop. Ghosts aren't real. That's fine, that should not be a showstopper. I'm perfectly willing to suspend disbelief and enjoy a story if it's gripping. The Force and Jedi aren't real either. But when you start piling on the bullshit (psychics / Midichlorians) to try and legitimize your other bullshit (ghosts / the force,) you just get layers of bullshit and layers of that is just a pile. (Poltergeist reboot / The Phantom Menace.)
I think you've hit most of what pisses me off these days. As a side note though, I saw a fan theory (totally unsubstantiated by Lucas's sloppy writing, of course) that said that the reason midichlorians are never mentioned in the original trilogy is that the Jedi later figured out that midichlorians didn't cause the Force, they were attracted to it, like moths to a light. It still doesn't excuse the prequels, but I thought it was some nimble thinking nonetheless.
Lucas actually had the concept of midichlorians set from almost the beginning, he just didn't feel there was time to explain the concept in the OT. As far as I can tell, they were never claimed to "cause" the Force in any canon material; that was a fan misinterpretation. They just served as sort of a bridge, letting people with a sufficient concentration of them tap into it to a certain degree. But yeah, generally over-explaining things in this genre can backfire, and it does so worst when you try to be all scientific about it.
What are you fed up with in paranormal/ghosty type stuff ...? Psychic detectives. And to Indian burial grounds add Egyptian mummies.
Well okay, I agree on the psychic detectives and I'll forever associate the Indian burial grounds with Stephen King, but what do you mean by the Egyptian mummies? I've been fighting one for the last 2 months...and now I find out it's passé?! Don't answer that, I'm over it too.
Wizard/witch main character magic not being well thought out. For example: not being clear about the limits or what exactly makes one person more powerful than another.
Vampires and Zombies.... Its over done I'm bored now. They used to be my favorite. I Hate romance in those genre's as well. I miss the- vampires are evil psychopathic beyond mortal understanding, monsters that kill and are violent thing. I used to like zombies then RE over did it. The franchise is killed in my opinion. Move on.
The bit where they look in the mirror, briefly see something behind themselves, turn around and it's not there.
This is why, to me at least, cosmic horror is far more interesting than regular Paranormal Activity type horror. The idea of a being whose mere existence renders humans obsolete and unimportant is much more intriguing than, "The ghost of Old Man Murray is haunting our house!"
Little children being haunted, houses being haunted, children giggling, laughing, smiling in a sinister way, married couples, basically everything that's been coming out lately.
I remember watching The Perfect Storm, and the increasingly incredible problems that beset the fishing boat; it's based on a true story, I told myself, so it must be true, no matter how incredible. Only at the end did it become clear that NOTHING that happened to the boat, after it left harbour, was known about. NONE of it was true. The true story was: fishing boat puts to sea, despite the forecast of bad weather; boat is never seen again; end of story.
I think unti the antenna broke off might be documentable, but I had the same feeling. For all we know, they daisy-chained each other and fled to Mozambique...
I think my problem more than them being 'over-done' as much as the ones out there seem to be the Little Vampire-esque mourning their loss of humanity types. I find that they don't have to be evil per say, but I'd love to see a facet such as them relishing being able to sever ties between themsleves and the worst parts of humanity or going back to the classic using them as a metaphor for taboos that the likes of Anne Rice and Bram Stoker did actually do.
I had to watch that with my English class in Year 7 (11-12 years old). I did not enjoy it (didn't like being scared), but thought the twist was clever.
No realistic consequences to dealing with the supernatural. No one ends up seeing a shrink and getting committed, getting arrested for arson because they lit the possessed house on fire, or arrested for murder after the cursed object dispatches five of their loved ones.
One thing I'm not keen on in urban fantasy is the "monster mash", where you have to have every type of supernatural being in the world. This really hit me when I was reading the first Iron Druid book. The protagonist is an immortal druid, he's got a talking dog, he sleeps with a goddess, faeries try to kill him, his best buddy is a werewolf, his lawyer is a vampire, the cute girl at the coffee shop is actually an ancient ghost....all in the first book. It's like at some point, "just" having werewolves or vampires stopped being enough. I'll admit, I'm reading this with a degree of trepidation, since the story I'm writing right now is all about ghosts.
