@cutecat22, exactly. Seems like the guy is always the middle ground representative while girls are either of the two extremes: useless screamers or invincible dragon slayers (who are usually also femme fatales). It's very rare to see a middle ground girl; someone who can kick ass but can also get her ass kicked. Again, I'd prefer it if she actually knew how to take care of herself, knew how to handle a gun, how to fight, had common sense etc, but that the odds would be just so tilted against her that it would be uncertain whether she'd make it, i.e. kinda like it is with oh so many male heroes. I mean, recently I read a published novel about a 16yo girl training to become a warrior and she was still utterly useless whenever things got tough. What gives? Where are all the tough but realistic girls (as main characters)?
Space nuns! (I suggested that once before, when someone here wanted to write but didn't have an idea. But I just now thought that maybe it would make a good horror idea!)
How about... warrior space nuns? And maybe one of them could be secretly evil, one would be like their leader, i.e. the über-warrior(ess), one of them would be the sensitive type, writing poetry etc, one of them would be kinda confuddled about her sexuality, also exploring different kinds of wild cornette and wimple designs (she might also be the musically gifted one), one of them would have a dark past and an unquenchable sexual appetite etc. And they'd tote around rifles / carbines / shotguns, pistols, and knives / kukris / tomahawks. Yup, I'd read that.
Space nuns with tomahawks - that's an image! Maybe some warrior face paint, too... riding into battle in space Popecarriages drawn by alien space horses. With unquenchable sexual appetites!! Okay, we can stop here. The horror has already happened.
I had a hard time digesting Sunshine as a horror movie, though there are undeniable and clear elements of the horror trope in that film. I think for me it was the discord in what is otherwise a crisply, cleanly Science Fiction film suddenly being tossed a horror element that answers more to the supernatural side of the horror genre. I mean, seriously, "I am Sunburn Man!! I will monologue at you in creepy Hellraiser, Pinhead fashion while the camera does streaky jiggly things to make me even stranger!! Your confusion as to my nature will be legendary even in hell." He felt more like a baddie from the Guild of Calamitous Intent. That just has no power to scare me. It's out of context and out of place. It didn't scare me; it confused me. So... to the OP... have a care with mixing and matching your horror elements...? They don't always match.
Actually, it is an interesting thought. There has never been a film about a competent bunch of people, say fresh graduates from the police academy having a celebration party bumping into someone hard to kill like Jason and they go after him instead of being trapped and hunted.
@Bryan Romer, that's why Aliens is so awesome: these highly trained, highly skilled, well-armed and equipped badasses go kick some alien ass, but, instead, get their own asses kicked to the moon and back, and then it turns into "Hunt the Marine." How do the marines (+ Ripley & Newt) survive now? That movie would've sucked if, instead of marines, we would've had a bunch of exceptionally useless teenagers on spring break. Besides, it would've ended right around the time they met the first aliens ('cause the teenagers still would've entered their lair 'cause we all know how drunk and giggly teenagers love to explore dark, dank dungeons and stuff instead of just sitting at home, on the living room floor around a bong, listening to crappy music).
Wasn't one of the Alien movies based on a prison planet so it was And then there was the other Alien vs Predator movie, the one with the underground pyramid and that guy who played the human looking robot (can't remember the proper term) in the original movie.
What else would be good, would be having a woman as the horror element! And I'm talking a little more horrific that bunny boiler or ghost/paranormal woman in a cloak kind of thing.
Dude, don't even... just don't. Alien and Aliens were such amazing movies and then they went and shat out Alien 3, which, while not a complete failure, was a bit of a stinker, and I won't even mention the rest. Okay, I'll mention Resurrection (sorry). They clearly tried to redo Aliens there, but that's just it: the copy almost never surpasses the original! That's why it failed. It was just reusing the same old stuff whereas Aliens was a major leap from Alien. Even comparing them to the Terminator series, 1 and 2 were great because 1 was groundbreaking and 2 just expanded on that and also broke new ground by introducing T1000, something we hadn't really seen before. And Linda Hamilton was totally badass in it. And then they did Terminator 3. The evil female terminator was just a bland copy of T1000 with added boobs and without the intensity of T1000's crazy eyes. The abovementioned 3. Android / synthetic. Although he prefers the term 'artificial person.' You mean like Carrie? The good ones are pretty rare, but that's what we're here for, isn't it? To write what we like but what doesn't exist or is under-represented in the current world of cinema / literature. I like it when the female villain is honestly scary, not just faux-badass, but someone that would have me shitting my pants if she approached me. And I also like them to have some morbidly humorous element to them, whether it's their own wit or something they do that could be seen as kinda funny (you know, like "am I allowed to laugh at this?").
@Wreybies - looool. That guy didn't scare me much either - and seriously, World War Z scared me so I definitely scare easy. What scared me wasn't the guy. What scared me were all the weirdly quiet deaths. Think about it - I don't think a single person died with screaming or even a fight. None of them had a chance, and it was all so... quiet. That's what gave me the chills. The way the camera zoomed in on the single leaf of clover in that woman's hands as she sat mourning her garden, and the next moment you see her face and only a second later you notice the blood, just the tiniest trace. That sudden realisation that someone you've been staring at like she was alive was actually dead - that gave me the chills. The fact that I still remember 4 death scenes in quite a bit of detail after nearly SEVEN YEARS. It says something, I think. I've only seen this film once at the cinema. @cutecat22 - oooh do let me know what you think of Black Swan! Tag me when you do Btw that clapping horror film sounds horrific (pardon the pun lol). I don't remember seeing the trailer though (and I don't want to lol). I remember the trailer for The Purge freaked me out, but I think the hardened horror fans would find it funny rather. I watched World War Z entirely by accident btw - didn't realise it was a horror from the trailer. I started freaking out when all the cinema trailers were horrors and I was like "SHIT". I spent half the movie hiding behind my hands and at one point, jumped so high I sprayed my friend with popcorn I'm actually really curious - horror fans: did you watch The Purge and did you find it scary? Or rather just funny? I'm actually pretty curious. Wasn't there a horror film called Pandora or something, about a space ship and this guy wakes up and it's just him and a bunch of people and they go out of their cell to find everyone's dead, and then monsters start stalking them and it turns out to be some virus? I hear it's meant to be pretty good. Another horror film - this is either Italian or Spanish I think. It's like a 60min film (or something equally short) in B&W, it's rather old. And it's about this guy who walks into a phone booth to make a call, and when he's done he finds he's locked in. Throughout the film everyone tries to get him out of there, to no avail, until everyone just leaves him trapped in the booth. Then at the end of the day, a crane comes and takes the phone booth away, with the man still inside. Finally, the crane stops at a factory or big storage room and puts the phone booth inside. There the man finds hundreds of other phone booths all piled together, each with a corpse inside. Never seen it, but sounds interestingly uneventful Since we're on the horror stuff, here's a clip for ya:
Uch! And it could have been a great movie. They took it far enough away from the timeline of the last one that they could have done some repair-work on the story, but no, they had to get Jean-Pierre Jeunet to direct it, and I'm like, No, Jean-Pierre! It's not City of Lost Children! Stop making it all strange and typically French-art-filmy with the hyper-saturated colors and ring-light reflections in everyone's eyes. And the dialogue! Lawd, gimme' strenf! "So, Ripley, I heard you like, ran into into these things before. What did you do?" "I died." Both actors, Ron Perlman and Sigourney Weaver respectively, delivering their lines in the most douche-bag "all the chicks wanna' git with this" tone. Appalling. ... and as if there weren't enough turds in the bowl, he casts the Wynona as the robot.
@minstrel's suggestion makes me wonder, can you put a legit horror in space? How might you do it? I realize that a number of things can make horror, but say you wanted a ghost story of sorts. Could you do it?
Like Event Horizon? I'm assuming you mean supernatural horror in space since e.g. Alien takes place in space and is a horror movie = horror in space. ETA: And there was an episode in X-Files where there was a ghost (or some such) in space. It came from Mars, entered an astronaut while he was on a space walk, and came with him to Earth. ETA2: It was called 'Space'! S01E09.
Or Sphere, which had a similar plot, but the ship made it back to Earth... in the past... because... it had Samuel L. Jackson & Queen Latifah. Any film with those two actors has no need to explain anything about itself to anyone!
I loathe both Event Horizon and Sphere. They're terrible movies. Event Horizon is the first movie I ever saw that made me think the director was really trying to make me turn it off. It is aggressively annoying. The soundtrack alone makes me want to leave the room. Both Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill had to pay some serious penance before I'd watch anything else they were in. Sphere is just dumb. You don't make a movie smart by claiming that the characters are all geniuses. I got the impression that Michael Crichton had no new ideas, but started writing anyway out of pure mechanical habit. He didn't know what to write about, so he just stared at the lightbulb and said, "Round. I'll write about something round." And off he went. Someone decided to put Samuel L. Jackson in the movie, so it gets cool points for that, but damn ... Barry Levinson exhibits a matchless ability to get lousy performances from good actors. I don't throw away DVDs, but if I did, out of the hundreds I have, these would be among the first to go. Fie on them!
What's Event Horizon about? (if it's horror, don't send me the trailer, I won't watch it lol) Btw: "Round. I'll write about something round. And off he went" - you're funny
Right, I meant Supernatural Horror. That is interesting though. I mean a Martian Ghost inhabiting people just sounds like a story I might watch or read. Although the rest of the story would determine if I continued on.
Note to self: Discover @minstrel's address and send him 50 copies of Sphere and Event Horizon for Christmas.
Long story, short: A big daddy space ship gets sent out some time ago. No one hears from it. Then they do. They send another ship out (much smaller) to find out what's up with the lost big daddy. The dude who made Big Daddy is on the little ship and, of course, knows all its ins and outs. They find the ship and discover via ship records that they all went bonkers and chopped one another up pretty much. The same shit starts happening to the people on the little ship. Drama, drama, drama, blood, blood, blood. For some reason the ship's engine is a gateway to hell. Silly Latin being spoken because for whatever reason Latin is the language of both heaven and hell in all movies. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The End.
I appreciate the thought, @Andrae Smith, but it's not a good idea. I'm environmentally conscious, and those movies are toxic waste, so I'd have to report you to the authorities.
