When Horror Isn't Horrifying

Horror is a weird category.
In many ways, I think it’s like comedy, in that it’s a genre label that gets attached to a great many movies that don’t particularly deserve it.
I can easily understand how the “The Blair Witch Project” (1999) and the entire “Paranormal Activity” (2007-2015) series got qualified as horror: they’re about monstrous creatures of shape unknown that you cannot defend against, that are hunting you down more or less for their own amusement.
“It” (2017), “10 Cloverfield Lane” (2016), “A Quiet Place” (2018) all fall in that same realm: nothing you do matters, you will die. I get why that’s scary: that’s an existentially horrifying feeling to have to face, because you know it will result in your death.
And then there’s trash like “Pandorum” (2009) which was just a series of jump scares and stupid decisions. Still horror, because there’s no potential for a positive outcome, but wasn’t made well because it didn’t rely on effective story telling, just surprises.
Even the show “Black Mirror” (2011+) can easily fit the ‘horror’ genre, because most of the episodes focus on an idea that leads to outcomes that are absolutely nightmarish, especially when the screen cuts to black and you’re left thinking about the implications of everything in that world that’s going incredibly sideways.

But here’s the rub: There’s a series of “horror”-labeled movies that don’t seem to grasp what makes a movie scary.
Specifically, “Crimson Peak” (2015), “Get Out” (2017), and “Ready or Not” (2019) come to mind.
“Crimson Peak” was about soul-vampire Tom Hiddleston who needed a new bride for his sister’s ghost for more incest, “Get Out” was a flimsy commentary on racism in America, and “Ready or Not” was crazy rich people with an inexplicable alliance to Satan.
None of those were particularly horrifying premises, and all of them ended with the main character surviving.

So lets break it down:

• “Crimson Peak” was visually stunning; that’s actually why I watched it. And I have a celebrity crush on Jessica Chastain.

  Anyway: As my minor synopsis above noted, it was centered around Tom Hiddleston as some kind of vampire who needed eerily similar brides over the years that he could sacrifice to sate his ghost-sister’s hunger, so that she could manifest corporeally for incest every generation or so. I think. 
It was weird and kinda creepy, and I wanted to make the main character leave the slowly-collapsing mansion during every scene. But nothing about it was actually horrifying, and at the end the newest bride was able to escape; vampire-Hiddleston and ghost-Chastain were dead, so there was no potential for further fear. It was just a closed book. We watched the new bride learn about Hiddleston’s past, find out about the ghost, realize her fate, then succeed at killing both villains and escaping. Boom. Done.

• “Get Out” told us that some weird white dude figured out how to transplant white people brains into black people bodies, because black people apparently have better bodies to do anything and everything with. It felt more like someone’s race-play fetish than a horror premise.
  Chris, the black main character, was a noted photographer, and a rich white man who was going blind wanted Chris’s body, because somehow functioning eyes were the key to good photography, not artistic talent, and the blind man also wanted to be a photography master… By the end, Chris had murdered his way out of the white people compound as they tried to murder him too, and the final scene was him getting rescued by his buddy in a cop car. 

  Here are my two issues: 
First: Why black people? Is there some kind of racial fear that the black community has that white people are body snatchers? Why wouldn’t the crazy white people just kidnap anyone of any minority race with a properly functioning body? When they showed the other black people who’d gone missing, none of them were particularly good at anything, so what’s wrong with Latinos, or Asians, or simply poor white people? The entire premise of “white people want black bodies” ceases to make sense when you start thinking about it critically.
 Second: The ending negated any horrifying premises. Real life talk: if a black man was found outside a mansion full of dead white people, he’d be arrested immediately, no questions asked, and probably wouldn’t get a particularly fair trial. This movie was set out in the racist boonies of West Virginia, so I doubt the courts would be on his side. That is a horrifying concept. That is a premise that would make me leave the theater nauseous, knowing that an innocent man fought his way out of a murder dome only to get put in the slammer by some racist hick kangaroo court. Had the final scene ended with the red and blue lights shining on Chris’s face as he stood over a dead white person, it would have been perfect. Instead, we saw Chris’s bumbling idiot friend step out, which then mitigated the nightmare of the entire premise. Obviously Chris’s friend wouldn’t report him, obviously Chris wasn’t about to file a report with the cops. All of the potential, horrific implications were erased in the last 30 seconds.

• And finally, “Ready or Not” which I reviewed here, so I won’t spend too long reiterating my previous work, but the synopsis is: new bride gets hunted by crazy new in-laws, they all die while she survives due to nothing more than luck.

Here’s my problem, especially with the second two: why were they rated so highly? Why do fans of horror think that “Get Out” and “Ready or Not” were such good examples of “horror done right”? Was it simply because they were movies that had uncomfortable premises that we had to sit through for a little while until the protagonist could escape? Because if so, that’s stupid. “Inception” (2010) had an uncomfortable premise that I had to sit through until the protagonist escaped, but no one on earth would qualify that as “horror,” because it’s a suspense-thriller.

So what did I miss? I went into all three of those movies with an open mind and high expectations based on other peoples’ opinions, and finished all three feeling unimpressed and annoyed and not at all horrified. How could all three movies end on a positive note and get qualified as anything more than “drama” or “thriller”?

If you have an answer, please feel free to email me at clawreviews1@gmail.com