You are in a movie theater waiting to watch a highly rated horror movie, but sit through the movie disappointed. The movie has so many things that could be good about it, if only the creators were willing to step out of the perceived norm and create something new and exciting for horror fans everywhere.

Horror movies in recent years have not had the same effect on audiences as they have in the past. When audiences first saw “The Exorcist” in 1973, there were people fainting, throwing up and just straight up leaving the theater. Horror movies that are coming out today are too reliant on overused tactics, cheap jump scares and an inability to adapt horror to make it modern.

The reliance on usual-suspects like underexposure in scenes, over extended moments of silence and other such tropes have made these movies incredibly predictable. The moment of the movie may cause an unsettling feeling or a little jump while leading up to a scare, but these tricks are no longer enough to make audiences scared or truly frightened.

All of the techniques are usually a lead up to some kind of jump scare. This creates an extreme reliance on jump scares and simple thrills to make a movie scary and less on true bone chilling horror that actually would apply to and scare a modern audience. Movies like “Scream,” are predictable and have overused plots that have been standard in horror movies for decades.

As I previously mentioned, “The Exorcist,” was extremely terrifying to the audience that saw it in 1973, because no one had made a movie like it before, it was a trailblazer in the genre of horror. In order to make a movie scary today you would have to do what hasn’t been done before. I feel like “Longlegs” could be a good example, because it made audiences scared and still held up to an original story.

There have been some movies to break through and actually be scary, but it’s not the majority. The people who make these movies have to focus on how the audience will be effective and actually flesh out the plots to keep audiences everywhere interested.

Horror is a hard genre to make content for and is a hard line to walk between not scary and way too far.