This Halloween, Old Time Suspense Will Win Out Over Slashers and Gore

I love scary movies. I love the moments of suspense, when you are on the edge of your seat, and something happens that makes you gasp and jump, and then laugh at yourself because of your reaction. Yet it's been a long time since I have seen a good scary movie, because it seems lately, the main thing on the horror movie menu is gore, gore and more gore.

I remember going to see "Halloween" when it first came out. One of the first "slasher" movies, it let lose a whole genre of gross-you-out blood and gore-fests. But what's the point, really? A classic suspense movie has so much more going for it, in my mind, than body parts flying in all directions.

I remember an old movie in black and white when I was young: "Night Must Fall" (1937). A woman is found murdered, beheaded, but you never see her, or her head. What you do see is a man who is hired by Rosalind Russell's wheelchair-bound aunt, who carries around a hat box that "is too heavy to contain just a hat". Now you just know what is in the hat box. There is a scene where Rosalind Russell is alone in the caretaker's room, walking up to the box, step by step - well, I won't give it away, but I do remember being on the edge of my seat on our living room couch, every muscle tensed, waiting for what would happen next.

Suspense was big back in the 30's, 40's and 50's, and a lot of great suspenseful movies came out then. I remember another movie, "Night of the Hunter" (1955), with Robert Mitchum as a really creepy preacher who marries women and then murders and escapes with their money. One of his victim's two children escape, to be helped by an old woman who, shotgun across her knees, waits out the predatory Mitchum in a scene that also had me on the edge of the couch. And of course, just about everything that Alfred Hitchcock ever made.

I'm a great fan of old films, films that rely on stunning photography, dynamic acting, and long, suspense-filled scenes to scare me. Really, what is scary about someone being stabbed, sawed, chopped, chain-sawed, or otherwise dismembered? Aren't there enough horrors in this world - why do we need to see this used as entertainment? And there's the question of numbing ourselves to the abuse and torture shown in movies like Hostel and Saw - if we can sit for two hours watching this and not be affected, how do we keep our humanity in the face of real life torture and abuse?

This Halloween, I'll settle down with friends to watch one of the good old suspense movies from decades past. Or maybe we'll go in for a comedy horror standard like the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Maybe some people can watch today's horror movies without being horrified, but I can't.