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The horror movie is the most fragile and perishable genre of film arts. It is like a virgin that you can only enjoy once, says Mart Sander, a TV Master’s student at the Tallinn University Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School.

You can laugh at a comedy once, twice, or for years. A good drama will make you tear up even on the tenth time of watching. But to be afraid of the same thing twice, or be startled twice by the same event – this is not part of the human nature.

In addition, the horror movie ages the fastest. Even worse: an old horror movie will deform into comedy, or more precisely into a parody of itself. A Chaplin comedy that’s almost 100 years old will seem more realistic than a horror movie from 15 years ago that made us shudder when it was new. As the orphan in the film world, the horror movie is something sub-par and implausible.

Every new generation of humans is less afraid of things than the last, and it is becoming ever more difficult to find new ideas and images that would make us truly feel scared.

All of the above is at the same time the reason who the horror film is the fastest to develop and find new ways of expression among all film genres. The image of horror has come a long way during the past century. From the first horror movies that aimed to show everything we have come to films that aim to show as little as possible, leaving the images to be produced by our sub-consciousness.

Atmosphere has become the focus instead of effects nowadays – the lightning, camera angles and musical compositions. Even though traditional filmmaking has received a serious contender in the shape of cheap faux-reportage movies filmed with handheld cameras in the forest or a cave, creating a classical horror atmosphere is a substantial and expensive process.

Thus, to give a short answer to what makes a horror movie really scary, I would sum it up with one word: money.