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I mean depending on how jaded you are when it comes to horror...can you go into a movie expecting to be frightened by a movie that is safe for 13 year olds?
For me, i can only think of 1 movie that was a good horror film with such a rating: DARK SKIES-with Keri Russell
Depends on the movie. As a genre, horror has a bad track record for quality. 95% of it is garbage. But there are some good PG-13 horror flicks. Such as:
A QUIET PLACE
THE SIXTH SENSE
THE OTHERS
WHAT LIES BENEATH
POLTERGEIST (was actually PG)
JAWS (also PG)
And if you want to include horror-comedies, you have to see:
GREMLINS (also PG)
EIGHT-LEGGED FREAKS (I love this movie)
TREMORS
I also should mention CRAWL, which was surpisingly excellent. This movie was rated R, but I'm not sure why. Language maybe? I would have loved this movie when I was ten years old.
The PG-13 "horror" movie can be more cerebral with a few scary/gory parts thrown in. I don't like gore so yeah, PG-13 works for me.
Of course it can also be a bad way to get a broader audience buying in to it so they cut out the worst pieces but it's still one-dimensional gore with nothing else going for it.
That was the first movie that popped into my head when I read the thread title. It relied on a good story to be scary like a lot of PG-13 movies do. The R ones tend to rely on gore and over the top brutality.
That said, I'm not a big horror fan anyway and tend to get scared easily. I might actually be scarred for life from some of the PG-13 movies I've seen like The Ring and The Grudge.
I mean depending on how jaded you are when it comes to horror...can you go into a movie expecting to be frightened by a movie that is safe for 13 year olds?
For me, i can only think of 1 movie that was a good horror film with such a rating: DARK SKIES-with Keri Russell
Depends. Most horror films simply must be R-rated in order to work. Most of the time, cutting one down is like cutting the pepperonis too thick on a pizza, and they lack the crispy texture. Can't have that.
Tremors works pretty well. But most of the gore is monster-related. That's how they got around it.
Imagine the bar scene in Near Dark. Severen (Bill Paxton) dances on the bar and opens a guy's neck with his boot spurs, then drinks his blood and belches. It's raw. If they edited it so there would be no blood, it would lose its effectiveness.
A film like The Others doesn't rely on gore, but creeps. It works fine, as is. On the other hand, Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak can't.
I see no reason for Jaws or Poltergeist or even One Dark Night to be R-rated.
Dawn/Day of the Dead, the IT remake, and It Follows (one of the best recent horror films) have to be.
Depends on the movie. As a genre, horror has a bad track record for quality. 95% of it is garbage. But there are some good PG-13 horror flicks. Such as:
A QUIET PLACE
Good gimmick that's spoiled for future viewings. Lame ending.
I mean depending on how jaded you are when it comes to horror...can you go into a movie expecting to be frightened by a movie that is safe for 13 year olds?
For me, i can only think of 1 movie that was a good horror film with such a rating: DARK SKIES-with Keri Russell
So I was watching Heath Ledger's Oscar winning performance in Christopher Nolan's the Dark Knight the other week, for probably the tenth time. Maybe twentieth.
That movie was PG-13. The malice and violence of the Joker was perfectly depicted, the dread of psychopathy and utter chaos. The violence was physical but not gory. I feel very little was lost.
This is not quite what you asked...but I thought they worked within their ratings "box" in that case quite well in the Joker's scenes and others. I'd call the Dark Knight a "suspenseful" movie with "mature themes" and certainly not horror. Anyone saying Heath's performance as the Joker was not frightening, though: they weren't paying attention to the absolute dripping malice. Very hard to top that in terms of sheer despair and, to my mind: horror.
I go in for all horror....of the classical type. Movies like SAW I would never touch. A movie doesn't have to be explicit to accomplish the effect. I was watching a Cannon (70s TV detective series) the other night where they were going to drown a man in his bath tub and the suggestions in the story were good enough for that effect.
I think Brinke Stevens said it best about that: In Dark Romances Vol. 1 (1990), I'm strapped to a torture device, like a rack. To show my agony, they have close-ups of my face, close-ups of my hands clenching and unclenching and also close-ups of my feet pointing and unpointing as I'm stretched on the the rack. I had to admit when I saw that footage that even my feet have talent! (from imdb)
Finally, one of the reasons why I do watch the classic horror flicks, such as those from Hammer, is that I am forever searching how I felt as a child back then, when everything was so exciting and I could do it on so little suggestion and a lot of imagination.
For example, now looking at "Premature Burial" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056368/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 as an adult, on the face of it, there is little to draw from. As a child, however, it was the source of so many passion fantasies that now I watch those flicks to see and feel what once I could.
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