Of Finding a Good, Satisfying Scare

I miss the good old days of scary movies (scary, not slasher) when you had your ghosts wreaking havoc, a bit of a mystery, the mystery solved, the ghost going away and everyone happy as clams. I'm getting tired of these "ha, ha, just kidding, you didn't solve anything and the ghost kills everyone" kind of endings. One, they're so flippin' predictable to the point of not even being scary. Two, it's hard to watch a scary movie twice when you know it's going to have that kind of an ending.

I mentioned a while back that one of my all time favorite scary movies was Watcher in the Woods. It's PG, it's Disney and by all rights should be considered tame. But it didn't matter how many times I watched that movie, even knowing what was going to happen, it still scared the crap out of me. Same with The Lady in White. And neither of these movies relied on those obnoxious just-kidding twists. The mystery was solved, the source of the scary moved on and I was satisfied.

I miss that so much. I love a good scary movie but I'm so reluctant to give any a try because of the popularity of these unhappy twists. I can see these twists coming the moment the movie begins, and it leaves me wondering why Hollywood is so enamored with these endings when there are so many far more interesting things they could do.