At 4/20/09 04:01 AM, WritersBlock wrote:
Horror is so much better in books than in films. Discuss.
Hmm. I can see where you're coming from, but I'd have to disagree with some of it at least.
All of what you've written is true for the mainstream, overdone pseudo-hollywood crap 'horror' films, but there are horror films that are as cerebral in their methods as any book. Most of them aren't exactly easy to find, or come across by accident, though. The only one whose title I can readily recall is The Blair Witch Project.
(I remember seeing one from Taiwan, I think, that was so psychologically torturous it made TBWP look like a kid's movie, but its name completely escapes me).
I see what you mean by 'getting into the mind of the characters' as well. It's much harder to 'just read' something. You have to make the effort to process what you're looking at (unlike the TV, which you need only stare into), so a book, by nature, would be almost always better for conveying mental pictures and other abstract concepts that are hard to put on a passive form of entertainment such as a cinema screen.
The few exceptions to this is when the movie acting is so good as to correctly mimic the subtle body language needed to convey such things as what the characters are thinking (without making it stupidly obvious). And let's face it: that caliber of acting is not usually seen in mainstream entertainment anymore.
I'd have to say, based on the better ones I've seen, that there are ways of out-doing a book with a movie. However, 9 times out of 10, the book wins in this particular genre.
