![]() They tend to limit their use of jump scares and gore, focused instead on curating a mood. When it comes to film, slow burn horror movies deviate from some of the more common tropes. You close your eyes and wait for the noise to stop, knowing it doesn’t. The light scratching sound comes from the wall by your cabinet. You head back to your room, feeling silly, and sleep through the night. Some nightmare you can’t remember, probably. You wake up, heart pounding, at three in the morning. One night, after an hour of tossing and turning, you try to sleep on the couch. Sitting on the bed folding laundry you washed four days ago. Scrolling aimlessly through Instagram, watching your phone battery drain to 2%. It has an uncanny ability to catch you out when you least expect it. The scratching has started happening more often. You send a message to your landlord and wait. If there is an animal, the exterminator tells you, there’s not much you can do unless you want to rip the entire wall down. You turn away from the offending wall, promising yourself you’ll call an exterminator in the morning.Ī week passes. Just as your mind melts into the lowest level of conscious awareness, there it is. This time you are lying in bed, teetering on the edge of sleep. ![]() ![]() ![]() You actually forget about it until two weeks later when it comes again. It is midday and you are just about to make lunch. A light scrabbling sound, like a trapped rodent. Behind your bedroom wall, just to the left of the cabinet where you keep your winter sweaters. You don’t think much of the scratching when you first hear it. Slow burn horror dwells in the potential energy of phobia.Īccording to Cynthia Freeland, author of “Horror and Art-Dread,” “dread…is an emotional response to a thought of the possibility of something very profoundly threatening.” The type of fear elicited in slow burn horror is rarely that immediate fight-or-flight shot of adrenaline caused by a confirmed threat. Its ponderous pace leaves room to eke out the more gut-level elements of fear: dread, anxiety, uncertainty, disturbance. The focus is on atmosphere, more concerned with how than who, why, and what. Conversely, slow burn horror stalks, a hidden presence in the shadow. You are given little time to think you must react. Thrillers zoom through the plot at breakneck speed, generating terror in their unwavering inertia. Slow burn horror plays with the possibilities of time, setting, and atmosphere within horror it sets a measured pace for the story to unravel. Though they share the common goal of making the audience afraid, each subgenre of horror has developed a unique language with which it operates. When you wake up in the morning, your jaw aches.įrom video games to books, movies to comic books, horror is a vast genre, encapsulating everything from bloodbaths to mindbenders. Your ears start seeking patterns in silent moments. It’s been bothering you for days but every time you try to track it down, it dissolves like morning mist. “Nothing in the house moves,” Eleanor said, “until you look away, and then you catch something from the corner of your eye.” -Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
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