User blog comment:ChristianWallis/Is the Written Word Scary?/@comment-25947144-20160824155605/@comment-28266772-20160824161720

Haha, no worries! I meant it largely in relation to the sort of person who insists that nothing will scare them. I think it's fair for most horror fans to say that the effect of scary stories/films has started to wane. Films do, after all, have a limited visual vocabulary.

And yes I also find it grating when horror movies that wear their metaphor badge a bit too lazily. Babadook, in particular, isn't even a fictional narrative so much as it is an allegory. The events can't make sense if you interpret the on-screen events as actual literal events, they only work if you frame them as symbolic of the characters' grieving process. It's a great film but it's not really subtle.

Although I will admit  that I'm not particularly unhappy with modern horror. The conjuring is placing horror back in the mainstream (even if I don't really like it), and films like It Follows are pretty unique and weird even if they batter their message to death. I liked Oculus a lot. And I can't wait for Don't Breathe, and the new Blair Witch (whose director created You're Next - a particularly great home invasion thriller). I just wish that we had a contemporary successor to John Carpenter :( :(