Where I believe some of these film differ is in how they approach the topic of fear itself. I admit at this point to be somewhat biased from the outset as I am a massive Kubrick fan, however I have still explored the other films just as equally. There is a scene in 'The Shining' where the young son Danny is riding his trike throughout the deserted hotel and the loud sound of his pedalling wheels changes from a loud thundering roll on the floor to a muffled stretch on the carpets and then back to the wood, and then the carpet, and thus we feel the tension building. There is nothing scary about what we are seeing at all, it's just a little boy riding a trike yet it is the anticipation of what might just happen around the corner that scares us. Kubrick uses the sound as opposed to the video of the movie to reach out and stand up the hairs on the back of our necks.
The same technique is also present in The Haunting when Eleanor Nell is trapped in her Bedroom with Theo and the two are terrified by a deafening banging on the bedroom door. Admittedly there was the classic the-door-handle-moving-by-itself gag which has been in horror for decades. Yet it is the use of the sound which makes this scene rather terrifying. Yes, I am a firm believer in that it is not the visual that is most disturbing but the sound of terror that allows us to really connect with the psycho-terror within the film. Have you ever tried putting your hands over your eyes when you're scared? An instinctive reaction for any child when frightened yet if your hands were over your ears you would not be anywhere near as troubled as you were before, if anything putting our hands over your eyes makes things worse for the faint hearted as it allows the imagination to take hold and interpret the horrible sounds of anticipation and terror into whatever form would scare you most.
And it is this that it all boils down to, imagination. It is the tapping into of the human psyche that defines a film as terror or not. There are plenty of films with blood, guts and gore and more often than not the effect is more funny than scary. But it is the film that probes that dark, uncomfortable area of your brain that doesn't want to see what is coming next yet out of hopeless curiosity you simply cannot look away. As I have said earlier I believe it impossible to make a film that is scary for everyone. because everyone is scared by different things but the best manoeuvre for any director is to blindfold their audience and let sound and imagination do their dirty work, and more often than not, the results are obvious.
Films:
The Shining (1980) Stanley Kubrick
Rear Window (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
The Haunting (1963) Robert Wise
The Tenant [or Le Locataire] (1976) Roman Polanski
The Machinist [or El Maquinista] (2004) Scott Kosar
