Nicholas Cage screams about bees. I whine about horror movies.

When I was about ten, I watched The Shining for the first time. I slept with the lights on for about a week, terrified that Jack Nicholson would come tearing down my door with an axe. To this day, no movie has ever come close to giving me that level of fear, at least on a level that stayed with me. An ex-girlfriend of mine told me she'd never seen it. Of course, we watched it. She laughed during one of the freakiest parts.

Pictured: my response.

What's terrifying to one person may be laughable to another, and once a decent subject matter is attained, it's nearly impossible to film it in a way that will convey the feeling the director is after. That's why there are so many awful horror movies, but for every Gingerdead Man (yeah, that's a real thing, and yeah, it stars Gary Busey), there is a Jacob's Ladder, and for every Wicker Man (The Nicholas Cage one) there is a, well, Wickerman (The good one).

Bees are not even kind of scary.

Horror films, like Eraserhead, The Shining, and Alien affect us in ways I don't think most people realize. Hell, Alien is the reason my cousin wanted to be an astronaut. I don't think there's any better reason to stay on Earth than watching Alien, but to each their own. Eraserhead, the only movie I've ever seen to involve lizard-faced baby infanticide, launched my own interest in works that are just insane, and Psycho made an entire generation of people scared to take a shower.

It's been a while since we've had a horror movie as good as any of these, but it can still happen. Personally, I'll be happy if they just stop making awful gore movies, like SAW, and billing things like A Haunting in Connecticut as based on a true story.