It is a truth universally acknowledged, that nothing on-screen can be more terrifying than the horrors dreamt up in ones own mind. This can be easily proved by looking many mainstream horror films. Boogeyman was a tour-de-force of fairly sophisticated jump scares, until you saw the Boogeyman itself and it suddenly and unintentionally turns into gross-out comedy. The same thing happened to Jeepers Creepers, which couldve been an intensely scary film apart from the fact that the monster is a flying snot-cowboy. In a world where most people are fairly de-sensitised to on-screen violence, its harder and harder to make a truly terrifying antagonist. Monsters just aren't frightening anymore. Even though CGI and puppetry have advanced incredibly to make them realistic, everybody knows that they are just that - computer-made images or a man in a rubber suit. Even monstrous (on the inside) humans have been played out to near the limit. Patrick Bateman looks relatively tame in comparison to to truly foul things brought to our cinemas and DVD players by maniacs like Dr. Heiter, thanks to the questionable torture porn genre. The only option, then, is to not show who the enemy is. What you dont know can hurt you, and these guys certainly would.
