Modern horror films suffer from cheap thrills at the expense of tension.

This year is an anniversary for two major scary films. It’s been 50 years since George A. Romero’s landmark zombie thriller Night of the Living Dead and 40 years since John Carpenter’sHalloween. The latter has a direct sequel out now, with Carpenter as an executive producer and starring original Halloween heiress Jamie Lee Curtis. Nick Castle is also credited in a cameo of his original role as knife-wielding villain Michael Myers and credited in both films merely as “the shape.”

Despite the simplistic brilliance of the original Halloween (its minimalist keyboard score has become iconic), the 2018 sequel lacks a cinematic tool often left out of many contemporary horror films: tension.

Consider one of the best monologues of horror, Robert Shaw’s speech in 1975’s Jaws. Shaw plays Quint, a jaded and weathered fisherman, and he’s in the middle of the ocean at night telling stories of shark attacks. The scene is nearly five minutes with bare-bones music, no flashbacks – just Shaw’s words as he speaks to the other passengers aboard a dimly lit, slowly rocking boat, but the patient tension is what makes the scene, and the whole movie, so frightening.

While the Halloween remake has some decent moments – mostly cinematographic homages to the original and some decent special effects – it lacks tension that makes the audience reallyworry.

This is the ongoing problem with a majority of contemporary horror movies and why many are dismissed, falling short of being held up as true art pieces. For great horror movies, it’s not gore that is needed – it’s existential dread.

What made the first Halloween work so well 40 years ago was that fear and terror were ever-present throughout. There were no funny moments or laughs thrown in amid the scary bits. The camera shots were mostly still, excruciatingly long takes with Michael Myers waiting just on the edge of the frame, stalking his prey of choice (young babysitters). The final scene is of an empty bedroom in an empty house on an empty street with Myers’ heavy breathing increasing until the final credits. Viewers feel the boogeyman, an icky feeling they can’t wash away – the horror is always there, even when we think we’ve killed it.

The lineage of great horror movies like Halloween offers up some examples of how the genre can really create a sense of dread. In 1974, director Tobe Hooper did it with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which isn’t as gory as the title suggests. Hooper’s use of slow-moving, wide shots and uncomfortable noises gets inside viewers’ heads, thinking the worst is happening. There’s actually very little violence on screen, but Hooper is so good at setting up the dread in our minds, we think it’s happening.

Despite a plethora of jumpscare remakes, sequels and prequels that plagued the aughts (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Friday the 13th (2009) and Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007), a handful of directors in the last few years have been reclaiming horror as an artful genre. It’s no longer a half-century ago, like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Rear Window, that we have to go back to to find classics. Recent films destined for that status – which also touch on themes of trauma, racism and classism – include 2017’s Get Out and 2014’s The Babadook.

For modern horror to be scary again, filmmakers need to look back on what made the classics work so well. Why is Hitchcock’s Psycho so terrifying? Because Norman Bates is human – not an alien or a monster. Viewers see themselves having an interaction with him. Same goes for Hannibal Lecter’s monologue in Silence of the Lambs, shot uncomfortably close to his face – the horror is within the human.

However good the original Halloween is, it did fall victim (pun intended) to one horror trope of letting the good girl be the heroine, which Carpenter was rightly criticized for. But one great thing the 2018 film does extraordinarily well is approach the #MeToo movement, not just by having three heroines, but by having them very clearly fight back against misogyny.

HALLOWEEN ( 2 ) • Directed by David Gordon Green • Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer • Rated R • 136 mins. • At Century Cinemas Del Monte, Century Marina, Maya Cinemas, Northridge Cinemas.