Dreadless

Why Quiz Show is a horror film. When characters make choices, it infuses the rest of the film with dread as we think back to the moment when they could have done something else. The correct adjectivized form of dread applies to films without it: War of the Worlds (either one), anything by the uber-hack Lost hydra, all of the Twilight films, requels, premakes, and the trailer-shows-the-first-and-last-ten-seconds-films that we have today. They are dreadful, but technically speaking, they are dreadless, they lack the resonance that carries us through the events of the film, all the while echoing the characters’ fate.