[Frank Richards]

I've been hesitant to jump into the discourse here, because unlike a lot of you guys, I'm not a serious horror fan. However, I love sci-fi, fantasy, and action movies that heavily borrow elements of horror.
Your recent debate over genre-benders like Alien, Predator, They Live, The Thing, etc... peaked my interest, and gave me the perfect opening to jump in and share my thoughts.
To give you an idea of the stuff I like, Guillermo del Toro, John Carpenter, Ridley Scott, and Robert Rodriguez are a few of my favorite directors, and while these guys borrow HEAVILY from the horror genre, I wouldn't consider any, except for the obvious exception of John Carpenter, to be "horror" directors.

Personally, I never developed much of an interest in the slasher franchises like Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, ect... but I do enjoy a handful of the Halloween movies, because I'm such a fan of Carpenter's work in general.
Also, to be frank, I realized that the horror genre just wasn't for me about a decade ago, after my horror-enthusiast friends finally convinced me to watch the original versions of I Spit on Your Grave and Last House on the Left. After that, I had no desire to delve any deeper into the genre.
Furthermore, recently, while hanging with some more of my horror-enthusiast friends, I finally forced myself to watch Martyrs and A Serbian Film. Lol, yeah... I'm done with horror for good now. For good... Those movies will stick in your head for days and days after watching them.

But anyways, yeah, as much as I love horror/fantasy stuff like Pan's Labyrinth, horror/sci-fi like Donnie Darko and Videodrome, and horror/action like Dog Soldiers, Army of Darkness, From Dusk Til Dawn, and my personal guilty pleasure, Underworld, more straight-forward horror just isn't for me. I love certain things about the horror genre, but the excessively gory and exploitative aspects just aren't something that really appeals to me.