I've noticed that you also weren't moved by the Exorcist. The idea of a living hell scares me much more than anything else. It really is different strokes... I almost fell asleep to Cloverfield in the theatre. Did you like Quarantine over [Rec]? I seen the original, never got around to watching the remake.
I don't think I've seen Rec, and it's been awhile since I have seen Quarantine.
Yeah, The Exorcist was a big let-down for me. I read the book as a teenager (and a few other Blatty titles) and have collected various books about exorcisms... but when i watched that movie around 2000 or so, I was ... bored. It just seemed so fake to me. Neither of those movies leave much to the imagination, and what I see on screen isn't that provocative to me. (Ironically, the one clip that unsettled me from The Exorcist was the one that wasn't in the movie release -- the scene of her scuttling down the steps like a spider.)
Cloverfield is really more of a relationship story that happens to have a giant monster as a backdrop; that's the heart of the movie, it's really about Rob & Beth finding each other again after their relationship fell apart -- the movie begins and ends with them, it's all very bittersweet. But the scene in the subway tunnels where those things are chasing them but they can't really see them, that's the part that was creepy to me -- although I liked how you can never quite get a good sight of the monster until close to the end of the movie.
I think movies that try to be explicit are the ones that bore me, I'm not much for Friday the 13th or all the other explicit gore movies out there; the more suggestive they are, as I noted before, or have blank spots with which my mind is trying to fill in the gaps, those are the ones that end up freaking me out. (Like in Paranormal Activity, where someone is dragged into the darkness down the hall and disappears, screaming, and you have no idea what's going on and they're just gone.)
Just watched The Descent again last night, and the first entire half of the movie doesn't even have the nasties in it, they only show up for the second half... but half the fear comes from knowing there are things in the dark that they're trapped with, yet you don't know where they are or what they are. And since people can't see in the dark, you can only see the things when someone lights a torch or uses the UV camera viewscreen. They just pop up out of nowhere. Would freak me out now to go up camping in the woods at night, after seeing that.