There was a time that I used to watch every horror movie I could find - even the bad ones - looking for one that was scary. When I was 11, we were moving and looking at houses. We had a few hours to wait for our appointment with the realtor in the town so we went to local movie theater which had a few movies showing. I begged and pleaded, and somehow convinced my parents to take us to see Amityville Horror - a rated R movie.
At 11, that movie scared the crap out of me and I had bad dreams for a few nights. One of the houses we were going to look at looked like the house and my younger sister refused to go into the house. A few years later I begged to see Poltergeist - which I found to be just as thrilling. I probably didn't see Alien until the early 80s, but, by then, I was watching horror movies late at night looking for one that scared me as much as Amityville Horror did.
There are a lot of good horror movies, but, grindhouse and gore has replaced true horror and even the old movies don't carry the same effect they once had.
I liked the Saw series, the 28 Days/Weeks series. The only real remake that I thought was extremely well done was Halloween. Rob Zombie's typical films were grindhouse, so, I was not looking forward to his remake.
I don't get to watch as many horror movies as I used to, but, was really surprised to find Horror was one of the larger genres present on Youtube movies.
To date, I have not found a movie that scared me since then. Many have very good and interesting story lines, but, they all lack that effect you get when the movie places a little sliver of doubt in your mind as you walk around that dark corner in the house at night, or the brief hesitation as you open the door you know was open earlier that is somehow closed.
While I didn't particularly like the movie Speed 2, Jan de Bont did a terrific job of keeping you on the edge with each scene being a race against the clock. I imagine some director somewhere may take some of those elements into a horror film and create something absolutely great.
Until then however...
But I agree, Blair Witch was really scary in The Ring.