Rationalist horror movies

I saw a review of a reality show like this. The contractor agent was just one "your door hinges were improperly installed" after another. One couple saw a scary shadow face on their wall and it turned out to a patch job on the paint that matched perfectly in daylight but looked slightly different in low light.

Oculus isn't perfect for this, she starts out already believing in the haunted house due to past experience, but has a very scientific approach to proving it.

I think my favorite [edit: ideal hope] for this sort of thing has 2-3 killers/antogonists/scary-phenomena, and one of them turns out to be natural, and one supernatural. So the audience actually has to opportunity to figure it out, rather than just be genre savvy and know it'll eventually turn out to be supernatural.

I've been rereading Sandman, which was deeply important to me in my young adulthood but has fallen flat for the last decade+. This reread has been filled with thoughts like "Gaiman is so overrated" and "what did I ever used to get out of this?" Until I got to book 9, where it out of nowhere started hitting me at levels of depth I had no conception of at 20. 

So I think some of what's happening is that having a catchy beginning isn't that correlated with having a strong ending, and young people are easier to hook at the beginning due to less experience. There are lots of books with deeply satisfying endings but so-so beginnings, and people only get to the ending if they're easily impressed enough to get through the meh beginning. 

This is really clear with good-but-cliched books: if it's your first time reading the trope you can just enjoy the good parts. But I think it's true for a lot of books on a more subtle level. 

Becoming busier? (Becoming more aware of how little time you have in the world and how much other people need it.)

I've noticed that my intuitive perception of fiction has shifted from "almost like an alternate reality" to "clear artifice" as I've gotten older. Perhaps just from seeing enough fiction and enough reality that the ways in which they differ become obvious.

My tastes in fiction have changed as I've aged, but I still enjoy it quite a bit.  I think your observation generalizes.  A lot of tropes and conflicts in fiction (and in reality, for that matter) seemed critically important in my youth, partly because they were novel in that form.  Having read/seen a lot more, I now recognize the shape of most conflicts, and am no longer particularly invested in the characters' reactions to them.

I STILL really enjoy the art forms, the presentation, and the new focus on aspects I hadn't noticed or had forgotten about.  And sometimes I just let the critical thinker in me and just enjoy the ride, the same now as my youth.

What fiction, if any, have you found to be compelling in the recent years of your life? (And do you have a sense of what made it compelling?)

As an aside: I'm curious if you've read The Waves by Virginia Woolf, and if so, what you thought of it.

For me it's not that fiction would be less compelling, but my standards have crept up, and it would take more time and effort to find something that would really grab me.

The curse doesn't track multiple people at once, it would just get transferred to the very first person the prostitute slept with, then return to the prostitute after that person was killed. re:flying around, could work, although you'd have to worry about being ambushed at any time after a year or two. What I think you might want to do is create a private chat room for people who have been cursed where they regularly update each other about their status, so you know to worry if the people ahead of you in the chain stop responding. Or if you don't want to spread the curse, combine traveling with living in somewhere like a desert where you can see people coming from very far away.