Can I place "fright" before another noun, for example "the fright movie"?

Question

I got this question from my social media and nobody has answered for a month.

The original question.

Rearrange the sentence : scary / fright / part /He /the /with / shook / movie /during / of / the .

I‘ve got:

He shook with the scary part during the fright movie.

But I still not sure about fright and scary but fright is a noun form.

How does it place before another noun? Or maybe I just set it in the wrong position.

I don’t have anyone who can suggest me. I saw many linguistics could help everybody. So please do give me some advices. I’m not good at English so please forgive me if there is any grammatical errors.

Answer 1

The definition of "fright" from Merriam-Webster as a noun is

1 : fear excited by sudden danger : alarm

For example: He turned pale with fright.

2 : something strange, ugly, or shocking

For example: All the salons have been closed for over a month, so my hair is a fright!

Neither of those definitions seem to fit "fright movie" very well, although I can see why you thought it might work to mean "a movie that causes fright".

Let me show you how I would approach the problem.

It seems like you're pretty certain about these parts:

• He shook (probably the subject of our sentence)
• (the) scary part (adjective + noun)

That leaves us with

• with (preposition)
• during (preposition)
• of (preposition)
• (the) movie (noun)
• (the) fright (noun)

Because there are no more verbs, we are right about "he shook" being the subject. I put our remaining article as a "maybe" in front of each noun. We have a lot of prepositions to fit in the sentence and we know that we probably need a noun phrase for each of them.

So our sentence starts with

He shook

followed by some combination of the three prepositions and their nouns (lets leave the articles off for now)...

1. with {scary part} / {movie} / {fright}
2. during {scary part} / {movie} / {fright}
3. of {scary part} / {movie} / {fright}

Which prepositions work best with "shook"? "Shook with" is a pretty common combination, but "shook during" could also work. "Shook of" isn't something we see very often, so we're going to scratch that one off.

Let's look at "with" first.

He shook with (the) {scary part} / {movie} / {fright}...

It looks like "fright" is the only option that makes sense if we use "with" first.

What if we use "during" first?

He shook during (the) {scary part} / {movie} / {fright}...

It looks like the only option that doesn't make sense is "fright", because fright doesn't have a duration like a movie or a scary part does. We can be pretty sure that "with" and "fright" go together now.

So maybe "of" can help us choose whether "during" goes with {scary part} or {movie}. We know it probably doesn't go after "shook" so it will go after the phrase after shook.

He shook {with fright} of (the) {scary part} / {movie} during (the) {scary part} / {movie}

"He shook with fright of ___ " doesn't work because we usually just say "shook with fright" without more description, so the preposition after "fright" is probably "during".

He shook {with fright} during (the) {scary part} / {movie} of (the) {scary part} / {movie}

It doesn't make sense to say the movie of the scary part, so our result is:

He shook with fright during the scary part of the movie.

or maybe even

During the scary part of the movie, he shook with fright.

Answer 2

I’m pretty sure the correct sentence is:

He shook with fright during the scary part of the movie.

With the way you have the sentence, it’s unidiomatic with “He shook with the scary part” and “fright movie”.

Emotions are the most common collocations with “shook with ______”. To see this, you can search COCA for SHAKE with *. Also reasonably common in this position are “laughter”, “cold”, and “sobs”. These are all conditions a person can be in, not something external like “the scary part”, which is why it sounds extremely unidiomatic to my native ear.

In the case of “fright movie”, it just sounds like you were trying to think of “scary movie” but didn’t think of the right word. In English, we use the phrase “scary movie” so much that “fright movie” doesn’t sound right, though you can find some examples of this expression online. (You can find “fright” used as an attributive noun with other words, such as in “Fright Night” which is the name of at least two movies.)