I am a big chicken. I scream at jumpy things, I can't go to sleep until I am sure all the doors and windows are locked, and I have been known to lay eggs. Well, I don't actually lay them, I buy them in a carton and put them carefully in my fridge, but it's pretty close! If I watch a horror movie, or even a "thriller" I have nightmares for weeks and can often recall the details clearly years later ... Evidence: the silly "horror" movie my friend's big brother rented when I was seven. I can still see clearly a little kid in the woods jumping in his sleeping bag away from a plastercine monster. Even though I know it's fake, and plastercine monsters who are slightly out of focus around the edges do not haunt the forests of Canada (but possibly Borneo, lots of strange things happen there) I still don't want to sleep without a tent in the middle of the woods. Given the number of bears, wild cats and feirce porcupines up here that is probably a good thing.
This leads me, finally, to a question: Why do some people, like myself, translate even the silliest horror movie into jumpiness and long term fears, while other people are able to watch the movies "just for fun"?
Is there a horror movie moment or campfire story that just won't leave you alone?
5 comments:
For me, it's the rare horror movie that makes a lasting impression (especially these days, when horror movies mostly stink). One that did is Poltergeist. That scene when the storm is coming and the little boy in bed looks across the room at the clown toy sitting in a chair, closes his eyes for a few seconds, reopens them and the clown isn't in the chair anymore ... oh my.
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Ok... for me it was the first horror movie I ever saw: Psycho! That shower sequence freaked me out for many days... I would always check around the shower curtain two or three times during a shower... a very well done movie.
Then there was "The Birds". Every now and then I still do a double take when an abnormally large flock of birds swoops around. Very well done film!
ok.spooky. Probably the scariest things are all subtle little "ordinary" experiences like knowing something is there and then having it missing or not being able to see or hear what is going on and then worrying that you will miss seeing someone. Of course, that's the problem, the ordinary experience takes on weird possiblities ... unfortunately my brain seems to think the weird experiences are totally plausable too!
Ok... just remembered another "ghost story" from a movie. It has to do with the "Three Men and a Baby" movie, maybe you've heard this one. In one scene where one of the characters is talking to a woman about the baby he's holding, there is a doorway in the background... and a man standing there in the shadows watching the baby ever so carefully.
The story goes that the director shot this scene several times, and had people checking that area of the set... no one was ever standing there, yet every day in the dailies, there he was in the doorway: same shirt, same pants, same hairdo... every day!
This supposedly went on for weeks; they tried to photoshop him out, but nothing would remove him from the background. In the final movie he's still there in the background, carefully watching over the baby... a guardian angel? Perhaps... now you're going to go rent that movie, aren't you?!?
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