new member here.
I had a weird one when I was in my early teens. I was in my bedroom at night, with the lights out, watching some movie about poltergeist. Right in the middle of the big scene where things go flying, my whole room started shaking for 10 seconds. Small, but very well-timed earthquake. Uncommon also, since I lived in Pennsylvania at the time.
Another new one here.
I’m terribly afraid of spiders, and my mother had finally convinced me to sit through “Arachnophobia.” I could only manage to watch it halfway through before freaking out, and went upstairs to my bedroom. A few hours later I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed, and as I was brushing my teeth I felt something fall on my head. I quickly brushed it away and saw it was a pale white spider the size of a dime. I looked up and saw about three more on the ceiling and above the doorway. I ran into the kitchen and saw about six MORE in various places on the walls, on the counter, etc. I bolted into my parents’ bedroom, woke up my mother, and nearly screamed that the house was infested with spiders. She thought I was joking but we did a search of the house and found and killed at least twenty.
I still don’t know what the heck happened that night.
My Ring anecdote does not involve a telephone or any sort of video equipment.
Saw a late show with friends, and availed myself of their guest bedroom. Turned off the light, and got into bed. Just as I was starting to feel ready to drift off, I rolled over onto my back, and opened my eyes, only to see a very familiar-looking ring of light.
After a brief twinge of startlement, I ascertained that the presence of a metal-halide light outside the window beside the bed, together with a polished brass bedknob with a small disk on top, had maliciously conspired to give me chicken-skin.
Boy, did I feel sheepish.
A friend of mine tried to get me. Here’s how:
I really liked the movie The Ring, so one night a few weeks ago my girlfriend (a real wuss when it comes to horror movies) and a couple other friends, Clint and Anthony, came over to watch the movie. So we watched it, the movie ended, and my girlfriend fled to the kitchen so she wouldn’t even have to look at the menu.
Clint, meanwhile, went to the bathroom. Unbeknownst to any of us, he took his cell phone with him. He then used it to call my home number. I answered the phone, no one was there. Having seen the movie a skillion times without incident, I thought it was just an odd coincidence, but I went back to the kitchen and said in my spooky voice, “No one was there!” Then Clint came out with his cell phone, revealed the gag, and my girlfriend proceeded to thrash him soundly.
At least if your friend tries to screw with your head, you can’t be blamed for being freaked. I did this to myself.
My BF was away, so I invited a friend over. Neither her husband nor my BF can watch horror, and we both kinda like it, so we rented Blair Witch. She left my place shortly after midnight. I got ready for bed. We have a waterbed frame with a regular mattress in it, and we still have the cushions for the sides, but they are broken, and I keep getting slivers, so a couple of days earlier I’d propped them up in a corner of the room, out of the way. I turn out the lights, stumble sleepily to bed, and from the light of the streetlamp, can just barely make out a shape in the corner.
No longer sleepy, I turn on the lamp, jump out of bed, put the cushions in the hallway, and find my copy of Anne of Green Gables (it being the most innocuous item on the bookshelf, and read until daylight, when I can finally go to sleep.
Another Arachnophobia tidbit. That movie made my mom and I squirm like crazy and we ended up huddled on the couch together by the end of the movie. My dad just laughed at us. Our mischievous terrier had buried one of his toys deep in my parents’ bed earlier that evening, and when my dad went to bed that night his foot touched the toy under the covers. He jumped out of bed screaming like a girl and stripped the entire bed until he found the little furry squeak toy. Damn funny for me although he was totally wigged out for a few seconds there.
Back in college I had gone to catch a midnight showing of “The Exorcist”. I had never seen it before and I wound up going by myself because both of my roommates were out of town that weekend and I had just gotten off of work and was looking for something to do. Anyway, when I got home I was laying there trying to fall asleep, and suddenly I started hearing this scratching noise, similar to what the folks in the movie hear in their house early on before the possession starts. Turns out it was my roommate’s stupid cat scratching at my bedroom door! Scared the crap out of me.
When I was in college I went on a date with a friend of mine from a town about 30 miles away. We went to see Maximum Overdrive, the movie based on the Stephen King short story Trucks (yeah, I know - not the best film in the world, but some friends of ours were extras in it).
ANYWAY - after the film was over I had a thirty mile drive home - on a two lane road - and was tailgated by a truck all the way.
Also not a horror movie, but rather interesting movie/real life connection:
Went to see SPEED, and after I got home, the slow-speed O.J. chase was on every channel!
Another The Ring story.
Just finished watching the DVD, and followed my standard post-movie ritual: Eject DVD, turn off TV, go clean popcorn maker When I finished cleaning the popcorn maker, and I started walking back towards the DVD player, when… The TV turned itself on, and the DVD tray (still holding that accursed DVD) retracted into the player. The though of shooting my TV and running away flitted through my mind.
Turns out a sweatshirt slid off the back of the couch and landed on my LCD remote (which is very ‘touch sensistive’, and happened to have hit one of the macro buttons.
Another Blair Witch Project story. Not me, but something I pulled on someone else.
We went to see the movie, and one girl was seriously creeped out by it. She lived out in a sort of rural area, so we went to her house later that night and piled some rocks around and quickly made one of those dangling, people frame thingies and hung it out on her porch in front of her house.
She came into work the next day and yelled at us. Apparently, it scared the crap out of her.
After seeing ‘Final Destination’ (where a bunch of people who escape death due to one guy’s premonition get taken out by Death himself, in a series fo freak accidents) we got rear-ended on the way home while going up the on-ramp onto I-35. That was a little scary.
Not a movie thing, but when I was 10 or so, the teacher let me and a couple friends stay in the classroom with a Ouija board during lunchtime (it was an alternative school). WIth all the curtains drawn, we sat with the board in the darkest corner of the room, all concentrating, and repeating “give us a sign if you’re there…” At that moment, the fire alarm rang! We all looked at each other in shock, the Ouija board and sundry components went flying as we hauled ass out the door.
Not a movie, but a book:
I was reading Stephen King’s Tommyknockers by lamp while sitting on my couch. I get to the point where one of the leads realizes that Something Is Terribly Wrong when she sees a green dot of light on the wall, and notices it’s coming from the eye of her German Shepherd. Just as I finish the passage, I look up at my cat who’s sitting on my stomach, and the light from the lamp is hitting his eyes just right so they have that weird greenish tint to them. Didn’t exactly freak me out, but it was deeply unnerving, none the less.
The morning after I saw The Blair Witch Project, I was leaving my apartment to go to work and hit my head on one of the stick figures from the movie, which had been hanging over my door.
Apparently, the friend I’d gone to see it with had come by that morning to play a trick on me. (And apparently, after reading this thread, that was a pretty common trick…)
It’s not exactly the same thing, but here’s my “Wierd movie coincidence that freaked me out” story.
In the movie Twelve Monkeys, which is supposed to take place in the late 90’s (at least that’s where Bruce travels back to) Bruce Willis and Madelon Stowe hide in a theatre. In the background, if you are watching carefully, you can see that the movie playing is Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I remember thinking to myself, “Self, why would they be playing an old Hitchcock film in a theatre in the late 90’s?” I thought it was quite the inconsistency.
Well, it turns out, a couple of years later, Vertigo was actually re-released, and was playing in first run theatres, at the exact date that Twelve Monkeys was supposed to have taken place. I spent several weeks halfway expecting to see some news story about a plague. Really freaked me out.
I’m over it now, thanks for asking. 
I don’t have a horror movie story, but it is a movie story. After seeing Back To The Future we were driving home and we were being followed by a light blue VW combi van just like in the movie. We kept on yelling, “It’s the Libyans”. It was funny and freaky at the same time.
Me and my ex-gf alone in a house in a forest on a mountain in Tennessee a few years ago, watching Cape Fear. Just after the movie, there was a huge crash and lots of thumping coming from the garage - which was locked shut. I nearly shat with fear. I grabbed a flashlight and a big stick, and gingerly opened the garage door. I could hear lots of heavy breathing and scuttling, and then I saw…
…not a psycho killer, but a raccoon that had come in through the cat flap to steal the cat’s food.
Another one for the phone ringing after seeing The Ring. Of course, the call was made by one of us watching the movie with his cell phone, so he timed it the exact second that the little clip at the end rushes by on the screen. ONe of the girls watching, the one who claimed this as the scariest movie she had even seen, screamed so damned loud and yelled “don’t answer it don’t answer it!” The thing is, I wasn’t phased by it at all, because for some reason I heard the ring, but thought it was part of the movie, to make you think your phone just rang. It didn’t dawb on me till after they all screamed that they wouldn’t have been able to get a ring for everyone;s phone. Oh well, I guess I just can’t be scared.
(and FTR, The Ring is NOT scary. Creepy, sure. Interesting? Very. But not scary.)
In my case, it was Carrie. The first real horror movie I ever saw. I was about 12 and I’m still scarred by it, I will not see it again.
My friend’s mother had taken us to it because Barbarino (John Travolta) had a bit part in it. All I was thinking how can it be a horror movie with Travolta in it, he’s so cute :rolleyes: Hey I was 12!!!
So I sat through the entire movie, looking through my fingers but I was doing fine… until the end, when she comes home after graduation… barely saw any of it but still enough to freak me out and then of course the surprise ending, holy crap!! I cried and shook all the way home.
Once there, I try opening the door and it’s lock so I ring the doorbell, the door opens and my dad is holding a candle, there is no electricity in the house, candles all over the place. The only time in life and i mean the only time when i became totally hysterical. I would not go in the house, I had to be pulled and pushed into the house literally kicking and screaming.
My mother became very “protective” of what i saw on TV or at the movies after that for a couple of years… wonder why