I was looking for a horror novel that was spooky but not gory. Kind of like The Woman in Black.
So I picked up The Pariah by Graham Masterton. It’s about a man haunted by the ghost of his lovely late wife. He’s on the verge of losing his mind, but then he learns that other villagers are seeing ghosts. As he discovers more about the village’s history, he finds a connection between the hauntings and an unholy pact involving a judge at the Salem Witch Trials.
I really liked the first quarter of this novel. But then the ghost of his late wife rapes him. That’s when I realized that I was reading one of those horror novels. Too bad.
Yep it’s this thread. I’ve only read the first page and can go no further.
Also, The Day After, the old nuclear war movie. It’s fairly cheezy and I went back and rewatched thinking it might help after all these years but no, that one minute still freaks me out. Not nearly as bad as it did when I was twelve.
Also one Halloween when my daughter was out of town we decided to hang out online looking for ghost stories and pics. I went a step too far though. This is when I was unaware of sites like ogrish and rotten. Never again. Never again.
Graham Masterton is my favorite horror author. He has written some things (especially a couple of short stories) that I literally could not finish. The only other story I’ve ever read that I couldn’t finish was Chuck Palahniuk’s Guts.
Nonetheless, I love both their work. Anybody who can write horror well enough to gross me out is doing it right as far as I’m concerned. I hadn’t read Pariah; I’ll have to check it out.
The tanuki video I saw implied that it was a normal practice in the Chinese fur industry, but as people pointed out, that makes no sense; it would expose you to danger from the animal, make it much harder to do the procedure, and would result in a much worse final product. So it seems the reason would have to be either pure cruelty, or as a staged incident to rile people up.
A number of years ago, I saw a video of a guy comitting suicide in a police station. It was a high-angle view like you’d get from a security camera. The suspect was being questioned in an interrogation room, and looked depressed. The cop leaves the room, and then the guy takes out a gun and, without hesitating, shoots himself in the head. The cop runs back into the room, and you can hear him shout to someone “Didn’t you search him?!”
The drunk driver victim that has been mentioned in this thread didn’t leave me for years, and tubgirl never really left me. But the one that has been giving me nightmares on and off for a couple of years is the brutal graphic gang rape that took place in India on the bus. That wasn’t a movie or a story. It was what real young men did to a real young woman. The details were horrific.
Which scenes? I thought that movie was fascinating.
My friend once passed on a magazine to me but told me not to read a certain article in it. Of course I did out of morbid curiosity. It was about a woman in Africa who left her infant with an uncle while she went to work. She came home to find the baby listless and when she checked the diaper it was filled with blood.
The uncle had raped the infant girl. You can imagine the injuries.
I don’t know how she (the mom) didn’t murder the uncle. I mean, if I found that situation, the uncle would have so many stab wounds in him I don’t know how they’d even identify him. I am not a violent person, but I know I easily could be in the heat of the moment.
The baby survived but I don’t remember the entire outcome. I’m sure it was Glamour magazine. The article was about the horrific conditions that some African women have to endure. I can’t remember the specific country.
I’d left the TV on and woke up in the middle of the night. Footage of a young woman tied up, asking for her child, the murderers cut her bra off. She says 'hey - that’s my bra" and they respond 'You don’t own anything anymore."
It was actual footage of this persons last moments, they’d already killed her husband and child. Some sort of documentary.
Once when I was about oh, maybe twelve, I saw a cat get hit by a car. I think I cried for a week.
Then there was the time I was in tenth grade and we had to do an essay for English class, and then do a presentation on our topic. One girl chose the meat industry. She showed this 15 minute video of a pig being slaughtered. Basically, they slit it’s throat, but not enough to kill it – they hung it upside down and let it slowly bleed to death while it moaned in pain. And then, before it was totally dead, they took it down and then cut off its hooves while it squealed and struggled. At the time, I was horribly disturbed and ended up having nightmares. (I think it was a year before I ate bacon or ham again)
Now, however, looking back, it seems an incredibly inefficient way to butcher an animal. Taking fifteen minutes to slaughter just ONE pig, (and I’m guessing part of the video was edited, so it probably took even longer), not to mention just letting it slowly bleed, while it would probably be easier just to quickly slit its throat and have done with it. Either the whole thing was a set up, or they were the dumbest butchers alive.
