I don’t watch scary movies (and supervenusfreak can attest to that), but there are some creepy/scary tv shows that have kept me up nights.
Tales from the Darkside had several of these. There’s one where a guy has his tongue bitten out by a cat that he’s abused. The ending line, spoken by his mother inside the house as he lies bleeding outside (I believe…it’s been awhile): “Why aren’t you answering me? Cat got your tongue?” Creepy, creepy, creepy.
Another TFTD was one where this girl moved into a boarding house and a tiny monster that the boarding house owner had created lived in her closet. I don’t even remember if it ever did anything to her, but the monster itself creeped me out.
Oh, there was a movie commercial that scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. It’s Alive, with the hooked claw peeking over the edge of the bassinet… shudder
When I was a kid, I saw the original Invaders from Mars on TV. Scared the crap out of me, especially since we had a big sand lot in our back yard.
In college, the late, lamented Orson Welles theater in Cambridge had a triple feature of two W.C. Fields movies and then Night of the Living Dead. Three hours of laughs and then clang - a bunch of zombies hit you upside of the head. Very effective and building the fright.
Another vote for Event Horizon. I love that movie. My favorite part is when Smitty is looking for the bomb the good doctor planted, he finds it, clicks on a button and sees he has about 5 seconds to live. He looks down and gives a little shudder, like he’s living the last few moments of his life in hell because he knows he’s fucked. That movie evoked a nightmare that left me petrified in my bed for 15 minutes after I woke up.
28 Days Later also for me, not scary, but definitely creepy and very much evokes the thought “FUCKING RUN FASTER” in me every time there’s a chase scene, especially when they’re running up the stairs of the apartment building.
As far as television, one that creeped me out to no end was an episode of “Truth or Fiction.” They told 4 or 5 stories and you had to choose which ones were fake or real. Anyway they told a story about a kid who was afraid of his closet because he said there was a monster in there. The bullies were threatening to throw him into the closet when one of them goes in himself. He starts screaming for help and to open the door and his friends are getting a chuckle. When their friend goes silent they open the door. The kid is not in the closet, his clothes are on the floor, and there’s NO WAY any kid could have gotten out. The kid was never seen again. At the end it was one of the true stories. Creepy.
Quite a few movies have managed to make me jump, but the only one that effected me after it was over was Final Destination. It had me intensely aware of every possible way I could accidentally die for the next few days, and it was made worse by being rear-ended by some drunk driver while merging onto the interstate after leaving the theater.
After seeing both the original Japanese version Ringu and the American remake, I can honestly say that Hollywood totally slaughtered the movie. The original is way creepier and a lot more subtle. The American version is loud, obnoxious, as subtle as a sledge hamer…and I can’t say enough bad things about it.
The first Nightmare was creepy, scary, and suspenseful. I don’t know about two, but three wasn’t scary at all (and I’m guessing the rest weren’t either.)
I went to see 28 Days Later and came out with stomach cramps. I had my gut clenched from the first seconds of the movie till the very end. It is arguably one of the best movies I’ve seen to date, but definitely the best horror flick.
Oh, I think I know which one you’re talking about! Then, at the very end, after the girl was killed, the guy found the monster hiding in the corner downstairs, and he picks her up and starts singing a lullaby to her, and she starts giggling. It’s really neat!
I completely disagree. I saw the Japanese version first and thought it was interesting and kinda creepy, but that someone else could surely have done it better. And sure enough, someone did.
Its not really horror but Irreversable is the most gruesome, harrowing film I have ever seen, I had to turn it off during the scene where the guy gets his head caved in with a fire extinguisher and didn’t even make it as far as the nine minute anal rape scene. I thought I was pretty much unshockable when it came to films but I was left gobsmacked by this film.
I have a theory about why Ringu and The Ring are so different. Ringu is a Japanese movie. Asian cultures find different things scary than do Western cultures. It seems that Asians dont find images scary so much as atmosphere.
The Ring had plenty of atmosphere and feeling, but it is the images that I found scary. For example, the video in Ringu is only thirty seconds long, and not particularly shocking, unsettling, or scary. But in The Ring…it goes on forever, creepy image after creepy image.
The two movies are both good, in my opinion; they just are the product of the cultures that created them.
When I was a young 'un, I was terrified of Pinhead from Hellraiser. Not that I’d ever seen the film, just his picture on the front of the box in the video shop. Every time we went in there, I would stand staring at him, then go home and have nightmares.
When I finally got to see the film, several years later, I realised the film that I had made up about him in my head was much scarier.
But then I was a strange child. The thing that terrifeid me the most as a child was a 5 second shot from an obscure T.V. movie about a kid that runs away from home and lives in a musuem or something. Just before he leaves home, he hurridly tidies up his bedroom, and slips a cover that looks like a dragon over his trumpet. After he leaves, the dragon kind of slips off a little. Gave me nightmares for years, as I was convinced that the dragon had COME ALIVE once he left the room, and that he was EVIL.
Since I’ve become an adult, two films stick out- the very end of The Blair Witch Project had me sleeping with the lights on for a few nights, but far worse, was the pyschological horror of Jacob’s Ladder. How the real world suddenly becomes very weird and very wrong is terrifying.
I too saw the Alfred Hitchcock Presents that Voguevixen mentioned. Considering that I am a terrible claustrophobic, and that being buried alive is the thing that would await me in Room 101, I didn’t find it all that scary. My theory is, my brain must of blown a fuse, or overroad the circuits to the part of my brain marked “terror”, to protect me from the full horror of what I was seeing. (or maybe it was just a failure to emphathise, as I would never have been silly enough to escape in a coffin in the first place)
I’m an American, and I’d love to pick apart The Ring piece by piece to show why I think it was such a horrible movie. But that would be hijacking my own thread, so I’ll just say that after seeing both, nothing can convince me that the American version has any redeeming qualities, and leave it at that.
Ringu was good.
The Ring was better. I think it is a cultural thing, mostly. They tried to explain too much in Ringu. I hear the sequels are even worse.
The Ring did go too far with the effect for the dead victims, and the movie was poorer for losing the truly terrifying “bag on his head” scene, but the stronger characters and pacing more than made up for it, IMHO.
