The Exorcist is an outstanding film, but I see it not so much as a horror movie, but as a story of Father Karras’s rediscovery of his faith.
For me, the most frightening films are not the ones with scary monsters, but when the protagonist is trapped in a scary situation. Rosemary’s Baby, for example, has no monsters (apart from a brief appearance by Satan), but it is a classic in paranoia because everyone in the movie is in a conspiracy against poor Rosemary and there is noone she can trust. When she appeals to her obstetrician for help, he thinks she’s suffering from pre-partum hysteria and unknowingly hands her over to her kindly family physician, who is a member of the Satanic coven.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy is intensely frightening not only because the monster in the film is all too real ( a rapist/ serial killer), but also because the director uses dramtic irony to heighten the audience’s tension unbearably. Thr most memorable se
The Exorcist is an outstanding film, but I see it not so much as a horror movie, but as a story of Father Karras’s rediscovery of his faith.
For me, the most frightening films are not the ones with scary monsters, but when the protagonist is trapped in a scary situation. Rosemary’s Baby, for example, has no monsters (apart from a brief appearance by Satan), but it is a classic in paranoia because everyone in the movie is in a conspiracy against poor Rosemary and there is noone she can trust. When she appeals to her obstetrician for help, he thinks she’s suffering from pre-partum hysteria and unknowingly hands her over to her kindly family physician, who is a member of the Satanic coven.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy is intensely frightening not only because the monster in the film is all too real ( a rapist/ serial killer), but also because the director uses dramtic irony to heighten the audience’s tension unbearably. The most memorable sequence comes after we see the murderer rape and strangle a victim, so we have a firm visual image of what he does to his victims. We then see him enter another woman’s apartment, getting ready to rape an dkill her, but instead of seeing it, the camera recedes from the door, goes down the stairs, and out the door into the busy street outside, where we see pedestrians walking by the building oblivious to the horror that is happening inside. Now THAt is scary!
The television version of Alice in Wonderland made in 85 has a scary Jabberwocky who pops up at random intervals. It scared me (and many others) as kids. I commend how effectively they did it! It’s so much better than crap out right now… :rolleyes:
For me, it’s Twin Peaks, but that’s because I’m a big wus. I can’t deal with the part where Laura looks at her father and the demon is staring back at her and the dancing talking backwards midget in the red room gives me the creeps.
I’ve never seen The Exorcist and I never will. It gave my jaded, laugh-in-the-face-of-evil, horror-movie-nut husband a panic attack.
The most I’ve been scared in a movie theater was seeing Jaws when I was 10 years old. I also remember being freaked out by the original Halloween (when the unkillable killer was a brand new idea instead of a cliche).
I can’t remember ever being scared by a movie as an adult, though. I’m too jaded and too aware that it’s a movie. I also find it impossible to be frightened by anything “supernatural” because I find such things as ghosts and demons to be too ludicrous to ever take seriously. If I’m disturbed by anything in movies, it’s real human evil not monsters. My idea of a scary character is Robert Carlye’s character in Trainspotting or Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. People like that exist. Devils don’t.
I haven’t been scared as an adult either. I might get tensed up, and I might close my eyes and duck, but I can’t remember the last movie that made me afraid to turn out the lights and go to sleep.
When I was a kid, Them gave me nightmares – the destroyed trailer, the little girl with the starey eyes, Fess Parker in the hospital, James Whitmore in the tunnel. Shudder.
When I was a teenager, I saw The Birds in a theater, and then had to drive 15 miles home, in dense fog, with my head out the car window so I could see the center line. That was kinda scary.
And The Blob – we were all sitting on our feet in the theater.
I have to say The Exorcist too. I watched it with a bunch of other people in my freshman year dorm in college. None of us had ever seen it before and when it started we thought it was totally stupid and were laughing that this was supposed to be the scariest movie ever made.
By the time it was over, we were all so freaked that we ended up sitting in the lounge for another 45 minutes because no one wanted to walk the dimly lit (it was about 2.30 am) halls of the dorm alone.
I was actually quite frightened by the Blair Witch Project, but it was all in the setup for me. You see, I didn’t see any adverts for it. A friend of mine told me, “Hey, there’s this ‘documentary’ that’s playing at the theatres, and it’s a true story… it’s all this stuff that was filmed out in the woods by this bunch of kids, and they’re showing it to the world now as proof of some kind of paranormal activity.” Being the young, impressionable kid (who was highly interested in the the paranormal) that I was, I thought, “COOL! This will be so awesome, I want to see/hear this ‘ghost’.” (I knew nothing about it. Zilch). Young, eager, thinking I was equipped with enough knowledge to “debunk”. I wasn’t. Too young, naive, and impressionable then… there was still a part of me that believed in some of this stuff.
So, I innocently go into the theatre, thinking this was a documentary of some sort, and the jerky camera-work, mundane things filmed and said, well… you see, when I was in high school, I used to borrow one of their video cameras and lug it around, and film everything, and so none of this seemed odd to me. Because it was something I would have done.
The things I heard, though didn’t see, the thing happening on that screen… I thought my head would explode. (anyone ever read Stephen King’s “It”? There is a passage where he describes how Stanley Uris would feel if he saw something not natural, and that was offended. My sensed were offended, because this was not logical, and yet it somehow appeared to be so. That bugged me more than anything). I spent most of the time whimpering in my seat, with my stupid hat pulled down over my head.
When the ending came, I left the theatre in shock, thinking how disgusting society had become that they put kids’ deaths in movie theatres for entertainment.
I did find out the truth shortly afterward, and felt relieved, embarrassed… but I still couldn’t quite get myself to go out to my boyfriend’s car, parked near the woods, in the middle of the night for several weeks. My side was on the darkest side, you know…
However, upon re-watching the thing, knowing the whole “mystery”, it IS boring.
I’m surprised to be the first to vote for The Silence of the Lambs.
I never understood what was scary about The Exorcist. Then again, I’m an atheist, and if you don’t believe in anything supernatural, movies involving the supernatural are going to seem more like science fiction than horror.
I did find The Shining to be at least disturbing. This may be because while it does involve supernatural agents, the agents are acting through a more familiar medium (I’ve never known anyone who was possessed by the devil, but I have known people who went insane).
I actually did end up laughing at the Exorcist. Long and hard. Regan’s voice? The pea soup vomit? Comedy gold.
Atmosphere scares me more than anything else, and things that are just completely irrational. The scenes in Primer where the doubles were drugging each other and where the one was bursting out of the attic creeped me out. Some of the slower scenes in The Machinist scared the crap out of me. Also, Lost Highway…
The scariest movie I ever saw was E.T.. I was 3 years old, it was the first time I went to the movies like “all the older people,” with mommy, daddy and older brother.
When he first burst from that closet I was shook with paroxysms of fear and nauseau. But I wanted to show my family tha I was a big girl and I refused to leave or to look away from the screen. And screens were much larger in '82. I remember praying for it to die.
I still can’t look at a commercial featuring E.T. Heck, I won’t eat Reeses Pieces. Daddy, being the kind senstive soul he is, bought the VHS tape when it came out. That tape mysteriously ripped. So did the replacement. Hm.
Since then, not so much has made my scared-scared. I tend to get really anxious watching things like Panic Room.
I guess sometimes it is not the subject matter that is scary, per se, as much as the situation. E.T., more than likely, would not have scared me if I watched for the first time at this age. Same movie, impressionable 3 year old, many sleepless nights. My brother saw Poltergeist at the same age and laughed.
Yeah, it may not be the scariest movie ever, but I’ll back you up that I found it a lot scarier then most folks seemed to have. It wasn’t just the ending either, something about being lost in the woods and not able to find your way out, as it becomes steadily harder to deny that your not just “lost” but that something malicious is acting against you, was very effective for me. Maybe because I spent a lot of time camping, hiking etc. during the time I saw this movie.
Is your sn Lovecraft’s initials? I thought it was actually sort of a Lovecraftian movie, both with the setting (New England, old stories about witches, etc.) and because of the focus was on the psychological effects on the characters of the “horror” around them.
Nah, that’s just good horror. Usually in order to qualify as Lovecraftian, a story has to involve eldritch horrors from beyond the dark of spacetime, despite the fact that quite a few of Lovecraft’s stories didn’t involve such things.
