What makes a particular movie give you nightmares? (Re: The Ring)

Cafe Society
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Lately a couple of threads have been devoted to scary movies, with The Ring grabbing a lot of attention. See

While I myself am strangely attracted to horror movies, I never go see them in a theater since that would scare me too much (I’m like a cat playing with water in that way). After only reading about The Blair Witch Project I actually had trouble sleeping! This was however during a holiday in the States, hence closer to the location of the movie. I was curious about seeing The Ring on video, but after reading these threads I’m too scared to actually watch it. My curiosity, however, has only increased.

I assume that you are all horror movie buffs that have become jaded with the usual scary stuff. Other movies apparently do not have the effect The Ring does. That you find it hard to sleep the night after the movie I can understand, but having flashbacks weeks after is uncommon. Now for someone who hasn’t seen the movie, and is too afraid, could you describe what makes this such a particularly haunting experience? I’m really interested to hear. I do not mean the scenes in itself; I’ve read about that in the other threads, and while it seems scary doesn’t particularly appear to differ from other horror. Is it the special effects, is it gore plain and simple, is it playing mindgames, or particular horrific concepts?

Note: I’ve already read most of the spoilers, but in case other people want to read this thread, it might be advisable to use spoiler boxes anyway when necessary.

Note 2: In the last thread some posters mentioned getting nightmare from a computer game. That I can understand given the higher level of involvement. A movie is on the contrary experienced relatively passive.

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Movies that follow the pattern of Scream, where a Mr. Spookyhead is stalking piglets for no reason and every once in a while goes “bluh!” as he jumps into frame, do nothing to me. But what i can’t deal with, atleast not instantly, is surreal horror that you can still relate to.

A few examples:

“In the mouth of madness”.
When they’re driving in the car on the repeating highway and keeps on passing the white haired biker. That freaked me out beyond reason, i still can’t drive at night on lone roads without wielding some sort of atomic bomb.

“Jacob’s ladder” / "Dante’s inferno ".
The hospital scene, enough said.

“A nightmare on Elm Street”.
Yeah, i know what you’re thinking. The Freddy as we know him became a parody, but in the first movie he was a truly disturbing character.

The only thing in the Ring, only seen the american version, that really made me squeal was in the beginning of the movie when we:
get a glimpse of the corpse in the closet <- Mini-Spoiler, mark the text.

I’ll add some more when my mind is less blank.

I don’t get nightmares as much as i get the willies. If i’m out jogging in the woods at night, the mind starts to recall. And the only thing i can do then is wish for no Total Recall, pardon the pun.

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Kubbo - you have hit the extra on the head with a ball peen hammer.

“In the mouth of madness”, while not a great movie, has a few scenes in it, the country highway scene that you describe included, that have stayed with me for a long time. Another is the scene where the old man is chained to the floor in pain while his wife helpfully answers questions above him over the desk. [Uhhh … shivers]

The secret of what really scares people is a subject for great debates IMHO. ‘Shocking’ people is relatively easy, and any director can make me jump out of my seat by having a cat jump out from behind the box just when the score is getting ominous and the lighting is dark. There’s not much skill there and the lacuna in the director’s skill is reflected in the fact that I don’t go home thinking about that scary ‘demented’ cat…

What I do go home thinking about is that scene where the movie has first lulled me into a dreamlike acceptance of unreality and then once it has me soft and malleable lying there in the cinema (or the couch), they hit me with a combination of image and sound that evokes something from a nightmare I had once but can’t remember. Wow. Did that make sense? Probably not.

Anyway – “hellraiser” is another one that might answer some questions for you.

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Oh! By the way- I’ve been too tame to see Ring (either the Japanese or US version). What a wuss!

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Well, I just watched The Ring last night and… OH MY GOD was I creeped out! I’m no slasher,“blood and gore” fan, so luckily, The Ring isn’t about that.

But what made this movie so creepy for me was a little bit of what cankerist said - the “nightmarish” quality. What I mean by that is, (spoiler here) when they show the approaching death of one of the characters, the filmmakers did a very odd thing - the camera speeds up and gets “jumpy,” the room gets very bright white and the sound jumps up. The thing is, I’ve had nightmares before where this “effect” happens. The fast action, very bright light and a loud “sound.” It’s really hard to describe, but this movie really captured that very odd and terrifying feeling.

But I think also, The Ring captured the “fear of the TV” thing very well. Static or a TV that’s been turned off has always been a creepy thing, and this movie really plays on that.

Then, this movie plays on childhood fears. As a kid, there was this thing called “Bloody Mary,” where if you went into a dark room with a mirror, and you said the words, “Bloody Mary” 3 times, you saw “her” in the mirror and she killed you. When I was a kid, this absolutely FREAKED ME OUT. It’s like, how could I die from just LOOKING * at a lady in a mirror?* What kind of strange power was in her?..

Well, “The Ring” really used that same kind of thing, but applied it to watching a video tape. Those same “Bloody Mary” thoughts came to mind as I was watching the movie. How could someone die from simply watching an image on a TV screen? Especially since the footage on the video wasn’t all that bad. I mean, it was creepy, but it wasn’t all gory or gross. It was simple images. But it’s like, what kind of power did those images have? Was it the sequence of images that made them deadly? Did it leave some sort of subliminal message thing in your brain??

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Things that require imagination are always so much more terrifying than things that lay it all out for you. A psycho killer knocking off sexy teens doesn’t have a lot of mystery to it (other than, “Why is he so psycho?”, and that usually gets answered somewhere between 3/4 through and the end of the movie). The truly scary movies are the ones that explain nothing, or rather explain just enough to allow you to draw your own conclusions. And the conclusions I draw are scary indeed.

For me, in no particular order, the top four scary movies I’ve seen have been The Ring, The Blair Witch Project, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hellraiser. In each of these, the villian was largely unseen and the protagonists were trapped in circumstances they could not escape despite real, intelligent efforts to do so. Nothing ruins sympathy faster than watching a character make idiotic decisions that are completely at odds with what someone would do in real life. But when characters try everything you yourself would try, and still fail, scary!

On top of the “impossible to escape” factor is the use of disturbing imagery, especially when it becomes a motif throughout the movie. Each repetition adds dread and malevolence to something that might otherwise be a minor scare or even unnoticable. From the movies I mentioned above, there are some things I’ll never forget:
The Ring: The shot at the end of the video tape getting longer each time, revealing a hand grasping the edge of the well from the inside.
Blair Witch: The handprints on the inside of the house, and the piled stones.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The feathers and cages inside the house, and shots of the house from the outside. I find countryside houses like that creepy now. (I should add that the scariest bit for me, for reasons I don’t really understand, was when the old man has the girl in his truck and keeps poking her with this cane).
Hellraiser: The walls of the room opening like slats in window blinds.

All intensely disturbing stuff that sticks with me because of all it hints at without revealing, and how close they are to things you might see in real life.

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The Exorcist - I haven’t seen the DVD version, but when it was re-released just watching the previews on TV gave me nightmares. I haven’t watched the old version in years, just thinking about it gives me the creeps.

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I just saw the Ring too. It gave me some pretty good chills. It also reminded me of a combination of Videodrome and The Changeling.

Videodrome had the fear of TV’s and video cassettes thing going for it. The Changeling had the phantom child angle. Both are chilling and creepy.

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While In The Mouth of Madness scared the crap out of me the first time I saw it, it didn’t give me a single nightmare. I haven’t watched any horror movie, The Ring included, and had nightmares afterwards as an adult, teen, or even older child.

However, Poltergeist gave me nightmares for over a year and a half. It wasn’t until my baby brother was born (when I was 6) that I finally stopped having them. Maybe I thought the scary things from the movie would take him because he was smaller :smiley:
I think this movie used up all the nightmare potential any movie ever after could have. Instead I have “orginal” nightmares. sigh.

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I JUST saw The Ring last night! And of course, I had a nightmare. Oddly, it wasn’t the shot that Kubbo mentioned that got me, it was the scene where

that horse jumped overboard, hit its poor, beautiful legs on the side of the ship and then fell agonizingly into the water, where it screamed and struggled, and then… oh god, then when it was just screaming and screaming, and then blood came out from under the boat. I dreamt last night about horses drowning and it was horrible. Just fuckin’ horrible. My friends who told me to see it got QUITE the reaming for not at least warning me.

Not to mention the fact that Samara’s fate was just about the worst thing I ever heard, ever, and I have little doubt THAT will pop in to visit me some night. Also, right after the movie, I have to admit, if my phone had rung, I think I might have peed my pants.

Now, I’m not really a good example because I have nightmares after scary movies all the time. The other movie thatstands out for giving me a graphic, severe nightmare was not a horror movie but Barton Fink. That scene where John Goodman was running down the burning hallway was what did it. I have no idea why.

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I’ve seen the ring a few times now, and it STILL scares me! In fact, the last time I saw it, I was watching it with someone who was seeing it for the first time. Well, right after the cursed video scene, her telephone rang. I thought we both were going to have a heart attack!!!

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I honestly don’t see what was so scary about the Ring, or any other movie I have seen. Sure, the Ring was very well done, with good suspense scenes, but I just can’t see how people can be scared of something fake.

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I got nighmares as a kid from an old 20’s pithhelmet adventurer movie that ran on TV.
The team of scientists were in a cave being chased over a thin natural bridge while lava poured beneath it. Then the bridge gave way and the girl hung by her wrist.

I woke up with that scene 100 times.

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As someone else mentioned, for me, anything that requires your imagination to help make it scary works for me, because I have a highly active imagination that doesn’t stop when the movie’s over. What got me with The Ring, and many other supernatural type movies is the sense that, at any quiet moment, something horrible can just be there! No real explaination needed, no forced entry, or broken windows. You’re looking in the mirror, everything’s cool, you bend down to spit your mouth wash out, you look up and BAM! There’s someone (or something) behind you.
then you’re dead.

That’s what gets me, and why I constantly have to have sound around me when I’m home alone. Either the t.v. has to be on or the radio, because silence breeds evil in the depths of my mind.

Darkness is another thing. It can be concealing, and there’s always a lot of it everywhere. A friend of mine told me a story he read when he was little around Halloween about this kid who moves into a house with his family, but the old residents just vanished one day, and the kid sees shadowy images moving around the house coming after him. That scares the shit out of me! Shadows grow, and who knows what they’re hiding, or what’s going to come out of them.

So, good use of suspense and anything that kicks off the imagination when it comes to the supernatural. Zombies are a bit more physical in nature, but they creep me out just the same. Again, it’s the notion that right now, everyone around you is normal, but at any moment, they can suddenly be outside your door waiting to tear you limb from limb. Not a happy thought.

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The description of this movie has been done well in this thread.

The last movie I saw that gave me nightmares was The Excorcist. I saw it twelve years ago. The thought that there may be a force more powerful than God has always unnerved me a bit. However, in The Excorcist, the entire movie was about a force that is in existance with the sole purpose to rival God. And it possesses a child. What can be more scary than that. The scene that still gives me the chills is the scene [start of possible spoiler] where the girl is repeatedly stabbing herself in the crotch screaming an expletive about Jesus Christ. I am not a Christian, but I simply cannot bring myself to even say those words about a Man who some claim to be the Son of God. This is such a horrific gesture towards anyone. I still shudder when I think of the scene. [/end of possible spoiler]

The only other one that even comes to mind was A Nightmare on Elm Street. [start of possible spoiler] The scene where that girl is flying around the room getting cut up scares me to this day.[/end of possible spoiler]

Then I bought The Ring on DVD. It seems so silly now…but I was downright afraid of that video. The first time I sat down to watch the movie, I had to turn it off about 30 seconds into the video scene just to prove that I could. After a day of rational thought, I was determined to sit through the whole movie. I still barely made it through the video scene…the phone did indeed ring. However, it was only halfway through the sequence. Thank God I was able cut that in half. If my buddy had called about a minute and a half later, I would have shit my pants.

Every time a part of the sequence played at any other part of the movie, I would get uneasy.

But here is what got me.

[start of spoiler]

The resolution of the movie, while creative, left a lot to be desired. Basically, the main character stumbled upon a way to save herself. That basically made about 90% of the movie…where she is trying to learn about the video tape…basically pointless.

However, it gives the “suspended” feeling at the end, which most horror writers apparently strive for…

But what really scared the freakin’ daylights out of me was the fact that they “defeated” the monster by a known means (at least in the horror genre), but the monster came back. The final death completely took me off guard. I wasn’t sure if the monster was going to offer gratitude and a final token of explanation or if the monster was going to strike again.

The movie left me with an incomplete feeling. We don’t get the “how” or “why” behind the existance of the evil. We just get the evil with part of the history of who was responsible.

Also, the imagery of death was done quite well. There are two scenes which depict this in the movie. It is quite unnerving when a person knows when he is going to die. It is even more unnerving when that person gets a glimmer of hope before that time comes. However, what is most unnerving is the realization that finally sinks in.

This movie actually made me think about death. I am not afraid of death…I am only afraid to die before I am ready. A week is not a lot of time to prepare.

[/end of spoiler]

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The Ring definitely gave me the creeps, but ‘Signs’ actually freaked me out a little more. The idea of aliens invading Earth is nothing new, but

Seeing them in your back yard, on your roof, etc was really freaky. The scene where Mel was looking into the pantry with the alien locked in was pretty intense for me, and at the end where Mel saw the reflection of the alien in his TV, I actually said ‘oh sh*t on a stick’ without even thinking about it. The one scene that was really eerie was when Mel was talking to the guy in his truck, about to head for the lake. “Don’t open the pantry; I locked one in there” was the creepiest line in the whole movie.

I actually liked the part about The Ring in that we never find out excatly how it worked; the lack of understanding makes it even more scary.

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I don’t understand it either, but that doesn’t stop it from working.

I’m a hard-headed skeptic. I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy, ESP, aliens, ghosts, or zero-point energy. My response to physically threatening situations is to look for something moderately heavy and portable to wade in with. When they’re out of my control, as in a car accident, I tend to swear in a resigned way.

When I even read about The Ring or The Blair Witch Project, all those hairs I shave off the back of my neck try to stand up. There are some images that seem to reach into a level of my brain that doesn’t do rational and trigger responses that were old before we started banging the rocks together to make the pretty sparks.

I can’t tell you why. I can’t even come up with a theory that holds together long enough to be typed.

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The Ring didn’t bother me much. Most horror movies don’t bother me much, probably because I grew up watching them. I remember seeing The Shining when I was 9 or 10 and loving it. I saw The Entity when I was 12 or 13, I think. Not much scares me these days.

Probably explains a lot…

However, I just recently saw Session 9, and it’s hands-down one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. And the ending… it made me simply never want to see it again. It’s a great horror film… perhaps too great. Those of you who’ve seen it already know. Those of you who haven’t… don’t. If The Ring got to you, Session 9 will probably kill you.

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Out of all the movies I’ve ever seen, one stays with me. *Lost Highway[/]. It’s not a great movie, and God knows I didn’t understand most of it, but it sure gave me the creeps.

SPOILERS

The part where Bill Pullman is at the party and he meets the mystery man. When he asks where they have met before, the man says “at your house”, which Pullman says he doesn’t remember. The mystery man elaborates by saying “I’m there right now”.

SPOILERS OVER

Somehow the bizarre, nightmarish quality of that sticks with me. I think of it sometimes in the night and it still gives me the creeps.

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Is it maybe something to do with not just the fact that you can’t do anything about the potentially lethal problem but that you can’t correctly perceive anything that would let you choose to take a course of action that would let you save yourself?

That ties into the Jacob’s Ladder/The Ring/Blair Witch/Lost Highway paradigm, and might explain why Memento had such an impact.

It’s a kind of helplesness that doesn’t allow for a “Why didn’t you just…” or “Well I’d have…” cop out. If what you would base your actions on might not be real, what actions can you take?

That still doesn’t explain why some of the images (see the trailer for The Ring, it got to me long before I saw the movie) can burn themselves in so deeply, but it makes for a nice rationalization.