What got me in the Ring more than anything was The brief images of the dead girl in the closet at the beginning and the dead guy in the chair at the end. The fact that the shots were so brief made them about a million times scarier, as I didn’t have any time to dwell on how fake they looked.
In addition, the horses in general throughout the movie, particularly
The one that starts freaking out on the boat. The fact that it fell off didn’t bother me, but just seeing it in the pen going crazy and then rearing up on the car scared the fucking shit out of me. I have a big irrational fear of hores to begin with, so I was actually kind of glad the damn thing died.
The girl coming out of the well/tv didn’t bother me at all, but the face/horse combo was bad enough.
I wouldn’t have thought of Hellraiser, though it is one of my favorite horror movies. I think I’ve watched it so much that it’s lost a bit of its edge. However, definitely scary is the thought of walking around your house at night, only to turn the corner into a room to come into contact with a fucking cenobite - one of the few movie monsters that I think would be scarrier in person than on the screen.
I also have to second Signs, but a different part - the news broadcast where you see the alien walk by at the kid’s birthday party. The sheer realism and the fact that you hardly see the alien made it very effective. While driving home that night after seeing it, I could totally imagine something like that running out in front of my headlights, and that was really scary.
I don’t really get scared of movies. I’ve never had a nightmare because of one. There are only two exceptions:
First, I got creeped out in the woods once, about a year after seeing The Blair Witch Project. We were on a golf cart, I was holding a flashlight, and we were going through a field. It was dead dark. But that was just a vague fear.
Secondly, 12 Monkeys freaked me out. That’s because I’m scared of biological warfare, though.
Funnily enough, I saw The Ring last night, too, and had a nightmare about it. Having seen Ringu already I had already had sleepless nights about the last scene, so wasn’t too freaked out by it this time. My nightmare, though, was pretty scary. In it the phone was ringing (duh) and I picked it up to hear a child’s voice say ‘She’s still there, Sakado [rather than Samara], she’s still alive’. As I listened a disembodied head appeared on the table: the head of a Japanese woman who was looking malevolently at me and mouthing the words I was hearing down the phone. At this point I realised it was a nightmare, and, pissed off, got out pretty sharpish. It’s interesting, though – clearly watching the remake had brought back all my fear of the original.
But in answer to the OP – any supernatural idea that gets you thinking further about it, and even *imagining yourself in the same situation * is scary. For example, a guy being buried alive in a film is not in itself shocking. But when you start thinking about what it must be like – suffocating in a confined space, knowing that you’re going to die slowly and painfully, being all alone in the darkness – that’s when the nightmares start.
I remember having nightmares based on horror movies when I was a kid, but not really as an adult. My twisted mind is already full of things to freak me out when I’m in dreamland. It doesn’t need to rip anything off.
But the movies that gave me nightmares as a kid were pretty much any black and white horror or sci-fi movie. Especially with disembodied heads. I’d dream of them floating towards me in the swimming pool and biting me. I remember being scared of the robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still. I could just imagine that solid steel frame crushing human flesh.
Contemporary movies: the ones that spook me the most are the ones that either have a flash of the surreal, such as the busload of blank screaming faces that goes by in Jacob’s Ladder, or the ones that don’t quite capture the thing that’s out there, like Blair Witch and Alien.
Good answers, all of you. Imagination seems the explanation of choice. I can see that (the Jacob’s ladder reference is a good one, I remember those images all too well).
Let me add just one thing. I get the impression that the images of a movie serve an additional purpose. When reading about something scary I can sometimes already become scared, but when I saw the trailer of The Ring on TV, I got an additional image with this girl crawling out of the television. Last night that image somehow triggered my imagination further and briefly made me afraid to leave the bedroom. (luckily such things pass). While reading about the plot of The Ring I was only intrigued, not scared, but that image, and a bit more detail about the plot, did it for me.
It seems therefore that what makes some horror movies particularly frightening is the combination of good basic material for your imagination to run wild, then a couple of disturbing images to really get it going.
I can’t remember having a movie-inspired nightmare since I was a kid, but I do remember what made them happen:
Plausibility, and personal immediacy.
For instance, I saw both Alien and The Swarm when I was eight years old. Alien scared the poop outta me in the theatre, but all I took home with me was the satisfaction that I’d just seen one of the coolest movies ever. The Swarm, on the other hand, is arguably a bad movie. (Is there even any argument?) Although the dialogue and plotting couldn’t be described as ‘plausible’ by even the most charitable of folks, the basic concept lies just a hair within the range of the credible. (Especially if you’re eight.) More importantly, I had a back-yard full of honeysuckle, and there were always dozens of bees within spitting distance. I had nightmares about swarms of bees for months. Nine-foot-tall aliens with exoskeletons and acidic blood were (and are) just too remote from my personal experience to make any appearances in my dreams.
“Real, intelligent efforts to do so?” Like throwing your map away? Like blundering around the woods with no clear idea of what direction you are going in? Like not following a stream which would inevitabley lead to a river/road/civilization?
Instead of follwing a stream, the AssHat bozos in Blair Witch scream at each other and blunder around the woods, which dropped my sympathy for them, which was at 0 already, to a fairly large negative number.
I was totally freaked out by Maximum Overdrive as a kid. That may be why I don’t like having big SUVs and trucks driving behind me at night, when it’s just the headlights in your rearview mirror… (shudder). And I hid behind a chair the first time I saw the video for “Thriller.” Of course, I must have been about six at the time.
I started the thread where I asked to be unscared after seeing ** The Ring.**
I think the things that frighten me most are the things that trigger my imagination. When I keep getting the feeling that if I just turn my head something will be there.
Signs really terrified me because I could image that happening to me. If aliens were going to invade the earth, I expect that I would be watching it on tv like the farm family was. The shot of the alien in the tv scared me to death.