Hey! Why are there two scenes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gak21IuXufkIt’s the second one that scared the shit out of me.
I was scared my mother would die.
Headless ostriches: When I was 5, something woke me from my sleep and I looked out the window. There, walking down the street, dimly lit by an overhead (well, technically not over head) streetlight, was an ostrich with no head. I was frozen with fear. My family tried to convince me that I didn’t really see what I saw, but what do they know?! To this day I’m phobic of anything what walks around without a head.
Squatting Elves: When I was 6, on Christmas eve, I heard a noise coming from my bedroom closet. I opened the door and was instantly terrified by what I saw. It was an elf squatting on the floor next to my stuffed panda. He turned his head to look at me and I ran. To this day I’m phobic of tiny people wearing green clothes and pointy-toed shoes.
Sleeping on my back with my mouth open: From a young age, I’m convinced I’ll fall asleep with my mouth open and a large spider will rappel down a single thread of web from the ceiling and lodge in my throat. Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it’s not going to. I’ve just got to get through a couple more decades of life before I’m home free.
I agree. Stephen King’s “It” was one of the very few books that filled me with a true sense of horror. The TV mini-series, with the exception of a fine performance by Tim Curry, was, much to my chagrin, dreck. I’ve longed for a finely crafted big screen adaptation of *It *for a long time. I’m mildly enthusiastic to see that there now is a movie in the works, although I’m unfamiliar with the currently slated director (Andrés Muschietti ) and star (Will Poulter). Any thoughts, fellow dopers?
I’m not happy to hear Muschietti’s comment, “It will have more horror and gore”…Gore does not a great horror flick make. It needs suspense, dreadful anticipation, excellent character development, and a believable universe of eeriness—all things King is a master at crafting. King’s line, “everything down here floats” is worth more than 10 pages of blood and guts. In one of his books he masterfully used the work* “slippage”* (to kind of describe the thin veil of acceptable pseudo-reality sitting precariously atop the desolate horror of true reality, which could reveal itself at any time). That word still fills me with dread.
“It” needs William Friedkin-type direction. It needs Max von Sydow, Ellen Burstyn, Lee J. Cobb, Jason Miller…and Tim Curry -type performances.
*“It” *also needs King to let the screenwriter write a totally new ending, because his ending was just plain silly.
When I was very young, my great fear was the cupboard at the end of the hallway. I thought it looked like the face of a monster, and it was waiting for me to get too close so it could gobble me up.
Later on, it was communists. I was well and truly brainwashed into thinking commies were everywhere. They were horrible, sneaky people who pretended to be good citizens but who were secretly planning to destroy civilization and then take over and make us all slaves and there wouldn’t be any more Santa Claus or ice cream or Chatty Cathy dolls and we’d all wear grey uniforms and everything would be just awful. Either that, or they’d just drop a bomb on us.
Mindless crowds, gangs, mobs.
Animals that attack people (dogs, etc)
The supernatural, which is weird considering that my parents were absolutely not religious, so I wasn’t subjected to the whole fire and brimstone spiel. But ghosts and demons stories would scare me witless.
For a short while, I was scared of being abducted by aliens, probably after seeing a movie about them but it didn’t last long.
I’ve never been afraid of serial killers, although of course I wouldn’t want my loved ones to cross the path of one.
In other words, I was most afraid of the things that I was never going to encounter, like ghosts. To this day, horror movies involving ghosts or demons creep me out whereas those that have a human killer as the antagonist leave me bored. Probably has to do with being faced with something unexplainable and unpredictable, albeit not real.
On a daily level, spiders. I even know where the fear came from: one day when we were little (I must have been under 5, as that’s when we moved to a different town), my friend and I were watching a spider make its web when her older sister came and started telling us about poisonous spiders that could kill you with one bite or make your flesh fall off.
Documentaries on brown recluses, black widows and similar beauties should not be accessible viewing for sadistic brats, damnit :mad:
On a greater level, I had serious problems understanding stories where some kid left home of his own will “to go seek adventure” or because he’d been yelled at or some such. I was very clear on the concept of “not without my books!” Maybe if Kindles had existed back then I would have had less of an issue with the concept, as it would have been possible to flee home while not being bookless. I was already pretty short on time spent with friends, being away from my few friends and also bookless was beyond imagining
Come to think of it, I was also scared of real things like:
- Dogs (still hate them)
- Dolls and puppets
- The dark
- The eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 (I saw it on the news just before going to bed, my dad had to tell me that it was happening far away from our place to calm me down)
- My parents suddenly disappearing (I had a couple of nightmares where they were walking next to me in a supermarket then would vanish all of a sudden, I remember looking for them all over the shop, even in butter packages)
I was afraid of Gene Simmons. The other KISS guys in their makeup were okay but Gene Simmons scared the bejeezus out of me. Didn’t help that when I was in kindergarten the babysitter’s asshole son would shove pictures of Gene Simmons at me until I cried.
My father. Never yelled, never raised his voice, but would whip the shit out of me with a belt.