I’m not a fan of Stephen King, and have read only five or six of his early books.
BUT…
one afternoon I was stretched out on the couch reading The Shining. My very first exposure to his writing. (I’d seen “Carrie.”) I was about halfway through it. Also should mention that I was in my late 20’s, all grown up and stuff. At one point, I started feeling pretty “anxious”, and put the book down for a moment; I was surprised to realize only then that my heart was pounding and my neck hairs were standing on end. Until that moment I’d never understood that one’s hairs literally do that- I’d always thought it was a cartoonish figure of speech.
No printed material before or since has ever had that effect on me.
I was a kid when I first read Lord of the Flies. I don’t know which adult thought it was a good idea to let me read this. But it horrified the hell out of me and made me feel sick to my stomach for months. I don’t think I could even now bear to read it again.
That happened to me with George Orwell’s 1984.
““You are the dead,” said the voice behind the picture.”
Scared the bejeezus out of me so bad I had to put the book down, walk away from it, and go back to it later.
Oh holy hells, YES! That’s the only horror show I still can’t sit through. I don’t even like to think of it. I think that’s where I got my unreasonable fear of puncture wounds.
I only remember 3 other movie moments that scared me. The scene in The Birds when we see the schoolteacher Annie after the birds pecked out her eyes, Peter Lorre being chased by a disembodied hand in The Beast With Five Fingers, and some movie I saw when I was very little that involved an intricately carved door. My mother would send me downstairs to turn off the lights at night and I would dash back upstairs, certain that The Door was right on my heels.
As an 8 year old kid I remember watching an episode of Murder, Mystery, Suspense on LWtv. It was called Crowhaven Farm and featured witches and the devil, I have never been so afraid in all my life :eek: 27 yrs on and I can still remember the terror and the subsequent nightmares.
The original Dutch version of the movie The Vanishing freaked me out completely. I was in my 20s when I saw it, and it’s still one of the most deeply disturbing movies/stories I’ve ever seen/read.
I don’t even like thinking about it. It’s just too scary to contemplate.
Ooh, you’re right, Athena. I watched it by myself once when I was home sick and was horribly disturbed for a long time afterwards. I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again.
Came home from watching Silence of the Lambs to find a light on that neither I nor my then-wife remembered leaving on in our apartment. A very tense searching of the apartment with a very large knife ensued. Didn’t sleep well that night.
When I was ten or so, I saw a commercial for a horror movie called Harvest Home. One character takes off his sunglasses to reveal - cotton-stuffed eyesockets. Gave me a few very bad dreams.
I later read the book the movie was based on - it’s pretty good. An idyllic rural community (immediate red flag!) practises a pagan fertility ritual that involves electing a “King” and “Queen” for a year; during the harvest festival, the “King” has sex with the “Queen” in the fields, and then is immediately slaughtered. The narrator, an urban transplant whose wife becomes “Queen”, sees things he shouldn’t, at the cost of his eyes and his tongue. Thus the scene that scared the hell out of me.
I can read Lovecraft or King and think “Yeah, but that couldn’t really happen…”
But I was reading Tom Sawyer to my son at bedtime, and when he and Becky got lost in the caves under Hannibal, Missouri, we got scared.
It was told so plainly and so… immediately… that I read faster and faster and we had to stay up later and later until … that plot point got resolved.
Anyone know if young Sam Clemens ever got lost in those caves? It was pretty realistic, as well as plausible.
Oh, I like Marble Hornets (despite not having watched much of season 3 yet due to lack of time). Honestly, it doesn’t really scare me, it has the same problem Lovecraft has. It seems like if he wanted Slendy could eviscerate me at a thought, maybe it should make it more scary that he DOESN’T and I don’t know why, but I’m fine with it.
Though I’ll admit I have had the odd “what if Slendy is RIGHT THERE, LOOMING” hallucination/thought before.
Most scared: a short story called ‘The Entrance’ by, of all people, Gerald Durrell. It’s very well framed - Durrell explaining how he ended up with this old manuscript - and then you get into the story of this guy who’s snowbound in an old chateau, just him and a cat and a dog, while he catalogues some dead guy’s library. Only one evening they’re all cosy in front of the fire, and he looks into the mirror over the fireplace, and
this white maggoty hand creeps around the door, grabs the cat, and vanishes. After a minute it reappears and closes the door…leaving long streaks of blood. The cat is fine, still curled up asleep, but it doesn’t have a reflection any more. Things just get creepier from there.
It’s genuinely terrifying. I was about fourteen, and it was months before I would close the bathroom door all the way when I had a bath, because there was a mirror in there.
Least scared: the scene in *Hannibal *where
Anthony Hopkins eats Ray Liotta’s brain.
My husband and I saw that in the cinema, and we may be sick people but we were twisted laughing all the way through that scene. It’s completely ridiculous, and how the hell does the poor actor *play *that?
I suspect from the ages of 9-11 is the time most of us start to come to terms with mortality, and have the capacity to dread it.
I remember reading Lovecraft at 8-9 and finding it gloriously creepy, but not terrifying.
Then at 11 I read Poe’s The Premature Burial under the blankets with a torch in the dark. It had a certain morbid plausibility, and at that moment, the full dread of mortality and all the horrible things that can happen in the world crashed in on me. I lay in bed in the dark rigid with fear, and the greater fear that I had somehow damaged my mindand this new-found terror would never ever abate.
I eventually got off to sleep, but I even feared that for what dreams may come.
Took a day or so, but I managed to shake it off.
I suspect from the ages of 9-11 is the time most of us start to come to terms with mortality, and have the capacity to dread it.
I remember reading Lovecraft at 8-9 and finding it gloriously creepy, but not terrifying.
Then at 11 I read Poe’s The Premature Burial under the blankets with a torch in the dark. It had a certain morbid plausibility, and at that moment, the full dread of mortality and all the horrible things that can happen in the world crashed in on me. I lay in bed in the dark rigid with fear, and the greater fear that I had somehow damaged my mindand this new-found terror would never ever abate.
I eventually got off to sleep, but I even feared that for what dreams may come.
Took a day or so, but I managed to shake it off.
Going from fallible memory, I don’t think he personally did, but he knew or at least knew of people who had.
I do know you can go to Hannibal and visit “Mark Twain cave.”
+1
I was lucky enough to catch it on the Showcase channel maybe 20 years ago and couldn’t sleep. More disturbing than scary but somehow even more effective than any horror film. They should use the re-make as an example of how Hollywood fucks all good things up.
I also loved the “holy shit” feeling of watching “Angel Heart” when I was 14. Alan Parker did a great job with that one.
Anybody remember the great tv movie “Night Of The Scarecrow”?
I did, I did! So now I have a better feel for where Tom and Becky got lost.
(It’s been a while since I read it; that anklebiter who wanted to get read to is now a skatepunk in his 20s)
I suspect from the ages of 9-11 is the time most of us start to come to terms with mortality, and have the capacity to dread it.
I remember reading Lovecraft at 8-9 and finding it gloriously creepy, but not terrifying.
Then at 11 I read Poe’s The Premature Burial under the blankets with a torch in the dark. It had a certain morbid plausibility, and at that moment, the full dread of mortality and all the horrible things that can happen in the world crashed in on me. I lay in bed in the dark rigid with fear, and the greater fear that I had somehow damaged my mind and this new-found terror would never ever abate.
I eventually got off to sleep, but I even feared that for what dreams may come.
Took a day or so, but I managed to shake it off.
I think the fact that I couldn’t even tell you what the other two stories were in the Trilogy of Terror is a pretty good indication what an effect that damn voodoo doll had on me!
Same here. It was more effective in the book (which I’d read beforehand), but even there it didn’t have the impact one might have expected. Context might have had a lot to do with it- that book (as well as the movie) was so over the top WTF ridiculous that it might have worked better as a parody. Jodie Foster knew what she was doing when she turned it down.