Happy Halloween!

[cleolinda]

I was going to post a book discussion but then I was tired and also sick. But it is Halloween so I will share something with you, via The Hairpin, from the scariest movie I have ever seen in the theater:

Granted, I don't usually get to see many movies in the theater, so I'm not saying there are a whole lot of competitors for the title. I did see Blair Witch in the theater, but I took so long to figure out what was going on in the two freakiest parts (What's that in the shirt? Why is he in the corner? OHHHHHHH) that it was more of a delayed-reaction terror.

So. The Ring. I went to see it by myself because no one would go with me, but I was doing movie linkspams on a dinky GeoCities site (yes, even then), and I thought the trailers looked really cool and creepy and I had a feeling it was going to be a really big thing. (And I still think that the trailers and the Cursed Videotape, copies of which the marketing team actually planted in real life, were amazingly well done--just the right touch of icy, cryptic distance.) So I went to an afternoon showing, probably a Sunday, and I was pretty much alone with my oatmeal fleece jacket and a small clutch of college students (my age) a couple of rows behind me. I nearly died. Naomi Watts fell into the dark haunted well and I wanted to leave the theater so badly, I have never wanted to leave a theater from terror before, but my legs no longer worked. I am serious, I sat there,  literally, in the literal sense of literally, trying to get out of my seat and I could not make it happen. I then began to pray, in complete seriousness, that a higher power would strike me unconscious before Naomi Watts found something. Because you knew she was going to. There was no point in the movie booting her down there otherwise. You knew. And the movie. still. made you. wait for it.

(I can't find the entire scene on YouTube, but here it is right up to the part where It Got Worse, as the Tropers would say. I think the end is where I started to lose control of my motor capabilities.)


When it was over, I staggered out of the theater white as a sheet. I am not exaggerating a whole lot on this one. "What happened?" my mother asked. "You look like you've been through a war."


I never saw any of the other movies, Japanese or sequels or prequels or whatever-have-you. This is all I want to have seen.

Obviously, this is your cue to share a movie that has scared you stupid. I want experiences of real, actual, physical terror if you've got it.


NOTE: ALSO: TCM is running The Innocents later tonight; don't miss that if you found the discussion interesting.


ETA: I have been reminded of Tiny Moist Hand!

Comments

[octopedingenue]

• The first time I saw The Ring was at a college movie night, and afterward I went back to my dorm pretty freaked out. Then the moment I walked into my room, simultaneously the phone rang and the printer started printing by itself.
  
  I spent the rest of the night hiding under the bedcovers with all the lights on.


• The most visceral reaction I've ever had to a movie was watching Jurassic Park at a family friend's house, when I was all of 9 years old. My parents were watching it with me, but none of us realized that A)this movie was very non-kid-friendly, B)the family friend had just set up a Surround Sound speaker system for her TV, and C)I'd never experienced a Surround Sound set before.
  
  So we're watching the movie and I'm a little uneasy with the violence but also fascinated by the animals, so I'm staying put no matter what. Until suddenly there are acid-spitting dinosaurs who will liquefy & eat my face and I can HEAR THEM COMING BEHIND ME.
  
  I jumped backward over the couch and fled down the hall into a bedroom up into a top bunk bed so quickly I may have teleported there.
  
  I now love Jurassic Park, but I still can't watch Nedry's death scene straight through.


• But the first movie that ever truly terrified me was the Carol Channing TV movie version of Through the Looking Glass. NO, REALLY. The Jabberwocky bits. I was like 6 years old, and I didn't run out of the room because I was paralyzed with Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
  
  Apparently I have an inborn dread of dragony dinosaur things.

[wandererriha]

this is your cue to share a movie that has scared you stupid.

Well I'm fond of "Ernest: Scared Stupid" but I know that's not what you meant! XD

I don't usually watch "horror" flicks because 1) I am not into [Dr. Evil]Evil[/Dr. Evil] movies and 2) I had a roommate in college who thought she was a vampire.
No.
Really.
She did.
Anyway, because of her, I have watched every so-bad-it-is-not-even-funny vampire movie out there. I was profoundly squicked by two, but not terrorized- unless you count not being able to sleep for a week. Capuchin monastery. Ugh. ><;

I did see Blair Witch
I call it "The Blair Raccoon" and when I've feeling less generous "The Idiots Who Could Not Camp To Save Their Lives. Literally." A couple of eight-year-old Cub Scouts would have done better. Eesh. 9_9

I went back and worked up the nerve to see some of the "new classics" like "It" (all that for a $#%@ BOGGART?!) and "Carrie". I think what freaked me out most was not the content or the plot or even blood'n'guts (if there were any) but the atmosphere. The original "Amityville Horror" and "Halloween" and pretty much all the other horror flicks made between 1970 and 1990 have the same sort of creeptastic ambiance that has this delightful sort of delayed reaction so that my filmmakers' brain processes it WAY LATER and consequently I CANNOT SLEEP because I have freaked myself out.

I could not even tell you what, exactly, it is that makes them all so creepy. It's not even an "ew gross" it's a "oh please don't make me do that please ;;" reaction. I really DO NOT like it. It disturbs me deeply. Again, I know not why. In so many ways these old films are so corny it can be hard to take them seriously. IDK.

That was long and rambly and probably does not answer your question. XD