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Happy Halloween
Oct. 31st, 2004 12:06 pmSo, it's Halloween, or Samhain for the initiated. I've been relaxing at home this OVFF weekend (congratulations to the Pegasus winners), and trick-or-treating with the rest of the City of Heroes crowd between reading history books. The game set up a special event, allowing players to meet up with witches, zombies, pumpkinheads, ghosts and werewolves under the canopy "perpetual night", getting badges for defeating these creatures, and it's been a blast.
Watched BRAVO's 100 Scariest Movie Moments last night. Some of my favorites are in there - the shower scene in Psycho, certainly; the "dragging on the ceiling" scene from A Nightmare on Elm Street; Michael Myers from Halloween; the clown attack from Poltergeist; Shelly Duvall's discovery of Jack Nicholson's novel in The Shining; the shock ending to the first Friday the 13th; the decapitation scene from The Omen; the bit where the hero realizes his girlfriend's a pod from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and others. They also showed clips from movies I'd also forgotten like Suspiria, or the eyeball piercing scene from Zombie, but there were spoilers ahoy for anyone who hadn't seen those movies. On a false note, they also mentioned Cujo, surely the worst adaptation of any Stephen King story I've ever seen, but you know, there's no accounting for taste.
Being American and movie-centric, nobody mentioned "Ghostwatch", of course, or the superbly creepy "The Stone Tape" by Nigel Kneale. The former took me (and most of England) in completely when I first saw it on BBC, and the latter still gives me the shivers. If anyone else remembers watching "Ghostwatch", I'd love to hear about it.
Bernie Wrightson defined horror once as "a man - a well-dressed man, standing on a corner reading a newspaper. Everything about him is absolutely perfect... except for a spot of blood on his shoe." My own personal definition is of horror as the realization of inevitable destiny, when you know that nothing will prevent the fate that is barreling down towards you, be it a slow-moving (or fast, as in 28 Days Later) herd of zombies, or simply the revelation of the real truth (The Wicker Man, or Lovecraft's "A Shadow Over Innsmouth"). The type of science-fictional horror I write reflects that - if you read enough of my stories, there's usually a moment where the protagonists realize the amount of shit they're in and also that there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.
I'm not naturally a jumpy person, but what scares me has pretty much remained constant since childhood. The boogieman hidden behind the corner about to leap up at me, the ghost standing there staring wide-eyed as a reminder of my own mortality, the idea of unwanted transformation - vampirism, lycanthropy, or even alien abduction and putting you in a brain jar.
The original The Ring (or Ringu) and Ju-On (which has been remade into The Grudge) were scary because of the everyday becoming threatening - a video tape, a television set, or an apartment house. Creepy children are also a staple, my theory being that it brings in all that psychological baggage about childhood, school days, innocence being perverted and the fear that other kids are there to replace an obsolete you. Fears of being being stalked in a corridor filled place like a school or a library, or vulnerable locations like the bathroom. Combine several of these elements and you're pretty much guaranteed to get me cringing away from the screen.
The horror moments that fall flat with me are the ones that have been redone over and over but presented as if they were being done for the first time. Some moments work because you're not expecting them, so the second time around it's useless (like the shock endings to Friday the 13th and Carrie). Others are overdone, like the "you're really dead" idea which goes all the way back to Ambrose Bierce's "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" and "An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge" - which is why The Sixth Sense (and M. Night Shamalaladingdong in general) has never impressed me, because it presented that old canard as if it was new and it annoyed me that people were acting as if it was revolutionary. Carnival of Souls did it better - hell, even Jacob's Ladder's psychedelic imagery made up somewhat for the cliché of the premise. But when you place so much weight on that kind of revelation, if it peters out it takes the rest of the movie with it.
So, what scares you this Halloween, my children? What are your favorite scary movies? Any memories or fears you want to share?
Watched BRAVO's 100 Scariest Movie Moments last night. Some of my favorites are in there - the shower scene in Psycho, certainly; the "dragging on the ceiling" scene from A Nightmare on Elm Street; Michael Myers from Halloween; the clown attack from Poltergeist; Shelly Duvall's discovery of Jack Nicholson's novel in The Shining; the shock ending to the first Friday the 13th; the decapitation scene from The Omen; the bit where the hero realizes his girlfriend's a pod from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and others. They also showed clips from movies I'd also forgotten like Suspiria, or the eyeball piercing scene from Zombie, but there were spoilers ahoy for anyone who hadn't seen those movies. On a false note, they also mentioned Cujo, surely the worst adaptation of any Stephen King story I've ever seen, but you know, there's no accounting for taste.
Being American and movie-centric, nobody mentioned "Ghostwatch", of course, or the superbly creepy "The Stone Tape" by Nigel Kneale. The former took me (and most of England) in completely when I first saw it on BBC, and the latter still gives me the shivers. If anyone else remembers watching "Ghostwatch", I'd love to hear about it.
Bernie Wrightson defined horror once as "a man - a well-dressed man, standing on a corner reading a newspaper. Everything about him is absolutely perfect... except for a spot of blood on his shoe." My own personal definition is of horror as the realization of inevitable destiny, when you know that nothing will prevent the fate that is barreling down towards you, be it a slow-moving (or fast, as in 28 Days Later) herd of zombies, or simply the revelation of the real truth (The Wicker Man, or Lovecraft's "A Shadow Over Innsmouth"). The type of science-fictional horror I write reflects that - if you read enough of my stories, there's usually a moment where the protagonists realize the amount of shit they're in and also that there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.
I'm not naturally a jumpy person, but what scares me has pretty much remained constant since childhood. The boogieman hidden behind the corner about to leap up at me, the ghost standing there staring wide-eyed as a reminder of my own mortality, the idea of unwanted transformation - vampirism, lycanthropy, or even alien abduction and putting you in a brain jar.
The original The Ring (or Ringu) and Ju-On (which has been remade into The Grudge) were scary because of the everyday becoming threatening - a video tape, a television set, or an apartment house. Creepy children are also a staple, my theory being that it brings in all that psychological baggage about childhood, school days, innocence being perverted and the fear that other kids are there to replace an obsolete you. Fears of being being stalked in a corridor filled place like a school or a library, or vulnerable locations like the bathroom. Combine several of these elements and you're pretty much guaranteed to get me cringing away from the screen.
The horror moments that fall flat with me are the ones that have been redone over and over but presented as if they were being done for the first time. Some moments work because you're not expecting them, so the second time around it's useless (like the shock endings to Friday the 13th and Carrie). Others are overdone, like the "you're really dead" idea which goes all the way back to Ambrose Bierce's "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" and "An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge" - which is why The Sixth Sense (and M. Night Shamalaladingdong in general) has never impressed me, because it presented that old canard as if it was new and it annoyed me that people were acting as if it was revolutionary. Carnival of Souls did it better - hell, even Jacob's Ladder's psychedelic imagery made up somewhat for the cliché of the premise. But when you place so much weight on that kind of revelation, if it peters out it takes the rest of the movie with it.
So, what scares you this Halloween, my children? What are your favorite scary movies? Any memories or fears you want to share?
