The Creeps

[dr_mabeuse]

What's your personal favorite scariest or creepiest scene, either book or movie or TV, radio, whatever? What was it about the scene that made it so creepy?

And while we're at it, which medium do you think has the best potential for horror?

---dr.M.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Favorite creepy scene is from a movie called ghost i believe. A much older film. There is a guy in the haunted house, and the chost is closing in on him. Meanwhile at a pond the authorites are pulling a car out of a lake. It sort of becomes a race against time thing, but the authorites don't know whats going on and the whole scene is filled with suspense.

I think television is the best medium for horro beacuse somuch of horror is visual. that said books have a huge advantage in that the monster will look as frighteneing as your imagination will make it

-Colly

 

[The_Fool]

Movies are the worst for creeping me out. They have a method creating suspense that causes physical discomfort followed by an abrupt climactic action that scares the bejeezus out of me. I hate scary movies.....*G* Still remember a scene from a vampire movie. Peaceful, serene evening for a family get together. Until the vampires shatter the sliding doors and go on a bloodthirsty rampage. I think I was about eight. Gave me nightmares for weeks. Or what I thought were nightmares. Now I have teenagers and REALLY have nightmares.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Movies are the worst for creeping me out. They have a method creating suspense that causes physical discomfort followed by an abrupt climactic action that scares the bejeezus out of me. I hate scary movies.....*G*

Bless you, Fool. I thought I was the only one!

I recognize several different ways of being scared, and the most unpleasant way is what the movies do to you. Usually the movie version of 'horror' is actually a mixture of surprise and disgust, and I can't stand movies where you know that something's about to jump out and you just have to wait for it.

I remember I was watching the first "Alien" where she'd just about escaped and then realized that she'd left the cat on board the ship and she'd have to go back and deal with that alien again, and as I was watching I said to myself, "Oh Christ, I don't want to watch this again!" and suddenly it occurred to me that Hey: you know what? I don't have to. And I just turned it off. I was just tired of being jerked around by the director.

And that was probably the last shock movie I ever watched.

---dr.M.

 

[dee1124]

Hard to say, movies or books. I can remember reading Salem's Lot one sunny summer afternoon and being afraid to go back in the house. The end of Silence of the Lambs is pretty creepy, too, Jodie Foster threading the maze under Buffalo Bill's house. Thinking John Ashcroft is actually a person of power in this country is a little flesh-crawly, too.

 

[Seattle Zack]

The Thing, John Carpenter remake, when they're testing all the remaining scientists by drawing blood and seeing if it squirts away when prodded by the hot needle ... man, what a great scene.

Jaws. the first time you really see the shark, whan Brody is sculling chum off the back end of the Orca and it rises up out of the water. "I think we need a bigger boat."

--Z

I remember I was watching the first "Alien" where she'd just about escaped and then realized that she'd left the cat on board the ship and she'd have to go back and deal with that alien again
So how many people died for that friggin' cat Jonesey? three? four? Harry Dean Stanton and two more, plus Ripley went back for it at least twice ... Jesus Christ, leave the damn thing ...

 

[pop_54]

Yeppers film

Got to be film, wide screen surroundsound and sensory transmitters, you know the old vibrating seats in the cinema and shit like that of a few years ago when cinema bosses tried to join the fun and scare the shit out of the patrons.

I don't scare easily, I'm too much of a realist and it's a shit way to be folks, I sometimes wish I could drop the logical minded attitude and have more fun. I sit watching horror or suspense films with the attitude, 'it's all pretend' firmly in my mind.

The thing that does give me the creepy spine tingles occasionally however is the noise in the loft thing, well not just the loft but you know what I mean, the suspense of not knowing for certain if a rat will scurry away when the hero opens the loft hatch, or if the hero will have his/her fucking head ripped off by something.

pops angle

 

[pixiesjuice]

Books do it for me more than movies, I'd started reading Saul, Herbert and King when I was 12. One day I picked up a copy of King's book 'It', I couldnt finish it and I couldnt sleep for a long time without seeing Pennywise hanging on the edges of my dreams. I'll never look at clowns the same way again

 

[Icingsugar]

The backalley "devil" thingy in Mulholland Drive.

It's so dumb, really. You know it's coming, you should be prepared, and out steps a fugly troll, just like that, in broad daylight.

And me, as well as the rest of the audience freaked. Afterwards, no one could really explain why.

 

[cookiejar]

When I was a teen-ager I read a book called "The Other" by Thomas Tryon. In one part there was a twist in the book ... I actually remember having to stop reading and go outside. That was the first time I really understood what power words can have. They later made a movie of the book, I remember a young John Ritter in it. They butchered it ... some books don't translate well to film.

I love horror and mystery movies especially those that make me think ... I just watched "Session 9" and loved it. It was as one reviewer put it, "a cerebral movie."

The scene in "Pet Cemetary" where the father tries to reach his little son before the truck runs him down. A horrific scene and every parents nightmare. I was working in a theater and had to watch that scene 8 times ... I will never forget it.

I could go on and on, we used to own a bookstore and I started reading Bentley Little ... I wait for each new book to come out. The first book I read of his was "The Store" and I became hooked. I enjoyed early Stephen King, his new stuff leaves me cold.

 

[Angeline]

For me books

have more potential to freak me out because there's time to stop and think, and my imagination is more capable of creeping me out than any outer medium, lol.

However:

Book The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is so subtly scary I get goose bumps just thinking about it. Its first paragraph is one of the creepiest things I've ever read.


Film: The Haunting, based on the book--not the recent silliness, but the b&w original from the early sixties with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom. There's a scene where Julie Harris is alone in her bedroom and the camera pans to this intricately carved woodwork and, as it gets closer, you see faces in the workwork. They look like they're screaming, and they start to move like they're breathing. Aye carumba!

 

[Wills]

Hi all

David Lynch's film 'Blue Velvet' dealt with erotic horror without the need for supernatural devices that still leaves me with a chill down my spine.

Not sure the film qualifies in the horror catagory. Don't see many of them. (See Dr Who comment on another thread)

I once stumbled across the filming of a Dr Who episode in Lulworth Cove, it was the one with sea aliens emerging to attack the weak earthling population. Biggest laugh ever.

Have a productive weekend. Get those NaNo plots rolling.

Wills

 

[sailorm72003]

Books

Books are much scarier, I find my imiagination in combination with a suspmensful tale- shivvvers.

Personal favorite is from The Shining, the climactic chapter as the blizzard rages, Jack has snapped over the edge, Wendy is hurt...

Stephen Kings early work is outstanding.


Occasionally Koontz will have something, a scene or a twist, but not as often.

John Saul can keep me awake at night, if I'm in the "right" mood to read his works.


Sailor

 

[Uncle Meat]

What's your personal favorite scariest or creepiest scene, either book or movie or TV, radio, whatever? What was it about the scene that made it so creepy?

In The Shining, there's a scene in which Jack Nicholson is stalking Shelley Duvall around a huge room the hotel. He's over the edge, and he's very belligerent. She's terrified, clutching a baseball bat, making timid little motions with it as if to threaten him, backing away from him all the while.

The entire scene is a polished gem of perfection; everything fits together. Performance, pacing, actor movement, camera movement, even the lighting. It's not shocking, or played to scare overtly. It just creates a sense of dread. Wel, for me, anyway.

And while we're at it, which medium do you think has the best potential for horror?

---dr.M.

I think that depends on the individual. If you assume the reader has a fair-to-middlin' imagination, he can picture a scene in his mind that's far worse than anything a movie director could portray onscreen, in part because he can customize that creepy scene so it corresponds to his own ideas of creepiness.

But in my experience, I think movies are more often successful because few books actually inspire me to go to the trouble of imagining a horror scene so vividly.

 

[Guest]

 

[Angeline]

When I was six, it was those damn flying monkeys!

LOL!!! They're still pretty darn scary.

 

[gauchecritic]

Not being a fan of the genre I've seen few horror films and read even fewer books.

Watching a horror film can make me jump quite easily, using lighting, music and camera angles and absorbing my attention through sight and sound, making me afraid however is another thing altogether. Skillfully written comedy, which is absorbing and then hitting me with the sympathy baseball bat often has me in tears.

William Peter Blatty is the single horror author who has made me afraid. He also made me jump when the phone rang (as per the movie) whilst the priest was researching into possession. No other book has made me jump whilst reading.

Gauche

 

[raphy]

I'm wondering why no one's mentioned old H.P.? .. Personally, I love his work, and he never fails to send chills down my spine. I first read the Call of Cthulu collection when I was about 13 and I couldn't sleep for a week. Had dreams of Nyarlathotep reaching for me from beyond the black vastness of space.

But I have to admit, I'm a gamer and so my primary source of horror these days is computer games; obviously the genre that is titled 'Survival Horror'..

Games like Resident Evil, Aliens vs Predator and Silent Hill (and others) push all the same buttons as movies do, with atmopsheric music, odd noises and suchlike, but they also have the added terror of it happening to YOU (or well, the character that you're controlling, anyway)

Resident Evil was the first that catapaulted the genre into mass-market recognition. It had superior graphics, and an exceptionally atmospheric intro that grabbed you by the back of the neck and scared the living daylights out of you.

Aliens vs Predator has an easier job, in some ways. It plays on your already-established triggers, because you already know that Aliens are scary, and deadly, hide in dark places and move too fast to see. The first one of those had a very scary scene where you had to walk through a hatching chamber with a ton of unhatched alien eggs, and you stepped through gingerly, tentatively with that sense of foreboding dread, because you just knew that one of them was going to open and a facehugger was gonna jump out. As it happens, nothing jumps out at you, but the scene is truly scary

I think the biggest prize has to go to the Silent Hill series though. Psychologically disturbing as well as truly scary, Silent Hill pushes every single one of your buttons when it comes to horror. From telephones that ring when you're not expecting them to, to subversive images of rusted metal plating (Is that rust, or is it blood?), to disturbing grinding noises in the background, from end to end, it's a game that scares the living shit out of you. They've mastered the art of NOT showing what's scary, and just letting your imagination conjure it up, like walking into a room and hearing a noise off-screen.

The true test of a survival horror game is whether it can make its players not want to continue, and Silent Hill does that. More often than not you find yourself not wanting to go through the next door, or turn the next corner, because your nerves are so frayed that one more shock will give you a heart attack.... And just when you think they've run out of tricks, they up the tension level one more notch.

I have no idea why I play them

 

[raphy]

Doh, whilst waxing lyrical, I totally forgot to answer Dr M's question.

Scariest scene - Silent Hill 3.

You walk into a room. One end of the room is a full wall-sized mirror, which is always a bad sign in the horror genre. You walk around a bit, expecting the mirror you to jump out of the mirror, or something equally as shocking, but trite.

Then, in a darkened corner of the room you notice that there's blood creeping along the floor. It's running in rivulets, little streams of blood, and it creeps along the floor and then up the walls. Curiously enough, there's no blood in the mirror room.

As the blood creeps up the wall, you start to notice that whilst there's no blood in the mirror room itself, the mirror you has blood creeping up its body, matching the pace of the blood on the walls in the real room.

When the blood has finally covered the walls (and the mirror you), you move around and see that the mirror you is frozen, stuck in place.

I swore never to enter that room again.

 

[raphy]

Bah, I keep forgetting things! (this is a favourite subject of mine, so please excuse the ramblings - I can't speak highly enough of survival horror computer games) ..

Anyway, this is the last thing I'm going to say for now, I promise.

One of the tricks that game designers use in survival horror games is to utilize the force-feedback that's available in the actual control units. They have little off-set cams that rotate and make the controller vibrate slightly as you play the game. That has two uses, in my experience.

Obviously it will vibrate whenever something scary happens, as the tactile feedback adds to the list of things that make you jump.

The second, and more subversive use is something I've only seen in the original Silent Hill game. The controller doesn't vibrate, it sort of 'beats' in time with the character's heartbeat (not all the time), so in high stress situations it gets faster and faster, and obviously that has the psychosomatic effect of making your heartbeat get faster and faster, almost without you noticing it.

It's a nice trick, and means that by the time you've gotten to the 'shock' moment, the adrenline is flowing through your system, and you almost didn't even notice that you were so on edge.

Trust me, as cheesy techniques for increasing a player's adrenaline level go, it's one of the best....

 

[Colleen Thomas]

The Thing, John Carpenter remake, when they're testing all the remaining scientists by drawing blood and seeing if it squirts away when prodded by the hot needle ... man, what a great scene.

Jaws. the first time you really see the shark, whan Brody is sculling chum off the back end of the Orca and it rises up out of the water. "I think we need a bigger boat."

--Z

I remember I was watching the first "Alien" where she'd just about escaped and then realized that she'd left the cat on board the ship and she'd have to go back and deal with that alien again
So how many people died for that friggin' cat Jonesey? three? four? Harry Dean Stanton and two more, plus Ripley went back for it at least twice ... Jesus Christ, leave the damn thing ...

Hey,

I am something of a book collector and I have the original compilation that the thing appeared in. It was a pretty creepy story even before special effects.

-Colly

 

[otherdarkmeat]

As much as I love books, I would have to say that film has the advantage if done correctly.

One of the scariest movie scenes for me (POTENTIAL SPOILER for those who have not seen The Ring):
At the very end when the girl comes for the ex-boyfriend (or ex-husband depending on the version), I was completely chilled by the way she crawls out of the well and staggers to the TV screen and out of it. It was one of the most horrific and amazing things I have seen.

One of the scariest book scenes (and there are many in this novel) is from Stephen King's "It". At the beginning when Georgie is talking to Pennywise in the sewer, trying to get his boat back. The made for TV movie just didn't do the scene justice. I don't think film could be as terrifying as the description King uses.

Raph, as for HP Lovecraft, I'm a huge fan. His short story, "The Hound", goes down as being one of the scariest I have ever read. Sadly, Brian Yuzna decided to destroy any chances of Lovecraft's work being translated correctly to film by putting out some cheesy horror movies in Lovecraft's name.

-Mike B.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Re: For me books

Film: The Haunting, based on the book--not the recent silliness, but the b&w original from the early sixties with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom. There's a scene where Julie Harris is alone in her bedroom and the camera pans to this intricately carved woodwork and, as it gets closer, you see faces in the workwork. They look like they're screaming, and they start to move like they're breathing. Aye carumba!

As I said, there arr different types of scariness. The cheapest and easiest is the 'startle', where something jumps out all of a sudden. Easy to do; the flicks are full of that kind of stuff.

Then there's 'prolonged dread': the stalking scene from The Shining, for example. I personally don't like these. I just don't like the feeling of seeing women, children, or even animals in immanent peril like that. I won;t even watch flicks were a women is stalked or hunted. I just don't like them (funny, since a lot of my erotica involves reluctant sex.)

To me the best kind of horror--the champagne of horror--is the kind of thing that changes your view of the world, where you suddenly see horror where you didn't before. It's not jump-out-of-your-seat fright like you get with 'startle' stuff, but it's more subtle and insidious. The scene from the Haunting was like that. The walls were alive; the house was alive, it was breathing. It was something beyond imagining. Very good.

The all time champ like that for me was "The Exorcist", book & movie (that's rare). It redefined the idea of Evil, and showed us how it would look if it were set down right in the middle of our nice suburban homes. And think of it: at no time were you expecting someone to be slashed or splattered. The sense of evil was more subtle and pervasive than that. A lot of fully adult males I knew had second thoughts about going out at night because of that movie.

And "Blue Velvet" had just that kind of horror. There were no monsters, hardly any blood, but such a pervasive sense of twisted evil right there on those suburban lawns, the world turned upside down. Dennis Hopper was terrifying. It was one of those movies that changed the way I look at the world.

Another scene, not as scary but quite creepy, was the scene in Poltergeist with the little girl in front of the blank TV whwwile her parents are asleep and putting her hand on the screen: "They're here..." TV screens are seldom blank these days, but the idea of having evil come in through the good old telly was just brilliant.

Raphy, I don't play too many games, but I was obsessed by Riven for a couple months, and there's nothing overtly frightening about that game at all. It's just beautiful and haunting. Still have to go back there on occasion.

And yes, H.P. Lovecraft. I love him for the way he deals with the unimaginable, and that thick, juicy, prose style. For my money he makes Poe look like a piker.

---dr.M.

 

[Quasimodem]

I can remember going to bed, by turning on the next-door room light, before turning off the previous, one room at a time, en route to my bedroom and bed, after watching the original, 1940's version of "The Mummy" on televison, while I was all alone in the house.

That said, I now find all horror movies 1). laughable, due to ineffective special effects, or 2). that the special effects are so intriguing, I'm too busy trying to figure out how it was done, to remember to be scared.

The worst horror stories are the slasher type.

Scare music sets you up to expect a sudden attack, then the tension is dissipated when something innocuous proves to be the cause of the tension. This happens several times, until you are nearly worn out by false alarums.

Suddenly, without warning, someone from the shadows swings an axe, and the heroine's head hits the floor, and bounces.

I hate such obvious manipulation. It's "pure editing," no credit to the screenplay.

 

[raphy]

Re: Re: For me books

And yes, H.P. Lovecraft. I love him for the way he deals with the unimaginable, and that thick, juicy, prose style. For my money he makes Poe look like a piker.

---dr.M.

Without lessening the importance of the rest of your words, Dr M., I just had to say .. That made me smile today *grins*