Posted on 11/23/2004 9:31:31 PM PST by John Robertson
What's your favorite horror movie...and why? What fried your hair, and still makes it jump if you get a little too tired and you remember a sequence or two from something that scared the stuff out of you.
I've always dismissed horror movies as a waste of time, but the older I get, the more I realize they must serve some function--some cathartic function--because they are an enduring genre, and each generation likes to find its own favorite scary movies. Heard a commentator saying the other day, the reason the country is so preoccuppied with horror films right now is, it's a horror we can "handle," versus the real, terrorist kind of horror.
Jaws...I still get nervous going any deeper than my knees in the ocean!
Also, The Ring was discomforting, as was Psycho, and The Shining.
And not that they used to scare me so much, but I used to love the Nightmare on Elm Street series (can't stand them now that I am an adult, though!)
But much of horror is sort of goofy..tongue in cheek..Have you seen Tremors?.....Very scary..yet almost a spoof of the genre..
Thanks..but don't tell me what it isn't tell me what horror is, then ..?
"Young Frankenstein -- scared the hell out of me." - Homer Simpson
Yes, many "Horror" films can be cheesy, shlocky, etc and aren't really meant to be scary I think. They are, IMHO, a whole separate thing... The Tremors movies cracked me up.
I think the "True Horror" films are the ones where the "Horror" is Human Nature - I don't think anything on this Earth could be more scary than the things that we, as Humans, are capable of...
Any film with Barbra Streisand.
Heh heh heh
I had twins that were 6 at the time and 3 other boys up to age 11. We had a pool so they all knew how to swim. But, I decided to take them to the beach to face their fears because it too scared the hell out of them.
I did it every weekend for a month or so. It got so we were the only ones in the water at times and guess what we were playing? Yep, fin out of the water (HANDS) making that DUH DUN sound and having a blast.
Youth....can't beat it!!!
Who can beat Wells?
"I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit in my study writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again the healing valley below set with writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about me empty and desolate. I go out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a butcher boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle, children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot, brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder darkening the silent streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they rise upon me tattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and wretched, in the darkness of the night.
I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great day....
And strangest of all is it to hold my wife's hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead. "
I thought The Shining was creepy and scary because of the deserted area they were in, how pyscho Jack Nicholson went, and that kids voice when he was saying "redrum" was kind of freaky too, haha. Anyone agree?
I eventually reached that point LOL...
I saw thru horror films a long time ago. My daytime horror is the IRS. You think I'm kidding?
S.D.
BTW
Howya doin', J.R.?
I think movies like The Thing can definitely be both. Maybe the most classic and acute example is the movie 'Xtro'. Sci-fi in setting, but utter horror in subject matter. In it, a human woman gets raped by an alien monster, and in a very protracted and utterly unbelievable scene, gives birth to a full grown human male. I submit this is both sci-fi and horror :)
Or another great example : Demonseed. A scientist's super computer decides it wants a child, traps his wife, and proceeds to use her to procreate. Creepy.
Scared the crap outta me, too. Can't remember why, either.
Maybe I should try watching it again.
"Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry" should get a mention.
Hell yeah! I thought I was the only one who ever heard of that movie. I bought the dvd on Ebay for like $6.
Session 9. I agree. The first time I watched it tripped me out enough that I had to watch it 2 more times. Each time it was better (I didn't watch it 3 times in a row but waited to see it 3 different times on the Indy channel). I love movies that leave enough to the imagination to let your own mind scare the poop out of you!
I prey on the weak and the wounded!!
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