Scary Moments
Mon, 2003-10-20 10:56
#1
Scary Moments
As it's halloween relatively soon, how about a discussion about the scariest moments ever? These can be in film, in theatre, in literature, in comics, in computer games or any other medium you can think of.
Mine are
1. Night of the Living Dead - whole film from start to finish. A masterstroke is having the characters that we are meant to be rooting for squabble and behave much as people would in a life threatening situation ie. in selfish and unreliable ways
2. Canon Alberic's Scrapbook by M.R. James - the bit at the end where the hairy thing comes for the book. brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
3. The end of Brazil by terry Gilliam - Where you think he's escaped and things become wierder and wierder and Bob De Niro gets covered in newspapers and disappears.
4. Planet of the Apes - Where Charlton Gun-nut's character finds that his fellow space traveller has been labotomised.
5. The bendy door scene in The Haunting - Brilliant. Black and White. Bendy Door. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr.
6. Lost Child in 'The Child in Time' by Ian McEwan - panic of child going missing when out shopping.
7. I am Legend by Richard Matheson - Absolutely wonderful novel of the last man in a world of vampires. Dead, dead scary
8. I have no mouth and I must scream by Harlan Ellison - Last people in the world kept alive inside the belly of a giant computer. Look for it, it's a masterpiece.
That's mine, at this moment. If I can think of more I'll be back.
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Buddha
Don't know about scary, but certainly horrible, in the Wasp Factory (Iain Banks) when his brother is working in the hospital, and finds flies have got into a patients brain which is now swarming with maggots. Ugh.
alison brown
woo wooo city of lost children at the start. when the room starts to fill up with santas. it doesnt sound scary but it freaks the buggergy out of me.
parts of blue velvet.... and twin peaks defo.
i will think about this more
spag
Nothing scares me! **** there is a big spider in the room
Ely Whitley
that scene in Jaws when the tooth in the hull becomes a severed head.
BIG SHOCK MOMENT!
The end of a book of ghost stories read as a child that wasn't a little bit scary but then finished with...
"There is no proof that these things exist but, just to be sure, you should check under your bed before you go to sleep tonight". Those words stuck with me for years!
the front cover of the book "The Excorcist" contained a small section of a blurred photo which I convinced myself was a polaroid of a demon's head taken from real life. That book was placed face down every night, still I was ten. maybe should have stuck with Pooh corner.
andrew pack
That's the one bit of Jaws Spielberg would like to excise - he says putting two shock moments in a film diminishes the second and the big shock moment ought to be the shark coming up while Roy Schneider kvetches and doles out the meat from the bucket.
Most horror films the scariest bit is the moment where you think something is going to jump out and then it is just another character, or a cat or a mop falls - the fear and then release that gives you chance to feel better. That's why the first Nightmare on Elm Street works so well, because the rules get messed up and you don't know when characters are awake or asleep, so danger can come right out of nowhere.
I'd have to say Lord of the Flies - for the bit where Simon rushes down from the mountain to tell them about the beast and the children crazy with fear and excitement and blood-lust from the feast end up killing him; and all the bits where someone just says meaningfully, "Roger sharpened a stick at both ends"
There was a horrible film I watched as a kid called "Crowhaven Farm" about a farm that had previously been the scene of American witch-trials and the woman kept flashing back to a witch-trial where she was a witch in a previous life and they make her lie down, put a bit of wood over her and then just add stones, slowly and deliberately until the weight crushes her. That scared the hell out of me as a kid.
andrew pack
Oh, and Grant Morrison does a lovely sequence about the fear of children's stories, creating one called "Anyhow Stories" featuring the lines "And all of the fishes swam my dear, and all of them swam at me" which is pretty scary, though I don't know why.
Hoffman's "Shock-headed Peter" with the scissormen "The Great Tall Tailor always comes / to little boys who suck their thumbs / and ere they know what he's about / he takes his great sharp scissors out / The door flew open / in he ran / the great tall red-legged Scissorman"
Brrr.
sabelle
Saying 'I do' and realising it's too late to go back.
The end of Carrie
The whole of the Exorcist
And any moment with John Malkovitch. The guy gives me the creeps
Dan
The Devils Backbone, when he's hiding in the closet.
The Subtle Knife, stealing back the Aliethiometer from Lord wassname.
Pearl Harbor, when the attack finished and I realized there was still a whole hour of the movie to go and I'd run out of booze.
Liana
Marianne Dreams... the stones with eyes. Brrrrrrr
spag
Iggy Pop scares me. Especially in his new video
andrew o'donnell
Big scary moments.. one particular time, as a kid, when me, my Dad and my sister watched an old fifties b-horror movie on telly whilst boating on the Norfolk Broads. 'Quatermass and the Pit'.. that's it! Was gonna ask someone for the title but it just came to me. There's a whole series of Quatermass movies, I think. The whole thing was brilliant but it scared the bejesus out of me and my sister. Something about being in the semi-outdoors, in the dark, on a river. Just glad it wasn't Cape Fear! Would love to see it again.. probably dead tame now. But the whole thing was very scary.. all about gangs of demons coming up from the centre of the earth.
And another fifties horror flick. Invasion of the Saucer Men (think I've got it right).. the sequences with the severed alien's hand in the car with the two teenagers. Brrrr indeed.
Also the first time I saw Psycho. Bloody hell. I think I was ten. There's still one shot in that movie that gives me the chills.. when Norman Bates is running up the stairs after the police inspector (if I remember rightly) its shot from directly above and you watch him run up the stairs and around the stairhead.. an absolute helplessness about it. Also, I think there's something about black and white that just heightens the fear factor.
The first Amityville Horror movie was pretty bad too. That scene with the flies on the window.. itchy-scary moment.
Oh Sabelle, ditto, the end of Carrie.. you don't see that one coming AT ALL!
Rumpelstiltskin.. that scared the crap out of me when I was a kid too.
And a quick nod to one of the best horror SPOOFS ever.. The Burbs, love it.
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justyn_thyme
I think Joyce's Dubliners is the scariest book I've ever read because it's about real people stuck in terrible real lives. For the same reason, I could not even finish watching The Four Seasons (Alan Alda etc). What a nightmare that film is!
As for the so-called horror genre itself, I remember being scared by the movie The Blob as a little kid.
spag
Scariest thin i witnessed was me this morning in the mirror. Then seeing Gloria Hunniford on telly. Then friend put on dvd of eight legged freaks. Very scary day
sabelle
The child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Misery when Kathy Bates hobbled James Caan
Two footy ones, when Dennis Bergkamp missed that penalty against ManYoo and "Vieira gave Giggsy the ball and Arsenal won **** all."
Sends shivers up my spine just thinking about it.
Goat biscuit Jnr
this is a true scary story, it happened to me today...
this morning I took a pack of raspberries back to Marks and Spencer's because they had gone squashy. Even though they were still within their sell-by date the customer services lady refused to give me a refund...I demanded to know why and a terrible chill went down my spine as I heard her say...
"cos they're from Tesco's..."