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I couldn't sleep the night after I saw Blair Witch, but most of my friends that I saw it with absolutely hated it. I have a kind of theory about that... that the movie can act as a kind of litmus test of "fill-in-the-blanks" imagination; to be truly freaked out, you have to get scared by literally nothing. It was the POTENTIAL for horror that wormed into every cell in my brain, and that's what kept me staring at the ceiling all night.
In terms of the creeps, the Japanese original of The Eye (not remade yet, but it will be, I'm sure) had me crawling up the back of the couch and trying to force myself through the wall.
The Ring, on the other hand... saw it in the theatre, and was intrigued but never frightened. I honestly thought it was a BEAUTIFUL movie, with a shot every minute or so that you could frame in an art gallery; there's a scene near the beginning with Naomi Watts out on her Very Modern Balcony surrounded by Very Modern Buildings that's just brilliant.
(threadrot: my girlfriend and I saw this in Montreal, and she came home afterwards while I took the train to visit my parents. I called her before boarding the train, at 11:55 at night, and she was just turning the television on, after accidentally kicking the adapter thingy that connected the DVD to the old coax in on the old television. So she turned the TV on to a blaring white static, and then the phone began to ring. Poop was had. :Threadrot)
Types of scares and their relative efficiency? I find that J-horror does better with aural creeps. I know this is a broad brush to paint with, but Japanese horror movies seem to do much more interesting things with noise, ambient sound and "non-music" than their Western contemporaries. See the "security camera" scene in Ju-on, which is pants-wettingly terrifying but just kind of silly when the sound is off.
On the other hand, some Western horror movies do a great job with the "laugh/jump" combo, which is very effective. Carpenter's "The Thing" is awesome at getting the perfect "hanging out with the guys OH MY GOD" vibe.
Just plain unsettling? Audition is up there, but Miike's Gozu crawled into my head and wouldn't get out. While Audition follows a fairly linear horror-movie plot pattern, Gozu is like a raw unrefined nightmare that somebody poured into my ear from a cracked and filthy pitcher.
Oddly enough, the first horror movie to really stick with me for days afterwards was a little movie called Luther the Geek, that I rented on video in I think Grade Nine. There's one scene where
SPOILERS
the mad killer, who is a mentally damaged circus freak with steel teeth that thinks he is a chicken, gets out of the back seat of the victims' car and sort of trots towards her farmhouse. The woman is in the kitchen and sees all this, but just... stands there, obviously confused at what this man was doing in her car, and then he bursts into the kitchen and kills her. Sounds stupid when I write it, but it was this tiny, terrifyingly real moment. And a maniac that stalks people and rips their throat out with his steel teeth while buk-buk-bukking like a chicken is just... whoo.
/SPOILERS
My goodness, I'm writing a lot. So, er, those are some horror films I have enjoyed. |
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