A few days ago I posted a story about my first encounter with the emotion of fear. I'm curious about your stories. When was the first time in your life you were ever scared by a story, movie, etc?
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Salem's Lot 1979 and Salem's Lot 2024
Happy Halloween everybody! Julie's working late and the boy doesn't have school tomorrow so he's heading to one of those crazy f...
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(2007) * First of all let me say that as far as I could tell there are absolutely no dead teenagers in this entire film. Every year just ...
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Hmmm, I'll have to check with Octo on this one. As I mentioned in the Star Wars Post, my memory of childhood is pretty scattered.
One thing that has always stayed with me was not from a particular source that I am aware of. Just a crazy fever dream. Every time I opened my eyes I could see the shadow of a man holding an ax coming out of my bedroom closet. I was maybe in the 5-6 year old range. I have never forgotten the terror of that feeling: Something is coming.
I'd have to say right now, looking at that creeped-out picture of that woman screaming for this post. Yeesh!
I'll have to get back to you on this one.
I ain't never been scared of nothin'.
among many frightening memories of growing up in Barrington, one standout was glimpsing the saltsucking monster from the Star Trek episode "the man trap" when i was very little indeed. now the monster just looks silly, but as a kiddie i was freaked out.
I got scared of a book of pictures of spiders.
ac, that monster's still pretty damn scary. Kirk barely makes it out of that one alive. And he does one of those patented Shatner screams (you know: "Aaaahh!") when it's trying to kill him and simultaneously messing with McCoy's brain to prevent him from interfering.
From the standpoint of scary movies, it's interesting in that each of the three movies I remember scaring the living crap out of me ended up in my Horrorthon "masterpiece" series.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers filled me with a cold dread that lasted for weeks and kept me awake at night, needing a nightlight like a little baby.
My friend Marc was a VCR "early adopter" (remember that this was the 'seventies) so everyone would go over to his house after school and watch Betamax movies (not VHS!) including the tail-end of The Exorcist, which I had to sit and watch with the cool kids and not reveal how it was affecting me even though I felt like someone had put my heart and brain in a skillet and started frying them in Wesson oil.
Later, on Marc's boat (he had a boat) somewhere in New York Harbor, he got out his Betamax tape of Halloweeen (same deal; I had to be "cool" and just gamely watch it) but it freaked me out so completely that for the next three days or so, walking down a brightly-sunlit street in broad daylight felt as scary as walking past a country graveyard on a moonlit foggy night.
When I was really young, the animated parody of 2001 that they did on "The Electric Company" (can't find it on YouTube), in which an astronaut stubs his toe on the monolith and it cracks apart to reveal a phoneme or a word, really frightened me. I think is was the Richard Strauss music more than anything else. But if that hadn't scared me (when I was, like, five), my Dad wouldn't have told me about the real 2001 movie and then taken me to see it when I was way too young...and the rest is history.
There was an anthology movie DCD and I saw on Creature Double Feature that involved a dead woman who comes back to life to reclaim a ring stolen off of her corpse. DCD and I called her "the gritted-teeth lady" because of the horrific tense expression on her face. Haven't tracked that one down yet, but it was bad enough that we could freak each other out just by mentioning it. Probably a Hammer production.
For a while my bed was pushed up against the wall that had these high windows in it. When I was lying in bed the wall was to my right, and the curtains for those windows ended right about at the foot of my bed. If you think of the way the bottom edge of a hanging curtain describes a sort of sine wave, maybe you can picture how, because of my perspective, the very last curve of the curtain looked just like the brim of a man's hat.
I would peer for what seemed like hours at that man at the foot of my bed, even though I knew that it was just the curtain, but no amount of reasoning was any help. Sometimes the shifting shadows would give me an extra jolt when it looked like he'd left his spot to come around the corner towards me -- and then to my relief I'd see that he was actually back in the corner.
In an issue of Saga of the Swamp Thing, Alan Moore pulled a perfect quote about this from the screenplay for Night of the Hunter by James Agee:
"Yes, for every child, rich or poor, there's a time of running through a dark place; and there is no word for a child's fear, and no ears to hear it if there was a word, and no one to understand it if they heard."
I remember that Swamp Thing issue. Great stuff.
Jordan, I'm with you on Halloween! I remember waiting at my bus stop and the older kids were talking about this movie called "Halloween". It sounded scary. A year later it was shown on television, commercials and all, and it scared me for days! The TV version of Salem's Lot also scared me to the point where I wouldn't enter my bedroom at night unless the shade was pulled lest a dead friend appear, knocking on the window for me to let him in.
DCD, remember when we scared you at your sleepover by hiding under the window?
I do remember that JPX! Octo had a real talent for scaring the shit out of me on many occasions which is why I love that story about you scaring him silly when watching Ju-On!
I once scared JSP by hiding under his bed and waiting until he was almost asleep before reaching my arm up and grabbing him!
Yeah, scaring Octo was great! The Asian stuff has been done to death now but at that point we had never seen anything like it before and we were both a bit on edge!
Then Julie (Jones) came home and kind of wrecked the vibe.
Well, those things happen...
This thread reminds me of one of those Golden Girl flashback episodes. "That wasn't half as bad as the time that you..." (The screen gets blurry and we're transported back to when Blanche and Rose were practicing for a tapdancing competition.)
As I recall the ladies looked pretty good in those leotards!
Hitchcock's The Birds, which I have mentioned before, was the first thing that I can remember frightening me. I had nightmares about birds, and the hit the ground every time one flew over my head.
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