Not a Halloween post, but triggered by a Halloween conversation.
I picked my son up from a Halloween party and asked what they did. He mentioned that part of the time they watched the movie Poltergeist (The original, 1982 version). I told him how much I liked that movie. He was less than impressed. He said that they almost turned it off because it was “boring.”
Boring? With skeletons and a clown and crawling steak? What is wrong with kids today?
It launched us into a discussion of what we find scary, and I found it interesting to learn what freaks my son out, compared to what scares me. (His scariest movie to date: Signs (2002) (Mel Gibson, “Swing away Merrill,” crop circles, etc.) I did admire his choice, and also appreciated that he appreciates suspense more than gore or jump-scares.
But this is about ME.
The first scary movie I remember was not a scary movie that I was supposed to see. Sure, the Flying Monkeys in the Wizard of Oz were freaky, but another movie that I saw by accident scared me worse.
We had one television when I was growing up: A black and white TV in our family room. When I was little (Under 10) I had a penchant for sneaking out of my room at night and checking out what was on TV. Much of the time I was looking for basketball, because the newspapers always showed that TBA was on late at night. It sounded like a basketball league to me…
One night as I was surfing all 5 of our channels, by hand, with a knob, I stumbled across something that disturbed me: Jason and the Argonauts (1963). I immediately pulled up a beanbag chair and watched it. I was not prepared for the battle with the skeleton army. Alone. In the dark.
Yeah, those skeletons. Sure, they look fake now, but back in the ’60s, to a little boy, they were the stuff of nightmares. And that is exactly what happened. For YEARS after watching that movie I had recurring nightmares that involved the skeleton army. It was officially the “Scariest Movie I Ever Saw” – not because it was all that terrifying, but because of the way it impacted me.
The next movie that terrified me was “Wait Until Dark” (1967). I recall that I watched it with my older sister. I also recall that the suspense was so great that I could barely bring myself to watch. When Alan Arkin jumped out and grabbed Audrey Hepburn’s ankle, I just about lost it. I looked at refrigerator lights differently after that.
Some of you might recall that back in the ’70’s every Saturday night Channel 4 would air what they called “Gaslight Theater.” I have fond memories of staying up late with my dad and watching classic movies. Here are a few that pop into my head – 40 years later:
Dial M for Murder, Angels With Dirty Faces, Gaslight, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sergeant York, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Maltese Falcon, North by Northwest, Casablanca, King Kong, etc. The result was a great education in classic cinema.
Included in the mix were some of the classic horror movies, Frankenstein, Dracula, and of course, some Hitchcock. The Birds was freaky, Psycho was, well, psycho. But Rear Window taught me three things: 1) Suspense and scary are not the same thing, 2) I prefer watching suspense to scary, and 3) Grace Kelly.
Fast forward a few years to a very scary movie that made an impact on me, and a lot of other swimmers. In 1975 Jaws came on the scene.
Jaws was a glorious mix of suspense, jump scares, and gore. But the entire first half of the movie was all about the build up. I don’t think we even saw the shark until midway through the movie. I loved it, but I still swim in the ocean.
Some people prefer suspense, some love the jump scare, others like gore, and there is plenty of all available. My EC and I tend to shy away from the gore – it is not our “thing.” Slasher and zombie movies are not our thing. The other genre that we avoid religiously (And I use that word very specifically) is any references to the devil, evil spirits, or possession. I have not seen the Exorcist, or any other “Devil Movies” – as we refer to them. We find it hard to justify waging war against Satan all of our lives, then turning to him for entertainment.
I do like scary movies, and am glad that there are review websites that can warn us of what type of scare we would be in for. There aren’t a lot of scary movies lately that can carry still a jolt without resorting to the easy use of evil or gore, but they come around every now and again. Hitchcock knew what he was doing by leveraging suspense rather than gore. I think my son had it right when he mentioned Signs. What made that movie scary was not what we saw, it was what we didn’t see.
It has been fun to watch the NetFlix series Stranger Things get such a great response, as its style is a throwback to earlier years. (Now if we could just move past the current zombie generation.) It seems that there are new scary movies out every weekend, so they obviously make enough money to justify their further creation. It’s just that, for the most part, that money won’t be mine.
• What was your earliest memory of a scary movie?
• What scares you now? (Other than the Presidential election?)
• Where do you draw your lines?
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First scary movies…. Invaders from Mars, The Crawling Eye, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Godzilla.
I read The Shining novel as a newlywed…At night, alone while my husband was working late…terrified me. I was afraid to move, actually jumped off the couch because I was afraid there was something hiding under it. Books have always scared me more than movies.
I’ve loved suspense since I could read. Grew up requesting the newest Alfred Hitchcock short story anthology every Christmas. Always got it. ?
I’m probably in the minority here, one of the 50 or so folks who were in the theater at the time this movie was shown: “Attack of the Crab Monsters!” You know, about a seaside town on the coast supported not only the crab fishing industry but also a secret atomic/nuclear research lab that discharged its lab waste into the sea. As you might guess, the movie was made in the ’50s. During the beginning of the Cold War. Just a handful of years after the “incident” at Hiroshima.
My favorite are the old black and white movies, many you mentioned. I love the suspense but would switch the channel any time because of gore. I don’t think any of the new movies can compare to the suspense and
drama of those old movies. Thanks for the reminder. I think I will get some of those movies out and watch one. Rear Window was a favorite for sure.
Twilight Zone was tantalizingly creepy. But now days, I don’t like anything that my 5 year old grand-kids can’t (or shouldn’t) watch. Maybe viewing too many real horrors like live abortions and child abuse during my activist days, and hearing about the different ways Christians and others are being tortured these days… Yeah, I’m a wuss, but I guess since I’ve been working in the temple 5 days a week for 16 years full-time could do that to someone. I also never liked anything ‘evil’, but now I can’t even handle anything that denigrates the sanctity of life, period. I think if something really terrified me now I’d probably drop over from a heart attack!
My first scary movie was The Wizard of Oz. I was abt 5, and those flying monkeys terrified me. Next was The Birds, especially since I grew up near Bodega and recognized all the town buildings. After those scares I knew scary movies weren’t for me, and I avoided them. I had to see Jurassic Park, though, and spent the whole time clutching my husband’s and daughter’s hands, whispering “I knew I shouldn’t have come. I knew I shouldn’t have come”. Remember, Jenny?!
I don’t like gore, just suspense and even that is small doses.
Scariest movies: “Wait Until Dark”– from my youth, “Charade”–sounds like I have a Audrey Hepburn thing going on, and “Deceived” (1991) with Goldie Hawn and John Heard–rented it from Blockbuster and it was due back by midnight. I watched it alone, after my children and husband were asleep. It was so scary I had to watch parts of it in fast-forward and then had to awaken my oldest daughter, who was 12, to drive with me to the dropbox. Sleepy twelve-year-old girls in fuzzy pink slippers can protect you from anything.
Growing up on a farm in Minnesota, the Wizard of Oz was bad–not the flying monkeys or the witch but Dorothy walking the fence over the pigs. Ever looked at their teeth? But later it was an episode from the TV show “Twilight Zone” that bothered me. It was about a car that came alive and was evil and trying to chase people down. Last comment: we took our little girls (45 years ago) to the original Willy Wonka when they were like 3 and 5 years old and they claimed nightmares for years. They thought I was a careless mother to let them watch that when they were so young! (I was told it was a kid movie and that’s all I knew.)
Actually, my scariest movie was an infomercial that a salesman brought to our farm in the late 1950’s. He was trying to sell fire alarms and lightning rods. He showed the film on a portable screen. I
had bad nightmares for weeks knowing I was going to burn up
The Yellow Balloon about a little boy chasing a balloon and is followed and chased by a creepy man. Terrifying!!!! Also nightmares for a long time. Then The Haunting, the original.
Snow White…early 50’s. The witch terrified me. I might have been 6? Also the Witch Mountain scenes from Fantasia. I am an over-sensitive gal and hate anything scary. Why would anyone want to be scared ON PURPOSE?? I don’t understand the appeal of scary movies at all… but I do understand that other people are not like me. So, to each his own!
The witch throwing the rock in the Disneyland Snow White ride scared me so badly as a child that it spoiled a lot of the rest of my day there. I cried on every other ride that was inside, including It’s a Small World.
The Changeling in 1980 is an excellent ghost story. But The movie that scared the crap out of me for years was Burnt offerings 1976. About a haunted house. That movie came on late one Saturday night and I watched it with my older brothers which used its quotes to terrorize me for years. My first horror movie I watched by myself was Carrie. I was babysitting for my Bishop. Lol.
I’m not a fan of scary movies, but if I have to watch one, suspenseful is the only way to go. I don’t do gory, gross, violent, or disturbing. Or Satanic. I don’t even like watching TV these days, because gross realism in crime shows is so rampant. Am I a wimp? Yeah, probably. But I’ve accepted it, and I’m fine with it. I suppose I could force myself to watch that stuff and desensitize myself to it, but it seems to me that life is too short to spend watching something that drags me down in that way.
Fortunately, most directors traditionally tend to telegraph their upcoming gore/grossness/jump scares, so I usually get my eyes closed in time to avoid it if something unanticipated comes up in a movie/TV show.
Not a movie, but I finished reading Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” about 1:30 AM. In a dark, creaky basement. By myself. All alone.
I also love suspense and won’t watch gore. Even in books, there needs to be a good story happening, and definitely movies, too. Echoing the sentiments on Blink, and I’d add Silence in the Library to that.
I’ve been afraid of Gremlins for years. I saw the commercials and watched Stripe, and just cringed. I told my friends that my parents had forbidden me to see it. Last year I saw a copy in the discount bin at the store, and bought it, then forgot I had it. Last week I watched it. I was previewing it for my grown daughter, because she nightmares easily. I was astounded. I was expecting scary, and discovered it’s a comedy. Not just that it’s funny now, but that it was written to be funny. And it’s not every thirty year old movie whose special effects are still good. For thirty years, I’ve been afraid of a comedy. Silly me.
1973, Friday Night Frights, on KMVT channel 11…loved all of the classics, except Bela Lugosi terrified me. Lon Chaney Jr & Boris Karloff…couldn’t get enough. The Thing…the original and Kurt Russel’s version. Awesome.
For some reason, I could handle humans becoming monsters, but I couldn’t, and can’t, handle humans being “monsters” thus the reason Dracula was hard. The absolutely worst…the invasion of the body snatchers (’78) with Donald Sutherland.
Unfortunately, I did see the original Nightmare on Elm Street in high school, then I had to walk my girlfriend home, then walk home by myself….you guessed it, she lived on the corner of Elm and 3rd.
I wish there were more “scary” movies produced today instead of the gore fests or possession ones.
Best modern movies: Hocus Pocus (ok, not that recent) then there is “the Sixth Sense” ….made the hair on my legs stand up!!! and I was wearing jeans.
My first really scary movie was the Birds. I was only 7 but remember where we were when we watched it then having to drive home in the dark. Lost in Space use to scare me as skid also-I had a love hate relationship with it. Now I go more for the suspense too. What lies beneath is great and the shark movie that came out this summer made me throw my popcorn in the air!
I was 5. My mom and I went to see “The Thing” with James Arness before he became Marshall Dillon. If my mom had any idea how frightened I’d be she’d never have gone but I could never walk past our hall wardrobe alone again. I’ve seen this movie again and now it is rather corny but it terrified me then. As an adult the scariest movies for me were “Wait Until Dark” and “Jaws”.
It’s actually an old Disney movie, hard to find, called “The Watcher in the Woods” starring Bette Davis. I actually still have trouble with mirrors sometimes. But it plays heavy on the suspense, relying majorly on music to set the atmosphere of creepiness. When I watched it once without the volume, it was mostly just a girl walking around the woods. If you ever get a chance and want a chill in your spine, watch it!
Poltergeist. Yeah, that one you mentioned with the clown and the creepy closet. I couldn’t look under my bed for a very, very long time. I did introduce my kids to Wait Until Dark, and watched it with my 14-year-old son just a couple weeks ago. I wasn’t sure he was into it until he jumped like a crazy person when Alan Arkin lunged out of the bedroom…but in his defense, we all jumped. It helps if you watch it in the dark. Mean mom.
Growing up in Salt Lake in the early 60’s we would stay up late (after the news) for Frightmare Theater, if I remember right. I saw all the early thrillers, The Mummy, Godzilla, The Thing from the Black Lagoon, The Blob, all in black & white. I usually fell asleep. The skeletons in Jason didn’t scare me as much as they gave me such a feeling of hopelessness. My first truly scary movie was The Birds, 13 Ghosts,, followed by Wait Until Dark, Rear Window, basically all the Hitchcock movies which I now love. I’m all for suspense, not evilness or gore. Can’t get interested in Walking Dead. Haven’t seen Silence of the Lambs, Stephen King novels turned movies, etc. Oh! and Betty Davis really creeped me out in that movie about Baby Jane. I steered away from all her movies and probably missed some great performances. Meh. Signs is a favorite!
Watching one of those late night movies with my dad, something about a Native American boy and the things that haunted him.
Next was The Skeleton Key. Big mistake watching that by myself.
Dr Who, Blink nearly did me in.
I prefer suspense and will never watch a Satan movie or one with possessed children.
Disney’s The Legend of Sleep Hallow where the coach goes up in the air and the rain runs down the window! Maybe at 66 years old I can consider this therapy by my telling about it – !! Disney or not, some children are not prepared to handle things outside their safe harbor of environment…
The Blob. I can’t remember how old I was, but I must have been pretty young. It gave me nightmares for EVER! I just knew that thing was going to seep under my bedroom door and eat me alive :O!
How about, ATTACK of the KILLER TOMATOES! What scared me was what kind of mind wrote it. 😉
Scariest movies I’ve ever seen: Rear Window; and Deliverance (on the big screen – you lose suspense on TV). I lived in Atlanta and had been to north Georgia, and had seen people like that.
I have no interest in splatter flicks either!
Most terrifying movie I watched growing up was on tv in the early 80’s and called “The Day After”. It addressed the ‘what if’ scenario we all feared during the Cold War: what if nuclear bombs were used against America? Gave me nightmares for a week.
I had real problems with flocks of birds after seeing “The Birds.” I agree with you about “Signs.” We just watched it again; loved it.
I remember a series called “Dark Shadows”. Mom forbid it. I did a sneak peek one night. It was scary.
My lines are drawn much like yours, no Devil Movies, anything with an Ouji reference is gone….
Do do the gore either. Suspense is better. What scares me now is wondering if I gave my children all that is needed to battle Satan clear to the end.
I LOVED Dark Shadows. I still remember Barnabas Collins being trapped behind a brick wall.
As a kid growing up in SLC, they had Nightmare Theater on at midnight on Saturdays. My parents would play cards with my cousins until late, so we would be able to watch scary movies. The scariest for me was “The Crawling Hand”. To this day it still creeps me out, seeing that hand crawling along the beach.
How’d you know what I was teaching today?!
I didn’t – what are you teaching?
YESSS! I love movies, and I love this post. I love horror movies, but there are simply not that many that are actually good.
I totally agree that suspense is key. I actually just watched the original “When a Stranger Calls” (1979), and I was so impressed. If I were to describe the movie to someone, they would call me crazy for considering it terrifying, but after watching the movie, I was so scared and had a tense, scared feeling in my body that doesn’t come from the usual disgusting and disturbing horror movies.
When I was a child, I had a friend who would watch many R-rated horror movies, and I would watch them with her. The things, the feelings, they put into R-rated horror movies are so sick and traumatizing that when I grew older, I vowed to never watch an R-rated movie again. It’s sad that people don’t understand how depraved the things they watch are. They don’t understand how traumatizing it all is.
I think I might get so hung up over these things because movies are very real to me.
What makes a horror movie good is that it cannot just “be there to be there.” It can’t just be there to scare us or disturb us; it has to have a story and, more importantly, characters that matter. I think Scream, The Shining, and Insidious meet these qualifications. I never really considered Jaws a horror movie, but after watching it again last month, I am reminded of how great and scary of a movie it truly is.
Like I mentioned, I used to draw the line when a horror movie was rated R, but now I avoid all horror movies that have sick undertones (cannibalism, torture, gore and mutilation, etc.), that are Satanic (I love your statement: “We find it hard to justify waging war against Satan all of our lives, then turning to him for entertainment.”), or that simply are there just to be there. This is the case with most new horror movies that have come out. They are there just to fill the cinema industry with another horror movie.
Anyway, thanks for letting me rant on.
I pretended I was asleep on the couch in the livingroom so my parents would leave me there. I watched Cujo. I haven’t been the same since.
I saw Jaws at 11. That’s my nightmare movie. I prefer suspense too.