Poltergeist scared the crap out of me at the time of its release. I was like 12 or so when it came out. The funny story my mom likes to tell is that it came out right before ET and when I went to ET, I was scared witless for the first 10 minutes or so waiting for it to be like Poltergeist. Damn you, Spielberg!
In recent years, The Blair Witch Project frightened the shit out of me. The Ring didn't scare me. It had some creepy moments, but I was so amazed at the terrible acting Naomi Watts did that I couldn't lose myself in it.
Movies scared me when I was a kid, but when I was a kid I thought a tiger might be lying on my bed when the lights are off. (No amount of proof would make each approach to the darkened bedroom any more logical.)
Movies startle me now, and make me think about them and remember them and sometimes come back to them with "Oh, that's awful" or something, but scare? In the "there might be a tiger on my bed" sense? No.
Polter-Cow, re: Spidey-2:
I was very fortunately unspoiled, so I didn't expect Willem Dafoe or the set-up for Harry Osborn to be the next Gobby. I mean...they did that in the comics, sure, but comic movies are not necessarily beholden to that canon, so I never expect them to follow it. Also, because I was so burned on the later Batman flicks, I was impressed they bothered to set up the next villain in the course of this movie. Makes it a flowing narrative rather than "And now it's Villain X! Played by Impressive Actor! Oooh, scaaaarrry! Aren't you impressed?"
Also half expected everybody who saw Spidey without his mask to die. So I wasn't holding out a lot of hope that a) MJ would actually see Peter be Spidey and b) if she did that she would survive. Same with Harry Osborn.
All in all, very good.
I have not read Tales Of Dread. I think King's been good at mixing creepy with gross -- I still think of that guy getting sucked through the slats of the raft in The Mist witha shiver.
But mostly it's smaller things, like the eyes of the seagulls in The Talisman.
As for movies, often it's just shock -- which wears off. But the end of
The Ring,
and its implications for those directly involved -- that's where real horror lives for me.
MM -- does the second thing in your post happen? (I don't read the comic so I don't know. . . and I don't remember that from the cartoon.)
Yay, The Thin Man was on today. Classic detective movie at it's best.
Rrrowr for Myrna Loy.
Eonline says that ED is rumored to be up for the part of the Black Cat in Spidey 3.
The thing with The Exorcist is, nothing relevant happens for the first 30 minutes; we're just hanging out in Africa on an archeological dig, and it's really pretty boring. And then they spend some time establishing Regan and her mom as a relatively normal family.
So when Regan's head start spinning and she starts howling, it's almost as strange and just as scary as it would be if that happened in life. I made my husband repeatedly assure me that possession was not real and there were no demons in my apartment after I watched it.
(It's also probably a scarier movie if you live less than two miles from Georgetown.)
Books usually don't really scare me.
