But your point is taken.

Thank you.

My preferred horror is the creepy sort, since running up behind me and yelling boo sometimes startles.

This is me, as well. Things that get under your skin insidiously. I don't particularly like being startled and I dislike gore, but I love being spooked, the kind of spooked that makes me remember that particular moment in the film days, weeks afterward and do a full-body shudder.

Sounds like I'll have to go see it for myself.

The horror of the end of The Ring took a couple weeks to hit me, but when it did, it hit hard. It was just so appalling a resolution.

I liked that.

I think it's getting a bad rap, but it's not as effective and creepy as the original. They go for too many of the typical Hollywood startle/scare tricks, whereas Ju-on did a better job of showing dawning horror that wasn't so dependent on startling the audience. You knew something creepy was in the process of happening, and kept watching to see just how bad it could get.

Plus, the surfeit of American actors as the majority of the victims made it seem as if the Grudge wasn't so much against people who entered the haunted house as against rude Americans who didn't take their shoes off before entering.

Oddly, the image that has stuck with me worst from horror movies is from a not-that-good-one -- Langoliers. Something about the fog beyond which there is nothing -- got me solidly the next few times I flew, and it always comes to mind going through the frequent fogbanks on my way to work.

Yeah whenever I see a dwarf in a red raincoat from Don't Look Now

eta: to help the spoiler averse it freaks my shit.

On the walk to the bus stop on the way home from my first big screen viewing of Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, we passed a group of midgets (little people? dwarves?). The was a bit of trauma.

I can't make a way to properly font this post and not blow the spoiler in the preceding post.

For what it's worth, I don't consider Fone Bone a mainstream critic (which is not meant to belittle the publication he works for, just meant to imply I hold him in higher regard than that).

But Sean, I don't think it's just about Fone. You said that any critic who couldn't follow the film is a moron and, quote, "can't handle a movie that expects you to bring your brain along." I don't think that's a fair thing to say at all, let alone without seeing the movie.

Don't Look Back

What the music guy actually means is Don't Look Now.

You know, it just occurred to me that what we were led to believe about the end of The Ring could be entirely wrong. Rachael assumed that it was making a copy of the cursed videotape and showing it to someone else that saved her from the curse. But what if it was the fact that she was the one who tracked down Samara's story and retrieved her body from the well? Her burn mark faded when she was in the well, not earlier when she showed the videotape to Martin Henderson's character. What if the thing that spared her was a unique, irreproducible sequence of events and her creepy little boy still gets to be the recipient of Samara's GotchaVision broadcast?

I wish Surviving Christmas ranked a little more than 8% at Rotten Tomatoes. I swear the trailer looked funny.

Did anyone read the "review" of The Machinist in last week's EW? Didn't really discuss the movie, but instead took Bale to task for losing all that weight when there are hungry people in the world.

Very odd, and not at all relevant.