Buffista Movies 4: Straight to Video
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
So I was looking through some screencaps from horror movies, and there were a couple that gave me a
frisson,
reminded me of the fear reaction I had watching the movie. I didn't want to spend time looking at THOSE as the image still scares me.
(FTR, they were the girl crawling out of the TV from
The Ring,
and the little boy from
The Grudge 2.
)
I don't think those are the scariest image for me though - I think that award goes to the shadow-shape coming up to the surveillance camera in
Ju-On.
I put to you, therefore, a Halloweeny quiz: What's the scariest image from a movie for you?
One that will stay with me to my deathbed: Dorothy looking into the Wicked Witch's crystal ball, when Aunt Em's face turns into the Witch's.
My top 20 or so scary images would be from Eraserhead, with the leads being Jack Nance spitting out that giant wormlike thing into a puddle, and that horrific mutant baby thing.
In the last few minutes of
The Blair Witch Project,
when you see Mike standing in the corner. Don't ask me why, but just thinking about that scene freaks me out.
Chris Nolan talks, mostly about Batman.
... this was the tricky thing to really try and nail with Batman Begins as opposed to previous incarnations?is the difference between him and a common vigilante, the Punisher or Charles Bronson in Death Wish
The Shining. There are about 10 scenes that screw with me, but the one that's getting me right now is the boy tricycling down the hall, and turning the corner to see the ghost twins. *shiver*
The girl coming out of the TV in The Ring is definitely a good one.
Carrie's closeup in the prom climax, after the blood falls and right before hell breaks loose.
The first glimpse of the alien in Alien.
Sadaka (I think that's her name) coming through the tv in Ring, definitely. I've never seen the American version though, so that could be creepier.
The movie that kept me up nights when I was a kid was When the Wind Blows. Nuclear holocaust! Cartoons! Public ignorance! Government lies! What's not to scare an eight year old kid?
As a kid, seeing the Wicked Witch of the West melting into a puddle scared the bejeezus out of me.
Lots of the visuals in
Jacob's Ladder
freaked me out, but it was an audio cue and following reaction that was the most frightening. The Tim Robbins character seems to finally have broken out of an increasing spiral of hallucinations involving demons, monsters, etc., and he's lying in a hospital bed explaining to his wife how it's all over now, etc., when
a mocking voice from off-screen says "Dream on." Robbins then turns to face the camera (and the viewing audience) as if turning to the source of the voice, and the look of fear, dread, and despair on his face is breathtaking. Freaked my shit big time.
Just saw
Where the Truth Lies,
Egoyan's new movie. SO SO SO bad. It was nice to see my Boyfriend Colin Firth playing something other than handsome well-mannered guy. He was skeevy and scary and very good. Kevin Bacon, fabulous. Alison Lohman was the core character of the film and she was horribly, horribly watch from the hall bad. I've seen her give good performances before, so I'm gonna blame Egoyan for this one.
The first glimpse of the alien in Alien.
Mmm, I'd say the scene in
Aliens
when they've locked themselves down into a room and they're tracing the aliens and realize they've breached the perimeter, and they can't figure out how and then they poke up through the dropped ceiling/vent and you get this nightmare vision of onrushing aliens clambering toward you at high speed? Yeah that one.
