Hmm, two eyeball moments, maybe? Wasn't an icecream scoop dangerously close to Someone's eye? It's probably (most definitely) me misremembering.

That's my point, though -- those are squicky moments, but not really scary, the way you're scared waiting to see what's in the basement or who's going to come through the door.

ita's closest -- when John went all yellow eyes, that was frightening because it was so unexpected, and it seemed like all the rules had changed.

I think maybe for me it's having grown up on horror movies, where you're always waiting to see who is going to die, and how. By S3, it was pretty clear that when it came to Sam and Dean, death didn't stick, so it stopped being so scary?

I think the feeling of "not knowing what's going to happen next" is the scariest for me, and as much as I love the show, it's stopped mattering because there's usually a way out of it? Or a way to fix it? Then again, I don't really watch the show for the scares, so. And I think for me, once I've seen it, it's not scary again on rewatch anyway.

it was pretty clear that when it came to Sam and Dean, death didn't stick, so it stopped being so scary?

But at the end of S3, Dean stayed dead for a good long while. Broken record but I always harken back to Joss around S5 of Buffy (show not not called Buffy, to use Tim's reminder language) where he says it's not about whether or not they'll stay dead, but how much it costs for them to die, and for them to come back.

And the show's pretty good at accumulating damage, so although a season ender with a death is not necessarily worse than a season ender with one of them in Hell or in Purgatory, it's still way non-optimal. And that's definitely a feeling I can tap back into--even rewatching the beginning of S6 still makes me agitated for Dean, and half of his brother is right there.

However, I'm not like what feels like too much of my dash in not wanting any deaths (sticky or smooth) to happen--the ones that can stick often should! But make it all hurt. That is the show--show not called "Happy brother or angel romance with great big immortal social circle and holiday dinners". Why the fuck would anyone want to watch that?

That is the show--show not called "Happy brother or angel romance with great big immortal social circle and holiday dinners". Why the fuck would anyone want to watch that?

That's when I turn to fic. There are certain things I adore in fic that I would never, ever want to see happen in the source materials. It's funny, but what would scratch a particular itch in an AU could well turn me off a show for good if it happened in canon. This is true for more than just SPN.

I still feel it all on rewatch -- I cry every time in Heart and AHBL2 and when Jo and Ellen die and Swan Song and all that. But "scared" is a very particular thing for me, I guess, separate from angst or horror or tension. Scared is edge-of-my-seat stuff, and I didn't get a lot of that even on first watch.

The Benders is a good example of when I was scared -- there were a lot of jump scares, and a real sense of not having any idea what was going to happen because it was so outside the realm of the usual case for them.

Yeah -- I get scared for their hearts, not their bodies, ya know?

I get scared of how sad Dean will get, what lengths he'll go to for Sam, and what lengths Sam will go to in order to "redeem" himself.

Precisement.

Hm. I know there have been episodes of SPN that I was really glad I watched during the day because they would have given me nightmares if I'd seen them right before bed (alone in the house and dark out adding to the scariness, of course) but I can't remember what episodes those were, much less what specific moments were scary.

The feral siblings under the house was the official scariest for me. It wasn't anything occult or extra-normal, it was just dirty old human meanness and warped-ness. There's a remove of sorts, you can tell yourself in some tiny safe sliver of your mind that it's fantasy, that's fake blood, that's CGI and lighting and prosthetics when it's ghosts and demons and vampires. Scary and metaphorical, and very affecting. But ultimately, there is a step away from reality.

Feral children? All too horribly real and possible. Still makes me shudder. It's why Missy is the very worst of the Benders. The men I can watch like Creature Feature, but Missy? Makes my skin crawl.