Scaring myself silly

by Rick Blechta

Once I read Tom’s post from yesterday, it was just too tempting to riff off it for my post this week.

Coincidentally, I was away last week because my wife and I took a few days to visit Elora, a small town about two hours west of Toronto. Why coincidentally? Because in October Elora’s small historic downtown comes alive with giant scary sculptures. People flock in from all over just to see them. We went for the annual studio tour, but alas, since it was still September, the sculptures weren’t out yet. They are quite spectacular. Click HERE to see some examples.

Anyway, on to the things that have scared me silly.

I’m with Tom all the way. It’s fun being scared by books or movies. There are, however, only three movies that have really gotten to me.

The first was The Mummy, not the one with Boris Karloff (which is legitimately quite scary, but the remake that came out in 1959 from Hammer Films. It stared Peter Cushing as the hero with Christopher Lee as the mummy.

I saw it as an eight-year-old with some friends at our local cinema in Mamaroneck, NY, where I grew up. It genuinely frightened the bajeejees out of me, so much so that I couldn’t go to sleep at night if the closet door in my bedroom wasn’t shut tight. I was probably 11 when the effect of that movie finally wore off and I could fall asleep no matter what the state of the closet door.

Next came The Uninvited. This was an out and out example of the classic ghost story. When I was 13, I stumbled across it on TV one Saturday afternoon in October (natch!) and watched it, alone in the house. When the ghost finally appears in the second act, I was so scared that I had to snap the TV off and run outside. It wasn’t until many years later that I watched the movie again and found out how the story ended. No wonder it was a big hit in 1942 when it came out. It’s a real chiller.

Last on the list is one Tom already mentioned, The Exorcist, both the book and the movie. I saw the movie first and then read the book. Since I was in my 20s at the time I saw it, I didn’t suffer any nightmares or have issues with closet doors, but the movie was indeed terrifying, the book less so, but still exceptionally good for what it was trying to do.

Interestingly, an extended director’s cut was released in 2000 and I saw it with my older son who also enjoys horror movies. There was a scene where the young, possessed girl comes down the stairs in the home upside down, moving like some kind of human spider. I don’t know why it was not included in the original movie because it is really very unnerving to watch.

And that’s maybe why some people gravitate to horror, whether it be books or movies. If done well, they are all certainly unnerving sometimes in the extreme.

Now I think it’s someone else’s turn with this subject. What do you find scary and why do you enjoy being scared?

Tis the season after all.