"when we rise from underneath"

[eldritchhobbit]

Happy birthday to vulpine137! May you have a great day and terrific year to come.

It's meme time:

What film should you watch on Halloween?
Name
Zombie, Vampire, or Werewolf?
Your film is
This cool quiz by eldritchhobbit - Taken 37 Times.

New - Dating Advice written by YOU!

In my recent monster and poem polls, a majority of you, my friends, agreed with the Edmonton Journal on the top scariest picks. What do you think about the scariest movies?


1. Alien, 1979, with Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, directed by Ridley Scott.
2. The Shining, 1980, with Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, directed by Stanley Kubrick.
3. Psycho, 1960, with Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
4. Halloween, 1978 with Donald Pleasance as Dr. Sam Loomis and Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, directed by John Carpenter.
5. Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984, starring Robert Englund as Freddy Kruger, directed by Wes Craven.


On to the poll!

[Poll #846850]


Today's excerpt is from the wonderfully disturbing Hugo Award-winning novella Coraline (2002) by Neil Gaiman:

She reached the top of the house. The topmost flat had once been the attic of the house, but that was long ago.

She knocked on the green-painted door. It swung open, and she walked in.

We have eyes and we have nerveses
We have tails and we have teeth
You’ll all get what you deserveses
When we rise from underneath.

whispered a dozen or more tiny voices, in that dark flat with the roof so low where it met the walls that Coraline could almost reach up and touch it.

Red eyes stared at her. Little pink feet scurried away as she came close. Darker shadows slipped through the shadows at the edge of things.

- from Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Coraline at Amazon.com

Comments

[maidoforange.livejournal.com]

Oooooh. I have to agree with Alien and The Shining. I got Psycho on that quiz too, hmmmm...I like watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Halloween. ;?)

[maidoforange.livejournal.com]

And that bit of Coraline sure is spooky. I first listened to it on audio as read by Gaiman and it gave me chills.

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

I love his reading of it. It's such a clever story, along with being downright scary!

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

Yay for the Rocky Horror Picture Show! :)

[mamomo.livejournal.com]

As far as Halloween movies go, I'm pretty much in agreeance with that list, though maybe not the order. Also, I would describe most of those movies as 'creepy' rather than 'scary'. And Nightmare on Elm Street, at this point, has kind of lost it's creepy vibe and turned into a kitschy cult phenomenon. I think it could be replaced on the list with Poltergeist cos I think that movie's pretty spooky. And the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, while goofy in some places, is pretty frightening.

The Japanese movie Audition is one movie that has truly scared the bejeezus out of me, but it's not a horror movie

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I've read about Audition but never seen it. It sounded nightmarish!

[mamomo.livejournal.com]

The tricky thing about Audition is that it starts off as a typical noir-type film, then about halfway through it gets really f-ed up really fast. All of Miike's movies are screwed up, but this one freaked me out so much. It didn't help that I watched it alone at three in the morning. :O

Re: Audition

[elicia8.livejournal.com]

The minute that burlap sack moved I was GONE. There are very few films I can't watch, and Audition is one of them.

Re: Audition

[mamomo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I about had a heart attack during that quick shot of the sack near the begining of the movie. Audition just really played into my psyche and a lot of my bizarre fears. So freaky.

[gilda-elise.livejournal.com]

The Haunting, the original version, is the one that does it for me. Doesn't matter how many times I've watched it, it still creeps me out big time.

[agentxpndble.livejournal.com]

That's my scariest movie too! Well... Aliens and American Werewolf in London are up there too...

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

That is a scary one - a classic for very good reason!

[elicia8.livejournal.com]

I feel kind of lame picking 'The Blair Witch Project' as the scariest movie, so I feel the need to justify it with an explanation:

I'm basing my choice purely on the experience of first seeing it—midnight showing at the cinema, driving home (we live in the sticks) to a dark house on a stormy night, and the power has gone out while we were gone. No heat. No light. Plus I'd heard of the Blair Witch well beforehand. It was all very horrifying at at the time. My brother and I were too afraid to go to sleep. We couldn't decide if we should stay or go to a friend's house, so we wound up falling asleep on the sofa in our coats and shoes. *is lame*

Nowadays, something like The Shining seems the most enduringly spooky—or maybe 28 Days Later for more "realistic" scariness (zombie scenario that could actually happen!)—but Blair Witch made the biggest impact.

There. Now I feel justified. Still lame (a little), but justified.

PS: My FAVORITE scary movie is Evil Dead 2. ;)

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

Hey, you don't have to justify it! I love that movie. :) And it always gets the creepifyin' mojo going, you know? 28 Days Later rocks, as well.

[mamomo.livejournal.com]

BWP freaked me out, too, for some of the same reasons you describe (i.e., late night showing, etc.), but I also got freaked out b/c the theater was freezing and the camera work made me nauseous. I was kinda screwed up physically at that point and sorta felt like I was out camping with the victims.

[elicia8.livejournal.com]

Yes! Our theatre was cold, too. We guessed that they slowly turned down the temperature as the movie progressed (they did the same thing with The Exorcist re-release a few years later, too).

[vulpine137.livejournal.com]

Woo, thank you for the bday wishes :)

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

You're most welcome! I hope you had a great one. Welcome to the 34 club. ;)

[vulpine137.livejournal.com]

Is it like the 700 club, with less televangelists ?

[kangeiko]

I only saw Santa Sangre because it looked like an arthouse movie - it had an Artifical Eye cover and everything. There was a man standing cruciform on the cover. There were flocks of white birds all around, and so I assumed they were doves.

So I sat down to watch it. Within the first three minutes someone's arms had been chopped off, another person had acid thrown all over them, and a little girl had been forced into prostitution.

That's when the psychopathic midgets and independently-powerd armless female zombies came into play - like Norman bates & his mother, only missing that extra pair of arms. By the end of the movie, when my flatmate turned the lights back on, whimpering a little and wrapped in duvets, she found me curled in a fetal position, so frightened I couldn't speak. I had nightmares for weeks.

And that was when I was 22 years old.

The imdb synopsis:

A young man is confined in a mental hospital. Through a flashback we see that he was traumatized as a child, when he and his family were circus performers: he saw his father cut off the arms of his mother, a religious fanatic and leader of the heretical church of Santa Sangre ("Holy Blood"), and then commit suicide. Back in the present, he escapes and rejoins his surviving and armless mother. Against his will, he "becomes her arms" and the two undertake a grisly campaign of murder and revenge.

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

Whoa. You had me at "the psychopathic midgets and independently-powerd armless female zombies"! *shudder*

Yikes! Films like that should come with a voucher for a free therapy session. ;)

[kangeiko]

Oh, man, it was, without a doubt, the scariest thing I've ever seen.

[dannyboy8406.livejournal.com]

Niel Gaiman is so one of my favorite authors!!! This book is hella creepy!

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

I agree on both counts!

[witchcat07.livejournal.com]

I don't watch too many scary movies beause of the way they affect me, and I do like to sleep at night without starting at every little sound. So I have seen none of the above. But I have seen a beautifully done haunted house type movie that I think ranks as scariest and most beautifully done:

The Uninvited
A brother and sister move into an old seaside house they find abandoned for many years on the English coast. Their original enchantment with the house diminishes as they hear stories of the previous owners and meet their daughter (now a young woman) who now lives as a neighbor with her grandfather. Also heard are unexplained sounds during the night. It becomes obvious that the house is haunted. The reasons for the haunting and how they relate to the daughter whom the brother is falling in love with, prove to be a complex mystery. As they are compelled to solve it, the supernatural activity at the house increases to a frightening level.

(Summary courtesy of IMDB)

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

I have got to see this movie! I'm hoping perhaps AMC or a similar channel will be showing it this month. *fingers crossed* It sounds excellent. Thanks for the recommendation!

[sittingduck1313.livejournal.com]

I believe AMC shows it every Halloween. Check your listings. Or you could trawl through Ebay for a VHS recording.

[witchcat07.livejournal.com]

They might, or A&E. I'm pretty sure I taped it off of cable one year, along with an all night marathon of The Munsters. ;~p

[arymetore.livejournal.com]

I personally like watching Spaced Invaders around Halloween. It is not at all scary. Rather goofy in fact. Its premise is entirely comedy and revolves partially around a rebroadcast of the original Orson Wells "War of the Worlds". Except this time... some Martians hear it... and think they are being left out of the attack :P

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

LOL! Good call. Goofy works for Halloween, too! :)

[fungus-files.livejournal.com]

Ack. Meant to do the poll the other day.

As you'll see, I cheated. :P

I ended up picking two flicks - they are the ones that have scared me stupid in my adult life. As you can probably tell, my childhood was filled with gibbering instances (mine, that is, let alone imagined ghosts...lol) so I don't think that counts. In my family, if I rec a movie and say, "It's really scary!", my sibs just roll their eyes. They're so rude. Don't they realise I'm a delicate soul?