Movies That Try To Go Bump In The Night
The other night I watched The Ring after several people suggested that it would scare the crap out of me. So there I am, sitting on my couch, hoping to get spooked out of my mind. Didn't happen.
Instead I just sat there thinking, "This is stupid." Or, "That could never happen." Or, "Will I ever get these hours of my life back?" In short, I wasn't scared at all, nor could I understand what all the fuss was about. I thought the acting was horrible and the story absurd. A couple of parts made me jump a little, but that was more because of some loud sound effect blasting out of my speakers -- not because it was legitimately terrifying.
In fact very few movies give me the creeps. The last one that came close to having that effect was The Others, starring Nicole Kidman, but to be honest, it hasn't exactly kept me up nights.
No, in my opinion the all-time scariest movie is The Shining. To this day, twenty-three years after it came out in theaters, I still can't walk down a long hotel hallway at night without thinking of those twin girls. Nor can I walk part a hotel room with the door slightly cracked open without thinking of that room with the dead woman inside. And to me that's the mark of a great scary movie. It really has to affect your everyday life and stick with you for awhile. I'm sorry, but whenever I see a videotape, I'm not going to think of The Ring.
But beyond The Shining, I'm really stuck trying to come up with a truly scary movie. I'm more spooked by a movie like Thirteen Days,which tells the true story behind the Cuban Missile Crisis and how close we came to nuclear war. To me a true story like that is scary. Likewise, The Shining could happen because people can go crazy when locked up out in the middle of nowhere. Sure you have a kid with psychic powers that could never actually exist, but if you eliminate that, you still have a pretty scary movie. A father really could go nuts and try to kill his whole family. You see it in the news all the time. That realism adds to the movie's effect. The Ring could never happen because no videotape can let someone know that you've just watched it. If you base a movie on such a weak foundation, you lose me before the first "scare."
Below you'll fnd other people's lists of the top scary movies of all-time. I thought about mking my own list, but I couldn't come up with ten. I'd be hard pressed to come up with five, to tell you the truth.
Feel free to volunteer your own scariest movie in the comments.
Related links:
9:42:13 AM  |
|
![Subscribe to "[ random acts of alex ]" in Radio UserLand.](http://radio.weblogs.com/0117496/images/xmlCoffeeCup.gif){kind=small}
