Aw yeah, it's time for...Movies That Have Scared You the Most: The TWO VOTES EACH edition! There are a lot of soul mates out there, just waiting to find one another. It's so sweet I could barf!
120. Inside -- 2007, Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury
119. Child's Play 2 -- 1990, John Lafia
118. The Devil's Backbone -- 2001, Guillermo del Toro
117. Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things -- 1973, Bob Clark
116. Lake Mungo -- 2008, Joel Anderson
115. The War of the Gargantuas -- 1966, Ishiro Honda
114. The Howling -- 1981, Joe Dante
113. Funny Games -- 2007, Michael Haneke
112. Psycho -- 1960, Alfred Hitchcock
111. Eden Lake -- 2008, James Watkins
I totally get you people who submitted Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things. I haven't seen it in years because I don't want to because the very notion of it scared me so badly when I was a wee bonny lass. Before I'd ever laid eyes upon it, the title alone scared me. Then when I finally got up the nerve to check it out, the low budget grainy-eeriness and oatmeal-faced zombies did me in.
Surely if I saw it now I'd find it fun and campy and harmless, rife with humor both intentional and unintentional...but I'm not going to see it now and you can't make me. Well, you could, I guess, if you rigged up some sort of Clockwork Orange contraption, but I think we can all agree that seems a little extreme.
On what is totally the other hand, I'll never stop cheering for Lake Mungo, a terrific and underappreciated entry into the found footage genre. The first time I saw it, I really loved it. The last time I saw it...I don't know what happened, man. Somehow it unsettled me enough that I was loathe to turn off the lights and go to sleep afterwards. Despite the past-2-in-the-morning-ness, I had to watch another movie to take my mind off of it. That so rarely happens to me anymore and I love it.
I didn't vote for Child's Play 2, but I was watching it the other day and the unsettling thing about it for me was "Chucky's going to start murdering people and they are going to blame that little kid."
ReplyDeleteI think I voted for Psycho but I don't remember, Norma Bates reveal was the big scare for me as a kid.
*Makes sign of the cross and slowly backs away from "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" *
In the best possible scenario my wife entered the room while I was watching Lake Mungo and started watching, not knowing what it was. As soon as something scary happened she said, "Holy fucking shit!". Then I told her it wasn't real. I don't blame her, though. It's the most real-seeming of the found footage movies.
ReplyDeleteI know you didn't rate it too highly but 'Eden Lake' really unsettled me. Maybe because I subscribe too fervently to the "kids are horrible vicious little fucking ratbags" philosophy. And that shrill child's scream when they did what they did to that Indian kid really affected me too.
ReplyDeleteI was one of the "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things" voters. Here's the funny thing: They showed that movie as the Saturday afternoon horror matinee on regular TV in the late 1970s all the time. THIS WAS NOT A MOVIE FOR CHILDREN, but here's 9-year-old me, thinking it would be like Dracula or The Mummy and getting ALL MESSED UP FOR LIFE at the site of zombies eating intestines long before I knew who the hell George Romero was. ... I have since watched it a couple of times as an adult and I would say that it holds up fairly well as a creepfest. The acting and dialogue are a bit too over-the-top, but the sound mix is as creepy as anything I've ever experienced in a horror film, and the special effects are above average. And it's safe to say there's never quite been a character like Alan Ormsby's in a horror film. It's a performance that has to be seen to be believed. This one is still worth seeing. But maybe not in the dark.
ReplyDeleteI was one of the votes for Lake Mungo. Just thinking about Lake Mungo for a second leaves me not wanting to turn the lights out. It's the found footage on her mobile that does it....ergh.
ReplyDelete^YES. The mom has a line that's something like "I was too afraid to sleep and too scared to open my eyes" and man, I've been there and for some reason this movie had me last time I watched it. Though I knew it was coming, the cell phone footage knocked me out. Love this movie.
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