Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Today's soundtrack: The Misfits "From Hell They Came" ::
With Halloween approaching our doorsteps, I find myself thinking about scary movies. Yes, I know many of you just let out a collective cry of "again?!?" and well, yes, again. It's true, though. Halloween makes me think about the movies that scare me spitless. I'm not talking about the films that go for the cheap shocker-gore-fest necessarily, but the ones that get me deep down and frightened to turn out the light.
To start, let me explain about the three things in movies that really push my freak out button: zombies, ghost children, and the unknown. You got that? Okay, then. So, taking this into account, here are the TWO films that I find so scary they keep me up nights.
Night of the Living Dead. The first time I saw this, I was a teenager. It was one of those things: it's a classic so I should see it. I was going through a "why haven't I seen these classic films" stage and had my mind made up. I had already rented Citizen Kane, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Exorcist, among others and this one was up. It was black and white and made in the 60s, so I figured I was in for something along the lines of Invasion of the Body Snatchers,. You know, slightly creepy for its time sci-fi with political undertones. Boy, did I seriously underestimate it! I had seen zombie movies before.... Dead Alive, Cemetery Man, and do the Evil Dead movies count?... so I was looking forward to a night of cheesy 60s sci-fi/horror with no idea of the traumatic emotional torture that lie in wait for me. It was low-budget, yes, but to me, that only added to the "realness" factor since the film makers couldn't rely on super-heavy duty special effects. Seven people hole up in a remote farm house hoping to wait out the terror of the walking and hungry recent dead. This is the movie that started my irrational zombie freak-outs, with a little help from other two buttons because 1) we're really unsure of why there are zombies (hints at space activity, but nothing definite), making the cause unknown which freaks me out, and bonus 2) a little girl has an infected zombie bite and rises from death to kill her mother with a patching trowel, in other words, a sort of "ghost" child. *shudder*! The way the characters in the movie interacted with each other and responded in their own ways to the "problem", had a very realistic feel to it. In the end, it left my mind reeling and I had some crazy-assed dreams for a week. Several years pass, and I decided to give Night another go, thinking now that I had seen it once, that there was no way it would get me again. I was wrong. I was just as creeped out as ever.
The Blair Witch Project. I can hear you groaning, now. Let me explain, mmkay? When this movie came out to theaters, I had moved out from my parents' and had a place of my own. I went to see it simply because the advert campaign made it irresistible to someone like me. I went with a couple of friends to an afternoon matinee. It was sunny and pleasant outside. When the movie starts out and the kids are in town interviewing the locals, well, the acting was very bad and I could feel myself fall into a sense of security that this was going to be a campy wannabe-scarefest. However, after they venture into the words and... something starts to torment them.... I then felt myself tensing up and freaking out. I had grown up near the woods, and didn't think anything could make them seem creepy to me until this movie. This film did a superb job at leaving the "evil" unknown to the viewer. We only get little teases.... one of which is little children laughing!!! At the end, we really don't know what killed them or how; it's all unknown, and when that happens, I fill in the gap with my imagination, which is, well, not good. I have really wild imagination. Really. You don't want to know what sort shit goes on in there half of the time. The end of Blair Witch had this going on: Josh is missing. He had been gone from the other two for sometime. Heather had found a torn piece of Josh's shirt with some bloody teeth in it and didn't tell the other guy. So, this made me put together, in my own mind, that Josh got possessed by the "evil" of the forest and pulled out his own teeth in order to scare the others. When they find the cabin, it is Josh who is waiting for them with an axe. I got this image in my mind of Josh wearing half a shirt, his face all bloodied, wielding the axe and grinning blankly as he took down Heather while Matt stood in the corner. See what happens when my mind is left to its own devices?? Anyways, even though it was a nice, sunny afternoon when I got out of the theatre, I still had troubles sleeping that night.
As a guy who grew up with horror franchises abounding (Nightmare
on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, etc.), it takes a certain brand of
scary movie to make me quake. You need to do more than eviscerate Drew
Barrymore and leave her on a swing to affect me, mate. So, if you're looking for
something to chill you to the bone this Halloween, I invite you to watch the
above two mentioned films. Don't take just my word for it... I know of a few
other hardened horror buffs out there who were equally scarred by these films.
Sure, there are those who scoff at them as being too low budget to really have
any scare-value, but if you ask me, it's the ones that can do it without
the big budget that are truly doing their job.
William (hiding under his covers)
