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Post by ripper on Dec 24, 2022 20:43:13 GMT
I am sure there must be examples, in particular from my childhood, but offhand I cannot think of any stories that frightened me. With films it is another matter. For instance, I found THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT very unsettling. I feel people who were unaffected by it were probably just not paying attention. Interesting. That one did nothing for me, but I guess I was too settled in my ways when I finally watched it on TV. Only thought it irritating. As you mentioned childhood, I dimly remember a Tarzan movie where the villain got eaten by a giant spider. I don't know which Tarzan this was, could be Gordon Scott, I never saw it again and have not the intention to. I think you may be remembering Tarzan's Desert Mystery, with Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan. The spider appears close to the end of the film. I believe it is Boy who gets tangled up in the spider's web. A scene from a film that used to scare me as a child was from Fiend without a Face (1958). It features stop motion brain creatures with spinal cord tails which jump at people and suck out their brains. For most of the film the creatures are invisible, until they get extra energy from an atomic power plant. While they are still invisible there's a scene in a barn where one of the creatures is moving around among some hay. A man with a pitchfork tries to stab the creature, but it jumps on him and sucks out his brain. That really scared me. |
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Post by Knygathin on Jan 4, 2023 11:29:32 GMT
I have also been unpleasantly disturbed by some movies. Movies are more in your face than literature. You are right in this. I will never forget the first time I saw Taxi Driver. I was much too young and naive for it, understood only the half of it truly and was actually shocked about the ending when Travis walked free. How could this be, why wasn't he in jail? The movie left a deep impression.
To the most unpleasant stories I read surely belong The Clinic by Alex White. You have my full sympathy with that unsettling early years experience. For me it was particularly Deliverance, The Deer Hunter, and The Exorcist. Salem's Lot also got to me (the child vampires hovering outside the windows). |
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Post by Knygathin on Jan 4, 2023 11:33:31 GMT
I don't think I have ever read a truly horrific story. It is just literature entertainment and aesthetics. It may tickle the horror bone, but that is a pleasant sensation. I have been unbearably horrified/disgusted by reading/hearing reports of cruelty from real life. I have also been unpleasantly disturbed by some movies. Movies are more in your face than literature. I agree with you totally on all three points. The second especially, having just read (and wished I hadn't) about Issei Sagawa, known as the "Kobe Cannibal" who died last month. Yech! I will be sure not to google that one. |
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Post by Knygathin on Jan 4, 2023 12:02:26 GMT
With a vivid imagination and a trait (gift) for drifting off from the everyday into psychotic hallucination/delusion, I think actual horror can well be experienced in reading literature.
Or else, ... It also requires both imagination and intelligence to realize the full significance of what is read. And at that moment the body starts to shiver from intellectual horror. =O
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 4, 2023 12:48:17 GMT
With a vivid imagination and a trait (gift) for drifting off from the everyday into psychotic hallucination/delusion, I think actual horror can well be experienced in reading literature. Or else, ... It also requires both imagination and intelligence to realize the full significance of what is read. And at that moment the body starts to shiver from intellectual horror. =O I think I agree! vaultofevil.proboards.com/thread/4011/vault-evil-anti-intellectual |
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Post by pbsplatter on Jan 4, 2023 14:38:36 GMT
A story that left a searing impression on me that I've never quite shaken is "Pulling Hard Time," by Harlan Ellison. A somewhat sympathetic character, Charlie, defends his wife from marauding bikers in gruesome fashion and winds up behind bars. From there he commits some more violence (I don't recall if it's as justifiable or not) and gets himself placed in New Alcatraz, the humane solution to capital punishment, where prisoners live out the rest of their lives reliving the worst moment of their life.
In Charlie's case, we see a detailed description that it's the time as a boy that he was in a car crash, and wound up trapped in the wreckage, facing his dead mother, for four days until rescue. . . It's brutal stuff.
The story of course ends with all the prison reformists congratulating themselves on this more humane method to penology, etc.
The story suffers from many of Harlan's flaws--namely, it's simultaneously venomous and self-satisfied (like a Dickens villain)- and it also stacks the deck by making the protagonist someone who already seems sympathetic-ish, but I've only ever read it once and will never, ever forget it.
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Post by ripper on Jan 4, 2023 21:24:08 GMT
I agree with you totally on all three points. The second especially, having just read (and wished I hadn't) about Issei Sagawa, known as the "Kobe Cannibal" who died last month. Yech! I will be sure not to google that one. I hadn't heard that he had died. For me, it's not only the horrific nature of his crime, but also that he became a celebrity of sorts, being interviewed on talk shows and the like after his release. |
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Jan 8, 2023 1:38:12 GMT
I am sure there must be examples, in particular from my childhood, but offhand I cannot think of any stories that frightened me. With films it is another matter. For instance, I found THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT very unsettling. I saw it on the big screen and found it unsettling, though I haven't revisited it since--I don't want to test whether it would hold up. I'm not sure that any story has frightened me in a long time, but some have disturbed me, including Clive Barker's "In the Hills, the Cities." A story that left a searing impression on me that I've never quite shaken is "Pulling Hard Time," by Harlan Ellison. I haven't read this one, but Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" left a mark on me. |
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