God, what a difficult topic.
I don't seem to scare easily. I jumped a couple of times during "Jaws", but only because my best friend's sister was sitting next to me and was digging her long fingernails into my arm.
There were some very scary moments in "The Sixth Sense". Especially the scene where Cole had to go to the bathroom. That gave me the willies.
I mostly sneered at "The Blair Witch" (damned idiot city kids), but the end was a little chilling.
I enjoy scary movies and TV shows, but rarely experience significant fear, unfortunately, unless the name "Richard Matheson" is attached somehow to the screenplay.
I also enjoy scary stories, but I find that short stories are MUCH more likely to scare me than novels. For example, I am left mostly unmoved by many of Steven King's novels (though I enjoy most of them), but many of his short storys really, really creep me out: "The Mangler" (brrrrr!!), "The Mist", and several others are very memorable. I finally figured out that what they have in common is what I call the "Oh, shit!" ending, which is hard to pull off in a novel. (Though King did it in <i>Christine</i>.) Of course, the downside is that the reader may end up feeling a little cheated by this ending (as in "The Mist", which King acknowledges in his introduction to "Skeleton Crew").
On a related topic, am I the only one who feels that Richard Matheson is all but unreadable? If I see his name in the credits of anything on film (TV or movie) -- screenwriter, story idea, etc. -- I immediately perk up and look for something remarkable and memorable. Yet every time I attempt to read one of his stories, I wonder why the man didn't get a more productive job as, say, a bus driver. Honestly, one of my favorite movies in the universe is "The Omega Man" with Charleton Heston, yet "I am Legend" leaves me wishing I'd never learned to read. The idea is basically the same, with some shift in emphasis, but the written story just doesn't work for me. I am in awe of the screenwriters who are able to take so much Matheson material and find the gold in it, including Matheson himself when he does his own screenplays.
Brett
This post was last modified: 04-01-2006, 12:24 AM by BrettM.
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