Monsters

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Del

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It depends on the scare. With me it was car crashes for a long time. I've been through more than my share and with devastating results. When I saw a crash it could force me from the room.

I was writing a piece that I hoped would make holiday drinkers think before they drink but I couldn't finish it. I will. Maybe for next year.

Love scenes can make me leave too. I don't actually understand that one. If a monster could make me feel the way a love scene does I'd call it scary.

I've seen my share of unexplained things, too. Giant talon across my windshield, a road that descended exceedingly into the foggy night, but wasn't there the next morning, I've written a seemingly fictional piece about a house that collapses on the MC, but I was there and it was very real. I used to tell stories for hours to my friends, and they were all real.

I'm a logical man. I know most of these things would have rational explanations. I just don't want to destroy the illusions. :D

I like monsters of most sorts. I have no trouble watching.

But the two legged kind, man, I have a lot of trouble with. I've never watched the Freddy or Jason movies. I have The Shining beside my bed and will start it soon, but if it wasn't King I wouldn't. Reading King is an assignment I give myself, hoping for some of those success elements to rub off.
 

BlueTexas

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Jamesaritchie said:
Maybe it does have something to do with age. I have never in my life felt such stark terror as I did after watching Frankestein and The Mummy as a wee lad. I had nightmares, and those monsters flat scared the Holy bejeebers out of me.

I think fear is bigger when you're younger. I read "It" as a young teeanger home alone in the woods for the weekend. I was more scared then than I was when someone was trying to break into my house!
 

Pike

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Everything freaked me out as a kid. The biggest scare I can remember was one night when my mom left me and my little brother alone so she could go out drinking. I was only 6 or 7 at the time. In the house we lived in at the time my bedroom connected to the living room via a narrow hallway that didn't have a light. My brother and I turned on every light in the house and sat in front of the TV for comfort, until they started playing ads for "Shadow of the Wolf", a Jan Michael Vincent movie full of spiritualism and snarling, wild animals. The ad played repeatedly and I can remember being too afraid to turn off the TV. We thought an old belt was a snake and I saw a pair of glowing eyes in the hall to my bedroom that turned out to be a stuffed animal catching a hint of light from outside my bedroom window. That was one of the worst nights of my life. I can look back at that and relive the fear I felt as a child left alone and clueless to the division between fantasy and reality.
 

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Ha, I remember lying awake all night one night staring into the glowing "eyes" of some glow in the dark strips on a pair of Ked in my closet. Do you think people like that just naturally grow up to be horror writers?
 

AzBobby

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Jamesaritchie said:
Primarily, yes, I think you're right. But I do think really good horror fiction should make you thinnk twice about turning out the light before you go to bad, and it should make you wonder what that scratching sound out there in teh darkness might be.

After seeing The Sixth Sense I actually felt funny walking down a dark hall to the bathroom that night. And that movie wasn't all that horrifying -- just good suspense and a few "boo!" moments where the editing and music would startle you for a second.

Yes, I think the easiest way to get creeped out by horror is for it to appear as if it can reach into your real world. That's the drawback of old fashioned monsters -- or really anything that appears removed by time and place, like an actor too famous to scare anyone any more lurking about in some 19th-century European village in black and white. The power of cliche -- of classic monsters having long been turned into cartoons and funny characters from The Munsters -- must work powerfully against them too. A few cliches still work, as long as they reach into the world of the audience. For example, if you're religious, a story of demon possession is that much more scary, because you might have been raised with a firm belief in demons. If you live in the woods, a werewolf story might keep you up at night because there really are furry beasts out there that kill people.

The more challenging trick that some great writers pull off is to make the fictional world absorbing enough for you to temporarily enter into it, making a horror reaction possible even in unfamiliar territory. In cinema, Alien probably qualifies -- you can't otherwise explain its scares as having much to do with the familiar, or chalk it all up to a few gore effects. I'm struggling to remember good fiction examples -- most of the ones popping to mind are contemporary horror like King's stuff. OK, here's one -- I read Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" just recently and found myself sufficiently drawn into the MC's otherwise unfamiliar hell so that I felt plenty of suspense and dread right up to the abrupt ending.
 
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