(no subject)

[apocalypsos]

Last week, I bought this plastic cauldron and a bunch of candy and brought it to work so that everybody could forage through it for sugary stuff. I didn't expect anybody to chip in anything for the candy cauldron (even if it would have been nice), but today when I was asking what anyone wanted me to pick up from CVS tomorrow, Lieutenant Asshat and Boy-On-Boy Action both chipped in ten bucks apiece for bags of candy. I take back the very few mean things I ever said about Lieutenant Asshat long, long ago, and ... one or two of the many mean things I've said about Boy-on-Boy Action, who cannot buy my loyalty with Bottlecaps and Blow Pops, but can sure as hell die trying.

So, anyway, I listened to Bill O'Reilly again today, so that you don't have to. It's funny to listen to him try to make himself sound unbiased, including referring to "the conservative radio talk shows hosts" as if he weren't included in that list. The number of idiots who called today was a bit higher than normal. My favorite was one woman who decided to pick on Kerry about "his manicures," which O'Reilly was quick to point out was a falsehood his own network had put out there, to which the woman replied that she thought he was wrong and Kerry really had said all those things about getting manicures and being a metrosexual. Lady, the guy works at the same fucking network as O'Reilly. I know he's a schmuck, but I'd at least think he might know this much ... you know, if I were on his side like you purport to be.

Listening to him for a full hour was more than made up for by the tape Ron and Fez played later of O'Reilly reading an email on his show that was obviously a gag (not that he seemed to notice) from a Jack Mehoffer. Maybe he could find some kid who read "The O'Reilly Factor for Kids" and watches The Simpsons who could explain it to him.

Ron and Fez also spent most of the show talking about the movies that have scared the hell out of you on a very personal level. (Because of Janet Leigh dying and Psycho and all that.) Mine are easy, even though I get scared by anything if you film it right:

1. The Exorcist -- A movie I have yet to sit through in its entirety. It's not even that it's gory or terrying or whatever, it's just ... you know how it feels when someone's standing right behind you and you know they're watching you? *shiver* (Also, in The Exorcist III, in that one scene where the robed guy walks across the screen after the nurse ... dude, that scene still scares the hell out of me every bloody time.)

2. Poltergeist -- When I was a little kid, this movie gave me nightmares for month. Of course, it didn't help that I was a small blond girl with a tree outside her bedroom window and -- honest to God -- that exact same friggin' clown doll in my room. FEAR.

3. The Shining -- Elevator full of blood. I have no idea why that, of all things, would get to me, but gyah.

Also, one of the last news stories on Don & Mike was about a mother and father in England named Peacock who named their son Drew. I still say there needs to be specially hired ten-year-old playground bullies employed by maternity wards to tell mothers of newborns what a stupid name they just gave their kid and how many vicious childhood pranks they're going to have to put up with when their parents are stupid enough to name them Drew Peacock.

Comments

[zeelee-penguin.livejournal.com]

I never watch horror movies (well, no--I watch the ones *so bad* they make me laugh), and thus the only movie I can remember really being scared shitless by is Stir of Echoes. Silence of the Lambs creeped me out pretty damn bad because holy shit the guy with the skins was creepy. Just... eeek.

And the Shelob scene in RotK, which I have yet to watch all the way through. Dude, I'm a scary movie wimp.

[wufeidragon.livejournal.com]

The Shining is much better as a book, if you ask me. It gave me nightmares for weeks. Then I saw the movie and I have to say that it didn't do the story justice. Though it did manage to be quite creepy.

[eiluned.livejournal.com]

Poltergeist still scares the piss out of me, only now it's in a good way. Jesus, when I was a kid, I had the most horrible nightmares about that movie. Some involved the guy whose face peeled off, many involved that goddamn clown doll, and quite a few were about the closet door with the light shining from behind it. It didn't help that my closet door was at the foot of my bed, and I'd occasionally forget to turn the light off, then wake up in the middle of the night and think the hellmouth had opened in there. Oh, and I wouldn't count between thunder and lightning for fear the Japanese box hedge outside of my window would come to life and eat me.

Man, I LOVE that movie.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

On one of the many family vacations, they shoved all the kids into one room and turned on 'Night Of The Living Dead'. I didn't sleep a wink that night

[ex-riverblue937.livejournal.com]

I recently watched Poltergeist again, and it is still scary. Although to my great surprise I actually felt myself tearing up several times - I think it was the adult in me watching the parents try to save their kids.

[akacat]

The Shining: the playground scene. Both in the book and the Kubrick film.

[harmonyfb.livejournal.com]

The book scared the crap out of me, especially that recurring image of the mother with blood dripping down from her broken nail, and the word flashing from the wall to the mirror. The movie? Just made me irritable. So very not scary with Olive Oyl as the mother and the little boy acting like he needed serious medication and Nicholson just going over the top instead of being scary because he was conflicted and ridden by his own abusive childhood. ::sigh::

[akacat]

I think of it as 'a Kubrik movie loosely based on The Shining', and it doesn't bother me too much.

Except for Olive Oyl. She wasn't even in the same universe as the 'pretty blonde cheerleader type' I recall the book describing.

[tv-elf.livejournal.com]

I was watching the Exorcist III in college with a friend. Five seconds after that ghost scene, my roomie (wearing white) came in the and walked across the entry into her bedroom. I've never been able to watch it again.

[cmstephens.livejournal.com]

Drew Peacock, eh? Still not as bad as former US Olympic swimmer Misty Hyman...

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

Or NASCAR driver Dick Trickle ...

[harmonyfb.livejournal.com]

I knew a girl in college named (I swear, this was her real, given name): Peaches Yielding.

What the hell were her parents thinking?

[cmstephens.livejournal.com]

Shit! I completely forgot about him! They used to say how far back he finished on SportsCenter (usually near the middle or worse), but that was back in the mid-90s...

[onefishjyuufish.livejournal.com]

Me and my girlfriend are renting horror movies like fiends this month. So far we've watched Hellraiser one, two and three (my favorite so far), Rosemary's Baby, They, The Changeling and Children of the Corn (and more, but those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head).

I'm a weenie, but it's so much easier to marathon them when you have someone to keep the monsters away at night. :0 And weirdly, I love scaring myself. It's the damn paranoia that I get afterwards that usually made me not watch them...

And worst movie for me ever? Ringu. Dammit, that movie had me counting down all seven days. >_>

[lots42.livejournal.com]

One of the later Hellraiser movies had a guy confronting a weird portal. He leaned through it and the portal -turned back into- a mirror and the guy was sliced in half.

That fucked my dreams up for years.

[muffytaj.livejournal.com]

The scariest movie part for me came in an art doco.

Yeah, yeah, laugh it up.

Anyway, I was a wee bairn, watching a documentary on aboriginal art, and they had those little black stick figures doing stuff, which was kinda freaky anyway. Then some smart guy thinks "Hey, I know, why don't we animate it?"

And suddenly there's little black stick figures screaming, running around fires, throwing spears, living, dying and HOLY GOD IT WAS SO SCARY!

I used to imagine them coming at me in night when I couldn't see them and scratching my eyes out, still screaming in that weird keening manner.

Of course, I was also convinced a tall, red, skinny robot with a round head was going to roll down the hallway and strangle me, and I never saw that in any movie. I guess I was just a messed up kid.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

For some reason, I used to have nightmares about the Scrubbing Bubbles.

[muffytaj.livejournal.com]

Scrubbing Bubbles?

Do I want to know, or will it just scare me silly?

[lots42.livejournal.com]

It will just scare you

[harmonyfb.livejournal.com]

You know, very few movies scared me like that as a child (and let me just note that I saw Poltergeist in the theatre when I was in college).

But the one that stuck with me and figured in my nightmares for many years was "Invasion of the Giant Spiders". I was five when I saw it on my parents' little tiny black-and-white television. There's a scene where a baby - no more than a year or so - is standing in a playpen in the front yard of a house when the giant spider comes stalking over the ridge. The child is crying hysterically, and yet nobody comes for it.

I had nightmares for weeks.

And there were a couple of "Night Gallery" episodes that scared me to death and kept me awake - including one where an artist loses their face and it becomes this landscape of veiny horror. ::shudder::

Other than that...I can't think of any childhood horror movies that really scared me that bad (I'm a horror maven, so my threshold is a bit higher than most people's.)

All through my childhood, it was books that I remember sparking my big "scared the hell out of me" moments. Like..."I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" or "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" by Harlan Ellison. There was also a short story (the title and author escapes me) about a man killing himself to escape his horrid marriage. I had nightmares about that one, too.

When I was just out of college, I read "The Scream" by John Skipp and Craig Spector, and laid awake for hours afterward. Cree-pee.

[malhablada.livejournal.com]

hehehe. Drew Peacock. hehe. I just called my mom to tell her that, and it took me forever to explain it to her.

Wasn't there a politician named Dick Sweat a few years ago?

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

One of my best friends when I was a kid had a little brother. The family's name was Seaman, the kid's name was Peter. I kept wondering if anyone actually bothered to say to them, "You know, about that name ..."

[malhablada.livejournal.com]

You almost have to think that they realize what they're doing...

I mean, come on... it's certainly the first place OUR minds went. And while your flist may be a little more perverted than average, it's not that big of a stretch to realize what a name like that would do to a kid.

[wal-lace.livejournal.com]

I don't know, but there was one named Richard Pratt. I know this because the British satyrical news magazine Private Eye published a photograph from one of his fliers with the caption 'Rich Pratt and family'.

[malhablada.livejournal.com]

*snort* I love that word, prat. Of course, I'm American, so it's an EXOTIC insult. Well, not exactly exotic, but different at least.

Also, the name of my garage band for the day: Exactly Exotic. (Yesterday it was Furry Slinky).

[lots42.livejournal.com]

The same moment in Exorcist 3 freaked me out also.

What 'gets' me in horror movies isn't exactly the creaky mansion or the abandoned mental hospital. It's when absolutely normal things go ass-scary. Like when the kid from Sixth Sense saw that scary insane ghost in his own kitchen.

[laurelin-kit.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm demented, but Poltergeist didn't scare me at all.

Signs? OH MY FUCKIN' GOD WHIMPER. Things jumping out and that alien walking in the kid's birthday video? That scared the snot out of me. The Sixth Sense, when little Mischa Barton is in the tent and throws up, that's the only moment that really gets to me. I love The Shining.

I will not be watching the Exorcist. Not unless Ioan Gruffudd, Alexis Denisof, James Marsters, Hugh Jackman, Hugh Dancy and Kiefer Sutherland are all waiting, naked, for me to finish watching it so they can...comfort me and...reassure me that I'm not going to be possessed. Sure.

[fyrdrakken]

I had severe issues as a child with the scene in Dragonslayer where the dead princess is being eaten by the baby dragons. Also some TV movie called Don't Go to Sleep where a family is haunted by the ghost of their dead kid or something like that -- and I think Poltergeist as well.

Come to think of it, I was weirded out by the White Noise trailer too, worse than some movies I've actually seen. I don't watch too many horror movies because I don't need that kind of thing occurring to me in the wee hours of the morning.