Good girl! :smug:

It's Bruce!! :stare:

However, beautiful story, Fräulein! :)

I love this movie to death.
When I was 4, maybe 5, I watched it the first time - 'accidentally'. My brother was collecting movies back then and had them all. He always scared me with this movie, talking about it etc... He showed me the VHS tape, which had a small black sticker on one side. I couln'd read at that time, so he thought I would never find the tape.

He forgot the sticker.

I watched the movie, secretly, (Just don't ask why I was able to handle TV & Video Recorder at that age, haha) and he surprised me when he came back early. He was coming up the stairs, doing the "dun-dun-dun-dun" from the main theme. I hid behind the sofa in terror, believing the shark became real, now on it's way to get me...

End of story? I was really traumatized by this movie and event, so a 2 years long streak of terrible nightmares haunted me - just because of Bruce.

A former girlfriend of mine managed to set an end to this trauma by buying me the movie poster for my room. It cured me, Bruce and me are friends today and I watch the movie every once in a while, ha.

I know but I was afraid the young and uninitiated wouldn't know who I was talking about.

It was so awesome. We still laugh about it to this day. Even though she'd told me she'd never seen ANY of the movie, it still just didn't occur to me that anyone who'd been alive and conscious for the preceding 30 years would not be at least *aware* of such a famous movie moment.

I remember pausing the movie, looking down at her on the floor, and saying... "Now... you did KNOW there was a shark in this movie, right? It couldn't have been that much of a surprise!" :haha:

But from what I've been told, a lot of people had the same reaction to that scene in the theaters when they saw it for the first time way back when it was just released.

I was a few years older than that when it came out in theaters but my sister, who was already married by then, refused to take me to see it because she said it was too scary. (This is the same sister who used to drag me out of bed at midnight on the weekends to watch old horror movies on tv. Go figure). So she GAVE ME THE BOOK TO READ instead. :haha:

This was pretty normal for her back then. The Exorcist? NO YOU CANNOT GO SEE THE EXORCIST... oh fine, here, just read the book. The Omen? Of course I'm not taking you to see that. Wait, though, I've got the book here somewhere... :O:

I have one of those Billy Bass singing fish type plaques on the wall in my office, except instead of the usual fish it's a great white shark and it says JAWS in big letters across the top. When it comes on the shark wiggles his fins like he's swimming and the "dun-dun dun-dun" theme from the movie plays.

Then that stops abruptly and the music changes and the shark turns his head to look at you and starts singing "Mack the Knife." Funny thing, I have it because that same friend and I were out shopping in some outlet and stumbled on a huge pile of these things on clearance, I mean a stack of boxes taller than we were and about ten feet around. We just stood there and stared at it until she said, "I think you have to buy one of those." "Yep," I said, and so I did.

Even funnier was that at first I didn't know that in addition to having a 'play' button it also has a motion sensor which was set to 'on' by default. So I put batteries in it and hung it in my office and turned off the lights and went home and came in the next morning to find a little note from the cleaning crew on my desk, letting me know that it had come on and scared the crap out of them when they walked in the night before. :haha:

I think for anyone in the UK who grew up between 1950 and 1991, this had to be the stuff of nightmares:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg

I just don't. They aren't as common as American movies and the few places that sell foreign movies have bad selections.

Scariest movie ever, comes down to you the individual as one person would sit there bored out their mind yelling at the film while another person goes screaming into the night.

So far I have not seen a film that gave me the shiver's but I do recall episodes of The Omega Factor scared the heck out of me as a kid.

That scared the hell out of me, and I first watched it on a nice comfy TGV on a beautiful summers day. Eeech.

Only two movies made me loose my sleep for nights when I first saw them, it was in my teenage years. The first, Alien, must not be explained.

The second was "Picnic at Hanging Rock" by Peter Weir. The last scene, when the camera closes in on the headmistress of the college, she now wearing all black suddenly and sits alone and motionless, when the last news is brought to her, and the last spoken words in the movie are heard by the audience. Her cold eyes, her face like stone, no movement - and then you hear how the big clock in the floor stops ticking.

That was kind of Bradburian horror.

I cannot explain why, obviously it is because of the mysterious nature of the story told before, but this scene let me fear darkness for many nights to come. Maybe because so much interpretation is possible and left to imagination. And imagination runs wild.

I still admire that movie very much.

Obviously there are other shocking movies as well, who impressed me for one or two nights, but not longer. "Don't look now" on my mind. Creepy.

Oh yeah, I saw that one last week. Pretty good movie. Not all that frightening, though. Probably because everybody knows who lives and who dies. It even said it on the back cover!

I'd be too frightened to watch that one myself :)

The Alien series isn't that scary. Aliens has a jump scene or two but it's more of a Sci-Fi thing than a horror thing. :hmmm:

Alien is hopelessly worn out by now - too popular. When you shed too much light ion something, it looses its magic. Actually, the original movie I saw again three years ago, and found it boring.

But in the very early 80s, when it came out (1980?) , it was anything than worn out or boring. It was a sensation. There was nothing to compare it to. It was new style, like Star Wars was a new style, too. It was shocking. And it stayed like that for quite some time, because the beast remained in the shadows for years to come, and the media landscape was not such to distribute the images of it as fast as it is the case today with internet and all that.

Alien must be seen as a culture phenomenon that can only be appreciated and understood by comparing it against the background of the time it came to life in.

Before, it were movies like Formicula! or Tarantula!, or the old classical Jack Arnold movies (I love them). But they do not scare anybody anymore. We laugh instead.

Have horror films gone to far?

Take Psycho the grand daddy of the slasher films which looks so harmless too today's films.

I'd say recently the trend has been towards "shocker" rather than "horror". Surprising rather than unsettling.


That said, El Orfanato scared the bejeezus out of me.

I remember seeing Jaws when I was a kid, after that movie no one wanted to go to the beach.

Another movie that scared me as a kid was "The Amityville Horror."

Today nothing really scares me, can sleep like a baby after any movie.

Fair enogh, you're forgiven, this time.:O:


Wow, she really didn't realize that the books are even more frightening?
Never read the Exorcist. After watching the movie - I never will. The stair-walk scene gave me the creeps. :huh:

Searched for it and saw a video on youtube. I understand why the cleaning crew freaked out :har:

Oh jee, I have the strong feeling I gotta watch that movie again soon! :arrgh!:

It was probably the first DVD I ever bought, but oddly enough I don't know that I've ever gotten it out to watch the movie. There will be periods here where it is shown frequently on tv - one cable channel would sometimes run it two or three times over a single weekend. And usually I'd have it on every time when that happened. It's one of those movies where, if it's on and I find it, it's highly unlikely that I'll turn it off.

So you've never seen Das Boot? :O:

Or Downfall? How could anyone not watch Downfall, the shouty scenes were just as good as the squillion-and-one parodies.

Or Battle Royale? Or Man Bites Dog? Doberman? Seven Samurai? :doh:

Just sticking with the good ol' US of A factory produced stuff, a good grounding for life. :hmph:

The Exorcist took some beating in its day.

You mean for being a little too intense? I don't doubt that for a second, ha.