Today is the anniversary of the premiere in 1974 of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, It was a great plan to premiere it on the day before Halloween. I have never been a great fan of scary movies, but I remember liking the Alfred Hitchcock show and the Twilight Zone, sometimes. I like scary books better. The stories don’t have to be so graphic like the scenes in movies. I think that our reading and imagining brains are better at scaring us than just gore on the screen.
The last best scary book I read was The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. It is a vampire book that keeps a constant sense of suspense, but with very understated violence. It is also a book about books. Dracula, in this one, is a real book lover with a special penchant for librarians and historians. What could be scarier?!
Tell about your favorite scary movie, story, music, or book.
Trail Baboon 
OT: I finally get my fifteen minutes of fame.
http://www.startribune.com/rodent-misidentification-led-to-goldy-gopher-s-stripes/564070652/
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What a fun article.
Go Seven Striped (or 13 striped) Ground Squirrel, go. Now that is a cheer worthy of a Big Ten School.
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I know them out here as Richardson’s ground squirrels
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Isn’t it a good thing you’re back in Minnesota to receive all this fame and fortune…!
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Where was google when George Grooms needed it?
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Rise and Shake in Terror Baboons,
I don’t do scary stuff, ever. Suspense things, yes. Scary, no.
Life is scary enough.
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I have never been a fan of scary movies.
This season in Rochester, the civic theater is currently running ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and the Repertory theater will be doing ‘Evil Dead; the Musical’ next summer.
I wouldn’t have gone to see ‘NotLD’ if I hadn’t been offered free preview tickets. It’s dated, and Zombies just don’t interest me. And it’s not much to start with. And what dialogue?? Moaning and groaning ain’t that hard. But I guess each zombie could still create their own backstory and come up with a full vocabulary of moans. Still. I don’t need to see it.
But there were people there that loved it; they knew the lines, they knew the story and they had a great time.
At least ‘EDtM’ knows it’s making fun of them all and it’s done in a full blown silly way. With music!
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Chicago daughter was all excited to go see Ari Antrim writer director of two very good scary movies heredity and midsommar which she says are really good. i’m going to check it out now you can too
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ari aster
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I remember seeing things like The Blob and The Fly back in the 50s- early 60, but they weren’t really very scary. I’ve never even seen the Shining and won’t go to anything, but I know there’s something nagging at my brain that was… maybe it will surface.
Used to play Danse Macabre by Saint-Saens at Halloween, and whatever was the Alfred Hitchcock TV theme song…
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The Blob ends with the Blob being dropped by parachute into the arctic, where it will remain forever frozen. I always wondered: why a parachute? And with climate change, are we due for a sequel?
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“Funeral March For a Marionette” – Hitchcock’s theme music
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Thank you.
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The Fly wasn’t scary; it was one of the funniest movies I ever saw.
Then I saw Psycho. I’ve never watched a scary movie again. Jacque is right: life is scary enough.
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I think I did see that and “The Birds” on the Afternoon Matinee on Channel (Sioux City) as a kid. Ditto—those ended my horror career.
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Channel 9 in Sioux City
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I’ve always wondered why scary, and especially gory movies are appealing to some people. For myself, I would find it horrifying to sit in an audience of those people.
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I feel like I’m in good company. Scary stuff is too much for me. I’ve never seen The Birds after watching just a couple of scenes when I was 7 years old. It was awful. I ended up not sleeping one night because of The Exorcist. And we won’t even discuss the fact that I couldn’t even drive by the Boulevard Theater for a few weeks when it was showing Jagged Edge. YA loves scary and gory stuff, I don’t know where she gets it.
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OT. Blevins page is updated. December 8th. We are reading Straight River by our own beloved Chris. But we need a hosting home. Anybody up for it?
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you can use mine but i’ll be gone
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Probably I can—let me check.
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Want to come to Winona?
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The mere sight of blood and I’m queasy, so anything that entails blood and gore is out of the question for me. Even thinking about it is painful.
A well written spy novel is about as scary and suspenseful as I can comfortably handle. John le Carré’s “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” was a masterpiece that I enjoyed immensely as a novel; not nearly as satisfying as a film. This despite the fact that Richard Burton starred in it.
At the moment, I find the suspense about Brexit, awaiting the results of the impeachment hearings, not to mention the whole global climate change debacle, almost too much to handle. I take little comfort in knowing that none of use get out of here alive.
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There is a very funny ad running right now that I have seen while watching Vikings or Twins games. People are screaming as part of a horror film in front of a bunch of suspended chain saws.
A Female says something similar to: “Everyone in a a horror film has to have really bad judgment. We could just all go get in the running car and escape.”
Then they all start screaming and run toward the chain saws.
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That reminds me – I saw Silence of the Lambs. In which Jodie Foster follows the serial killer into a basement without a cell phone, and without calling for backup first.
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I really like Danse Macabre, the orchestral piece, which I imagine to be dancing skeletons.
The other night I was lying in bed, reading, when the shirts in Husband’s closet silently shifted back and forth, as though there was a breeze blowing them. They stopped. They did it again. There was no other noise in the house. All was silent. I was somewhat alarmed, then I heard a scrabbling, scratching clunk and thud, and our tortie cat streaked out of the closet. Mystery solved.
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When I lived with pets, I never was spooked by things that went bump in the night. If I heard a weird noise, I’d just say, “Hmm, the cat musta done something” or “Dang, those dogs are noisy.”
Which explains why sounds I hear now are so frightening. I’ll hear something weird and think, “The cat musta done something . . . or, wait, I don’t got a cat!”
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I remember seeing the first Alien movie in the theater when I was around 20 or so. At one point I think I had to get up and walk away for a bit, but end back to see the rest. It was probably the last really scary movie I saw. Not a fan of the genre.
The Lord of the Rings movies were rather scary, I thought. I knew how they ended, though, so I made it through all right.
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Knowing the ending does help!
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Fun
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