Boo

It's Halloween time again. Time to buy (or make) costumes once they finally decide on what they want to be. It is also time for scary movies. I admit I really like a good scary movie. However I am pretty picky about it. Slasher flicks simply don't count as a scary movie. Startling, disgusting, shocking, but not scary. To get the best ones you need to go back before too many special effects were around. When you have that creepy music, you see the person go into a room and maybe see some shadowy movement and a scream. It's so much more effective when you have to imagine it. Much like an almost naked woman is sexier than a totally naked one. (I know a lot of men might deny that just in the hopes you will show them a totally naked one to prove your point, but they know I'm right.) Your imagination is better. Which is why seeing some crazy person cut someone into pieces is bloodier, more shocking, and definitely more gross, it's just not as scary as if something from the shadows took them and you hear screams and sounds form the dark but don't see it. At least in my opinion.

So here is a list of really good scary movies. Anything from Hitchcock. We watched the Birds one Halloween when I was little. It was a Saturday night. On Sunday we wake up and outside our bedroom window there are hundreds of birds. All on the fences, the trees, the power lines, everywhere. We are totally freaked out. Out of nowhere a pigeon flies through the bedroom window and lands on my brother's bed twitching. We, of course, screamed like Hell just walked in. My dad runs into the room ready to kill whoever broke the window. We are all huddled up as far away from the twitching bird as possible. My dad just stands there for a minute,looks at the bird, looks at us and laughs! Laughs!!He takes the bird and says

Oh good! Lunch!

Yes, I promise this is a true story.

Also, the original Haunting is a good one. Yes it is black and white. But when they make the walls breathe --- oh man, very creepy. The Shining is a good one. Also The Changeling from the 70's. It's slow but trust me. The Silver Bullet by Stephen King, mostly because of who the bad guy was. It didn't seem right. Psycho of course. The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I watched that when I was about 8 or 9. My bed was about 1 1/2 to 2 feet off the floor. This, I decided was the perfect size to hide a pod under. I don't think I slept for a week. My brother was maybe 12 or 13 when he saw The Fly. I admit I have never seen it, but he didn't sleep for a while unless my dad was there to periodically slap him with a flyswatter. No really.

Now the Body Snatchers took first place for a long time. But recently I watched an episode of Doctor Who. (Yes, I am I sci-fi/fantasy geek.)The story seemed cool, but the more and more I thought about it (and I couldn't help it) the scarier it was. It was about lonely assassins. They were aliens of course. They came from the empty places in space. They were called that because they could only move, only be, as long as no living thing could see them. This included each other. They looked like statues of angels and they always had their eyes covered. Now I know this doesn't sound so bad. But here is this girl staring at this statue that wants to kill her, and in the background she is remembering the doctors words.

They are incredibly fast, don't turn around, don't even blink.

How can you possibly run from that?? How long can you go without blinking??? How do you hide from that? I know I am not explaining it well but trust me -- just watch it. It's in Season 3 I am pretty sure.

So, in all of this, I think the scariest things come from our own imagination. Also, the scariest stories are not really about monsters, or men in with chainsaws, but from the unknown. The bogeyman in the closet you never see, but can hear. The whispers in the dark. The things you can't hide from, you cant even find, until it's too late. Then ..... Gotcha!

Happy Halloween