Horror Show

[PC Fitzroy-Toye]

Just seen "the Keep" again and even though its a dated film its one of the few horrors that has a very arty feel to it in the medium of the music and the use of dark and light in the scenes, it inparts to you a mood, and what horror is found there is not the full focus of the film unlike so many horrors, it has at its core a simple but good story and some fair acting ,what I like most about it is you come away from the film feeling you have not seen just a horror but something more like a picture a piece of art.

[Scorpio]

Saw

I have recently watched the original SAW movie, and i thought i would write a brief review of it.
A man awakes in a tub of water in a derelict basement. He see's another man imprisoned with him, and a corpse on the floor with a revolver in his hand. Together, the two men discover they have been kidnapped by someone that they suspect is a criminal who has been dubbed ' The jigsawman '.
The opening scene is atmospheric and quite intriguing, promising to be a battle of wits and wills between predator and prey. However,this building tension is cut short by mostly dull backstory concerning one of the hostages brief term as a Jigsaw man suspect. This part of the movie is enlightened by a crime scene discovery involving barbed wire, and an interview with a Jigsawman victim involving some novel headwear. The movie continues in this uneven vein, with subplots involving Cops, and the hostages family imperiled,shoehorned into the central premise line. Happily, the film closes strongly ;returning to the basement, a hostage takes drastic action to escape, and in a gimmicky but fun scene we discover who that dead man really is. It would be fair to describe SAW as a pleasing but faulted film: A solid exploitation movie which makes good use of its limited budget, mixed with an inferior SEVEN, with police procedural scenes, and the killer being motivated by moral self satisfaction idea being lifted straight from the aforementioned film.

[Scorpio]

I've not seen the sequels to Paranormal activity. However, i did watch ' The conjuring '. I found this one watchable but to mild for my tastes . It was a real chicken Korma of a movie.

[kensei]

Has anyone seen ' Paranormal activity' ?. For an investment of ninety minutes, i received one minutes worth of mild scare. The reviews were very good, but i was not getting that terrifying vibe.Perhaps because i watched it on my laptop, i may have lost something of the big screen's ability to sell this kind of thing.
Not a terrible movie, but an inert one.

I've been away from the site for several weeks. Just popped back in and found your post about a movie I rather enjoy. Just as with its forerunner "The Blair Witch Project," many people seem to either love it or hate it. I love them both, but they both suffer from one thing- they are only scary the first time. After that, no amount of time in between rewatchings seems to be able to deliver the same level of shock value. But that first time watching "Paranormal Activity," I've got to say that Katie Featherston being yanked out of bed and then dragged screaming out the door by her invisible assailant freaked the hell out of me. It is an incubus, a demon rapist, the mere concept of which sends a chill down the spine. I also remember feeling very strongly that Katie's boyfriend was one of the biggest jerks I've ever seen in any movie who both invited and deserved what happened to him in the end.

Have you seen any of the sequels? I've seen part 2, a prequel that overlaps with part 1 just slightly. SPOILER ALERT, stop reading here if you don't want to know anything about it. There are further chills in how the demon messes with a newborn baby and hurts a dog, and it's absolutely maddening to find that it wanted Katie's sister first and that the sister secretly sent it to her to get rid of it. There are one or two other sequels, on my list to see. I believe part 3 is another prequel that covers the two sisters' first encounters with the demon as children.

[RivkahChaya]

If you ever have a chance to see Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (Crawford and Davis) in a theater, it is less campy, and much scarier on a big screen.

[Cogidubnus]

Rutting

I can't agree

Tom Wescott, when he's on heat, is far worse



Dave

[pinkmoon]

I was like a lamb to the slaughter.

[pinkmoon]

films that have really scared me

The following films that have really scared me the omen,jaws,alien,schindlers list and last and not least my own wedding video.

[Scorpio]

Has anyone seen ' Paranormal activity' ?. For an investment of ninety minutes, i received one minutes worth of mild scare. The reviews were very good, but i was not getting that terrifying vibe.Perhaps because i watched it on my laptop, i may have lost something of the big screen's ability to sell this kind of thing.
Not a terrible movie, but an inert one.

[Scorpio]

Buffalo Bill aka Jaime Gumb is a much more convincing killer and an interesting character.
Harris partly based his MO on Ted Bundy,who used a cast on his arm to illicit sympathy, and Gary Heidnik,who imprisoned women in a hole in his backyard.
The signature bares resemblance to Ed Gein who fashioned various garments from human skin.

[RivkahChaya]

I never saw Hannibal Rising, but I did see Silence of the Lambs. I thought there was an "Eff society and the mores it rode in on" motivation to Hannibal's cannibalism, which is a legitimate choice for a literary character, however much it might be impossible (from a psychiatric standpoint) in a real person. Cannibalism is a huge taboo in the US and Canada, and from what I understand, in Europe, and, ironically, in most Catholic countries (like S. American countries, if Alive is any gauge), so violating it can be the action of an iconoclast.

It isn't seen that way, though, at least when it really happens. That's the way Hannibal Lecter was seen, but not the way Jeffrey Dahmer (who, if you ever saw a post-conviction interview with him, came across as startlingly mundane) was seen. Of course, it's not the way Jeffrey Dahmer presented himself, either. He was ashamed of himself, and as much as the media tried to portray him as a monster, he mostly gave it silence, at least before his trial. Silence can be menacing, and that the angle the press took ("He must be hiding even worse secrets than the things we know about"), but the fact was that he was lonely and pathetic. If he'd been caught stealing sex toys, trying to build a sex robot, or raping animals, people would have been laughing at him, but all those things come from the same kind of desperation. Dahmer also was a necrophiliac, and an alcoholic who could get drunk, and then have a mental disconnect, where other people didn't have needs apart from his own, and that's what made him dangerous.

Things like alcohol and desperation are the difference between a fictional monster like Lecter, and a real threat, like Dahmer.

[Scorpio]

Thomas Harris wrote that book, so it is canon.

[kensei]

I don't know how many people saw "Hannibal Rising." It wasn't nearly as big a hit as the movies with Anthony Hopkins, but it did portray what went into the making of him as a serial killer. His cannibalism stems from the fact that Nazis occupying his family's house during a snowstorm killed and ate his little sister. I guess I'm not sure if that's considered part of his official canon or not.

[Scorpio]

Two of the best known cannibals of modern times,Geoffrey Dahmer and Andrei chikittillo, provide a good example of what Ressler was getting at.
The cannibalism in both cases was pathological; The desire was rooted in deep seated in psycho sexual problems that are closely associated with other behavioral problems which combined would be difficult to conceal from the world. An inability to conceal ones strangeness from the world is a disorganised characteristic.

[RivkahChaya]

I never saw anything disorganized about Hannibal. Even his cannibalism was carried out with the finest kitchen utensils, even side dishes like some fava beans and a nice chianti.

I think the point is that cannibalism itself is a disorganized trait when it's practiced by a serial killer (in a society where it's taboo, I'm assuming; there are societies that practice it as part of religious of funerary rites). It's kind of like there are lots of crossover features of cats and dogs, but there are some things that they will never share. Dogs will never be able to retract their claws, and cats will never be able to dig holes bigger than they are. Even cat-sized dogs, like Chihuahuas, can dig Chihuahua-sized holes in a matter of minutes.