Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein…
It was mostly funny but that made the scary parts scarier!
Martha
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Surprised nobody has mentioned Alien. Claaaassic.
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Aliens {#2} is the best of that franchise!
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It’s awesome true, but not scary like alien 
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The spiders are coming!!! 
Okay, scary movie favorite: The Birds. Yeah, it’s a zillion years old, but Alfred Hitchcock did creepy really well, and I was willing to watch those things when I was a kid, so that’s what I’ve got to offer. 
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Oh man…that’s a lawsuit if ever I heard of one. 
hitchcock was the best. what hitchcock did that most can’t do today is suspense. suspense creates more fear than cheap jumps and gore. you saw no real violence in most of psycho, but the build up of suspense was masterful.
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Not Hitch but who didn’t spill their popcorn in Jaws when Richard Dreyfuss is chumming off the back of the boat & the shark leaps out of the water? 
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we just watched jaws. literally. i was more startled (every time) by the head popping into the hole in the boat while hooper is diving.
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The Thing, 1982. Timeless and very scary. It’s my favorite film of all time, even beating out titans like Alien and Blade Runner.
Oh?
Hi there.
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Dammit! Happened to be cruising past that before you blurred it!
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HOW?!
For me, reading is far more immersive than a show. Movie catches you at a time when your mind is a bit too open, and you are actually getting legit scared? Just look around at the fact you are in a bloody theater. Or if at home, just go hit the fridge/bathroom for a moment.
But a scary book… damn, you are hosed because it was always in your brain and always will be.
That said… my scariest experience has to be a video game. “The Suffering” was so very well built. Enemies were thematic and creepy as hell. Jump scares were not just employed, they were MASTERED. The best was that they would do screen overlay jump scares if you are taking your time to line up a precise shot. So right when you are the most focused on the screen… BAM!
Ambient noises, light levels, story… it hit on so many marks so well.
I am looking forward to my kids being able to handle scary movies. I haven’t watched Babadook yet, but have heard great things about it. My own entry to scary movies was Alien, at a sleepover when I was like 8 years old. I did NOT sleep, but did hide in my sleeping bag starting all of 10 minutes or so into the movie.
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I guess it depends somewhat how your head is set up but yeah, for me, the after image of a book is at least 5x as intence as a movie and at least 20x longer halflife.
OMG, I was in my mid-thirties and couldn’t finish watching. I still start to hyperventilate a little when someone says, “Here, kitty, kitty!”
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I think it’s a matter of brain wiring. I heard a presentation by a neurologist one time who was studying visual imagery and talking about the differences…when he put subjects in an fMRI and told them to visualize their living room, he could look at the different parts of the brains that would light up – some people don’t visualize as well; others are vivid visualizers. The first group could tell you what color the walls were, where the furniture was, and their visual processing areas would light up as expected, since they were imagining seeing what they knew was there. The latter types’ brains lit up in areas more associated with movement, or as he put it, “as though they were dancing through their living room,” like they were actually THERE in their minds.
His talk explained to me why I’ve never been able to, say, describe someone’s face from memory. I used to watch detective shows where they’d have the artist draw someone according to the witness’s description, and they’d be like, “no, his nose was not that long, and his eyebrows were more arched, and you’ve got his ears set too high.” I had this secret fear that I’d witness a crime and would be the one sitting there going, “Ummm, nose? Yeah, I’m pretty sure he had a nose…”
So that decreased ability to vividly visualize things in my mind probably is what makes it possible for me to read scary books without the trauma that the movies inflict. The movie in my head is vague and blurry and just not that scary.
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I have a patient with PTSD who had worked hard in therapy and had been really stable for several years, who called the office one day in crisis, just out of the blue. Couldn’t identify any triggers; no idea why, had just suddenly started having massive, debilitating panic episodes for the first time in years. During the subsequent office visit just casually happened to mention they’d gone to see “It.” Hadn’t considered any connection between that and the return of symptoms until I asked about it; turned out the panic episodes had started the very next day.
Their treatment plan now includes “No watching scary clown movies!”
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Clowns I can deal with, what I can’t deal with are those realistic porcelain dolls. Those really creep me out.
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