I also came across this tale of teen angst/recipe for Oh-No-She-Didn’t Butternut Squash Soup from CosomGirl.com:
Lindsey was a shoo-in for head cheerleader. Her handsprings were Slinkies on speed; her pikes were 90 degrees of perfection; her dismounts put Nastia Liukin to shame. On top of that, while other cheerleaders decorated the football players’ lockers (Go Warhawks!), Lindsey decorated the other cheerleaders’ lockers. Everyone on the squad adored her.
Except Tiffany.Tiffany, who could only do the splits because she was born with some sort of weirdo ligament problem. Tiffany, who slipped cards into the football players’ lockers after the squad had decorated them so the guys thought the work was hers alone. Tiffany, who had a secret stash of embroidery supplies and could arrange it so that the word FARTER mysteriously appeared on a certain teammate’s black bloomers in bright yellow thread. Hmmm.
For sheer literary merit and respectability, Frankenstein has cast a shadow over all horror novels published over the two subsequent centuries. Picking Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic seems like an easy out, though, which ignores more recent landmarks of the genre like Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. The new century has already seen some excellent horror novels, including Dan Simmons’ huge, Victorian-era chillers, The Terror and Drood, Scott Smith’s disturbing vacation-from-Hell The Ruins (hey, anyone see the movie?) and China Mieville’s genre-busting Perdido Street Station.
Still, evaluating the scariest of everything for the 13 Days of Halloween series has reminded me of the subjectivity of fear-based entertainment and the fact that the most lingering scares date back to youth. For the novel that scared me most, I have to back to vintage Stephen King, who penned several heart-stopping books before I was old enough to drive. Salem’s Lot and The Stand would be satisfying choices, not to mention his “Monkey’s Paw” homage Pet Sematery). His novel that scared me most, though, wasn’t even a novel.
Movie theaters tend to be our culture’s equivalent to the campfires, the places where we gather and attempt to frighten each other. Of all the film genres, the horror movie offers the most likely return on investment, so cinema offers more than a century’s worth of spooky material, from Universal Studio’s black-and-white classics like Bride of Frankenstein of the 1930s to recent high-tech ghost stories like Japan’s Ringu. Of course, the vast majority of horror flicks only inspire laughter or disgust, but the jagged diamonds in the rough can be exhilaratingly frightful, like John Carpenter’s Halloween which created the template for the slasher film in 1978.
After most movie “boo!” moments, the fear subsides once you see the stage blood or realize that only a cat was making the unnerving noise. A few, however, create horrors that follow you home, none more so than The Exorcist, William Friedkin’s notorious depiction of demonic possession. Linda Blair’s Regan transforms from a cute, normal little girl to a misshapen, all-knowing, possibly homicidal ghoul. The Exorcist’s nightmarish sound design alone can fray a viewer’s nerves, but the film violates the rule that what you don’t see is scarier than what you do, offering a glimpse of unimaginable, inexplicable evil and hostility made flesh. The Exorcist combination of stark fear and abhorrence proves so potent, even remembering it can scare you. The pea soup is the least of it.
So far 13 Days of Halloween has beheld scary things (movie trailers, short stories, TV shows, songs, etc.) from a safe distance. Some of the spookiest, most creative visions of the year, however, might be on view right down the street from you at this very moment. The past couple of decades have seen Halloween lawn displays evolve from modest Jack-o-Lanterns to sprawling, grisly spectacles worthy of professional haunted houses like Netherworld. Down the street from my mother-in-law’s home in Chamblee, for instance, you can see a giant-sized spider surrounded by fake human bones (at least, I hope they’re fake) in an otherwise nondescript neighborhood.
Given that you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting morbid yard art this time of year, What’s the best local Halloween display you know? Email photos of the scariest or most imaginative outdoor decorations at Joeff.Davis@cln.com — if you dare! — and we’ll make an on-line slideshow of them worthy of “Night Gallery.” It’s your chance to can take your monstrous front-lawn tableau viral and scare exponentially more people.
To be fair, I probably don’t know enough scary radio shows to make an informed decision, and radio’s a perfect medium for generating chills. While I’m sure there are many unsung classics, Orson Welles’ broadcast of The War of the Worlds seems an inarguable choice, given that it generated actual hysteria in real life.
Exactly how many people thought Welles’ news report-style adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel really was an actual alien invasion is subject to dispute (some estimates hold the number to be well over a million). The Mercury Theatre on the Air’s War of the Worlds included three disclaimers that it was fiction, and here’s my favorite theory about how it still scared people nontheless:
Later studies indicate that many missed the repeated notices that the broadcast was fictional, partly because the Mercury Theatre (an unsponsored “cultural” program with a relatively small audience) ran opposite the popular Chase and Sanborn Hour over the Red Network of NBC, hosted by Don Ameche and featuring comic ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and singer Nelson Eddy, three of the most popular figures in broadcasting. About 15 minutes into the Chase and Sanborn program the first comic sketch ended and a musical number began, and many listeners began tuning around the dial at that point. As a result, some listeners happened upon the CBS broadcast at the point the Martians emerge from their spacecraft.
Notoreity aside, Welles’ War of the Worlds holds up quite well, particularly the passage mentioned above, when the newly-arrived Martians aim a death ray at a broadcaster (whose delivery was allegedly inspired by the famous play-by-play of the 1937 Hindenburg crash). Check out the “eyewitness account” at the 7-minute mark, and listen for the blood-curdling scream and even more nerve-wracking silence that follows. Then imagine stumbling across it while dial-surfing in the 1930s:
Sequential television programs don’t readily lend themselves to fright, because the same characters usually come back every week and can only be put in so much peril. Anthology shows had more license to torment their victims, particularly Rod Serling’s ingenious “The Twilight Zone” and his more feverish “Night Gallery.” In one of “The Zone’s” best gotcha moments, from “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” a squirrelly mental patient (William Shatner) on a malfunctioning aircraft looked out his plane window only to see a gremlin’s bestial face staring back at him. (The adaptation from the uneven movie is good, too.)
“The X-Files” at its best proved highly effective at presenting new hauntings and alien abductions each week, and showed the influence of the 1970s short-lived, much-beloved monster-hunting show “Kolchak: The Night Stalker.” In a way, “The X-Files” served as a “safer” version of “Twin Peaks,” David Lynch and Mark Frost’s night-time soap opera with an ironic hybrid of lurid twists and ironic humor. “Twin Peaks” wasn’t always violent or horrific, but its darkest moments may never be surpassed at terrifying viewers. “Peaks” hit its monstrous heights when Lynch directed the nightmares and criminal acts that set the demonic spirit called “BOB” lose against helpless victims. In a sadistic joke on the show’s loyal audience, “Twin Peaks” concluded with BOB taking possession of wholesome FBI agent Dale Cooper. Here’s one of the show’s most disturbing visions from the end of the second season premiere:
I should also mention a TV show that doesn’t quite “count,” but comes first to my mind when the phobia-inducing subject comes up.
Graphic novels have an equivalent to Sweeney Todd in From Hell, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s encyclopedically dense and disturbing autopsy of the Jack the Ripper murders (currently published by Top Shelf Productions). Well before the English writer penned From Hell and Watchmen, he terrorized American readers in the 1980s by taking over Swamp Thing, then an obscure DC Comics title about a plant-man in the Louisiana bayou. Moore pushed not just the character but the very medium into breathtaking territory, abetted by artists Stephen Bissette and John Totleben, whose intricate illustrations harked back to classic/shlocky EC Comics titles like Tales of the Crypt from the early 1950s. (Forget about the movie and TV versions with their tree-hugging “Do not bring your evil here” messages.)
Moore’s second issue of Swamp Thing, titled “The Anatomy Lesson,” offered a wildly diverse reinterpretation of the title characters origins while also providing a Poe-worthy revenge tale. One moment comes to mind that conveys the depths of Moore’s imagination from the Saga of the Swamp Thing Book Two collection (coming out just in time for Christmas). In one issue, Swamp Thing descends to Hell itself to rescue his lady love and happens upon the soul of his arch-enemy, Arcane, being eaten alive from the inside out.
“How many years have I been here?” Arcane asks.
“Since yesterday,” Swamp Thing replies.
The scream of a villain’s realization of the scope of eternal damnation? Priceless.
While shivering over the scariest stage plays yesterday, I neglected to mention Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The sung-through musical seems so sharply different from scary “straight” plays that it belongs in another category altogether.
The vast majority of pop tunes about monsters and murderers tend to be cool, not creepy, from “Mack the Knife” to “Werewolves of London.” Pop music offers plenty of tracks for your Halloween party, including your average heavy metal Satanic anthem and seemingly every other song by The Cramps or Oingo Boingo. (My favorite is “Screaming Skull” by The Fleshtones.) But with rare exceptions like Primus’ “Mr. Krinkle,” they’re more for rocking you out than haunting your sleep.
On the other hand, Sondheim’s Grand Guignol musical from 1978 includes lovely solos and psychotic arias, none more blood-curdling than “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd.” Framing the musical, “Ballad” offers a portrait of murderous psychology from its very first words: “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd. / His skin was pale and his eye was odd. / He shaved the faces of gentlemen / who never thereafter were heard of again.” It’s like a hundred Penny Dreadfuls distilled into less than five minutes. (Ironically, Tim Burton’s film version only includes an instrumental version of the song. Maybe he was chicken.) This performance version from 2006 Tony Awards broadcast begins and ends with “Ballad” and includes bits of Patti Lupone’s “The Worst Pies in London” and Michael Cerveris’ “My Friends.” The latter, a love song to a straight razor, builds to the horrific kicker, “My right arm is complete again!”
The most frightening moments in live theater don’t always come where advertised. Mystery chestnuts like Sleuth or Deathtrap come across like suspenseful parlor games, while old-fashioned ghost stories like Conor McPherson’s The Weir, however atmospheric, seldom provide anything to lose sleep over. On the other hand, more high-brow examples of the modern “Theater of Menace,” like Harold Pinter’s enigmatic, paranoia-inducing The Birthday Party, Martin McDonagh’s totalitarian fable The Pillowman and Caryl Churchill’s apocalyptic fantasy Far Away all generate dread that lingers long after the curtain calls.
A spine-tingling, straight-up Gothic exception to rule, however, is The Woman in Black, currently creaking the boards at Theatre in the Square. The late Stephen Mallatratt wrote the play in 1987 to fill a playhouse’s Christmas slot while keeping the number of actors and props to a minimum. Mallatratt promptly scared the knickers off England, and The Woman in Black has subsequently played in London’s West End for 20 years and countless other theaters elsewhere. As a theatrical ghost story, it comes second only in popularity to Hamlet, I guess.
The ingenious quality of The Woman in Black is the way it taps the mood-creating powers of oral-tradition storytelling and the chilling power of live stage effects. T-Square’s production team take to the latter like kids playing a spooky prank on their parents. The begins when aging lawyer Arthur Kipps (David Milford) engages an theatrical impresario identified as “The Actor” (Gil Brady) to help him tell a story he’s desperate to get off his chest. The Actor suggests a theatrical experience rather than a dry, five-hour recitation, and sets up a funny contrast between Kipp’s rushed, amateurish delivery and the younger man’s ability to set a scene. The initial tension of how to tell the story soon gives over to its compelling content.
Considerable discussion of Spike Jonze’s hit Where the Wild Things Are concerns whether it’s too frightening for kids. The Maurice Sendak adaptation features some admittedly suspenseful, night-time scenes of the (mostly harmless) wild things pursuing a young boy. Of course, often such questions beg the answer, “It depends on the kids.” Some young ones can witness unspeakable acts on screen without batting an eye, while others can shriek at seemingly innocuous figures like, say, disembodied Jambi from “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.” The wrong scene at the wrong time can create phobias that linger for decades.
Children’s entertainment offers countless examples of spooky, potentially traumatic moments, including many early Disney features, the Dementor scenes from the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Akzaban and a close-up corpse grinning in a ghastly rictus in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. (And they can be much scarier in a loud, cavernous theater than on video). Recently Cracked.com ran down some horrifying moments from classic kids movies and included the one that I think lingers the most: it’s relentless, hallucinatory and seems out of context of the rest of the film. Plus,the scene supports the idea that the 1970s were the scariest decade ever. The freak-out kicks in around the 2:10 mark. “You’re going to love this… just love it.”
“TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad?” Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” hooks the reader from its first sentence and is a perennial contender for the most frightening short story ever written.
Unlike nearly all forms of fiction, however, the initial words aren’t always the most crucial to scary short stories. Frequently the last line provides the killing stroke. A truly enduring, haunting tale should end on a note that feels like a trapdoor opening up beneath its readers, leaving them off-balance and breathless. Sudden endings are a plus, like the way “The Tell-Tale Heart” ends with the nameless, murderous narrator, convinced he hears his victim’s heart beating, snaps and admits his crime:
You know how in horror movies, the victims-to-be always open the forbidden doors, no matter how loudly you yell, “Don’t go in there!” at the screen? Well, Culture Surfing can’t resist counting down the days to Halloween with examples of the biggest scares in pop culture, across multiple media. Think of them as the razor-blade apples in your Trick-or-Treat bag.
Let’s creak that door open by asking, “What’s the scariest movie trailer?” Frankly, the kinds of trailers that scare me most are the ones like this or especially this. Most contemporary horror trailers these days culminate with a memorably loud, often visually incoherent jolt at the audience. Today’s sneak previews can’t hold a candle to the Exorcist-influenced trailers of the 1970s, which often had a fever-dream quality that made their cheapness even more unnerving. Perhaps I’m biased because I was a kid in the 70s, but the TV commercials for the likes of Suspiria, and It’s Alive never failed to freak me out. Most menacing at all was the trailer for Magic, an Anthony Hopkins psycho-ventriloquist flick from 1978. “Fats” the evil dummy terrorized my younger self at movie theaters and on late night TV:
Does it leave you unfazed? Okay, Mr. Braveboots, what’s a scarier one?
Graphic novels have an equivalent to 
The most frightening moments in live theater don’t always come where advertised. Mystery chestnuts like 
“TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad?” Edgar Allen Poe’s 