It is life, bound.

Think of the journal drawn by Mary Klein in Mothman Prophecy before she dies. Using only what she has with her in the hospital after her car accident, Mary (played by Debra Messing), uses the tools she had - her eyeliner and lipstick - to draw the winged figure that she sees and that causes such fear and caused the accident in the first place. The creature of which she says to her husband (Richard Gere), "You didn't see it, did you." She draw the figure over and over again. It is a moth-man, with heavily darkened wings or a dark cape, colored in with her dark kohl eyeliner, with eyes red as her blood-orange colored Shisheido, colored over and over again so heavily that it almost looks as though it were drawn with oil paint.

Like Dolarhyde's fat and huge journal, and Mary Klein's heavily drawn lipstick-red eyes and the images drawn by the young victims in The Ring, each of these characters reveals some turmoil of their inner world - the dark journey of the soul as it begins a slow descent into madness or a journey of extreme horror and fear.

John Klein (Richard Gere) is initially so blind to Mothman that he may never have found his wife's hospital journal were it not for the distant figure of the attendant who informs him that before Mary died she had been "drawing angels" as if "she knew," the attendant says.

Yes, Mary Klein did in fact know, but it had little to do with angels by any standard definition. Yes, Mothman is the harbinger of death, the symbolic manifestation of the soul's winged flight and journey to the after world. More, it seems that he is often or maybe only seen by those who have some prescience, just like our young friends in The Ring. You have to know you are going to die, or at least, the process must be started, otherwise, you do not see the way John Klein is in the same car with Mary when it crashes, but doesn't see the winged Mothman.

You are either sensitive or not sensitive, as Annie (Cate Blanchett) would say in The Gift (anyone else noticing these two word titles: the briefer the better. Concept based horror, and simplified.) One cannot draw what one has not seen, and in these films anyway, the very fact of seeing has rendered you in deep doo doo. If you see it - and the it will change from film to film - you will die, or the very least, you've got death lurking very nearby.

Fear.com had the same premise, though it wasn't done well enough to succeed and instead, fell flat on it's face. It could have been a great film. After all, it shared the same conceit as these others noted here - all of which I think are excellent films. Yet Fear.com didn't get into our heads the same way. Maybe if they had made the Web site weirder or shown us more of the victims inner world we would have believed. As it stands, the site wasn't intricate enough, it wasn't, and I hate to say it, artistic enough. Only a work and I'm convinced of this, great art, would be so terrifying. It has be done or drawn, compiled, painted, filmed, directed whatever - by someone who, like the victims in these films, is sensitive.