Retrocrush gets scary - Page 2

For example, I found The Exorcist scary when I first saw it on TV, but the split pea soup was not frightening, just kind of ugh. Similarly, the eyeball stuff in the Bunuel film is more biologically yuck than scary. Maybe it's a bit scary for people who don't know that it's coming... the first time I saw it was in a university lecture theatre with a bunch of people who mostly didn't seem to know what lay ahead; that occasion provided proof that a film made in 1928 still has the power to make people scream with horror. Hmm, horror, there's that word again. Apparently Boris Karloff didn't like Frankenstein being called a horror film as he thought "horror" had connotations of physical nastiness rather than the emotion of fear. He suggested "terror film" as an alternative name for the new genre but it never caught on. Maybe he was onto something, though.

Anyway, the eyeball stuff in Chien strikes me as more of a shock thing than anything else, which, I suppose, then begs the question, just how much of a difference is there between shocking a viewer and scaring them. Some examples again. The shower scene from Psycho tops the list. There's also the scene from The Birds with the dead man with no eyes, that rather bravura opening murder from Suspiria, and Lon Chaney's unmasking in The Phantom of the Opera. These are, to be sure, shock moments... but are they scary? Or am I just splitting hairs here? I don't know because I don't actually have an answer to that question, so "splitting hairs" may actually be the valid response here. Still, thought I'd throw the question out anyway.

Incidentally, Chaney's unmasking scores quite highly on the list, which is nice to see. For my money, though, it's probably not until you compare a photo of him from that film with a photo of him without makeup and contemplate the makeup job he had to do on himself to get that look (yes, he did his own makeup) that you realise how scary his Phantom actually is.

Article Author: James Russell

Visit James Russell's author page — James Russell's Blog