Thursday, October 30, 2008

Regarding Scary Things That Crawl Out of Televisions

I just like to be prepared, that's all.

If I'm planning a trip to a restaurant, I'll check the menu online. If I'm planning a trip to a park, I'll look for the hiking trail maps. And if I'm driving somewhere, whether I've been there or not, as I have absolutely no sense of direction, I'll check a map. If I'm looking for a new book to read, I'll read reviews.

Mike thinks that researching a menu is cheating, but I think that it's smart because I want to know what to expect. Left to my own devices at the restaurant, it would take me seventeen hours to decide on an entree, and then five hours to eat it. But really, I think that it's just good sense = have you seen the menu at the freaking Cheesecake Factory? It's a NOVELLA.

For restaurants, I think that looking ahead is fine. Sometimes I'm bad, though. And this has everything to do with the screen. I don't stop at reading reviews - I want to see clips, I read the spoilers, I read the extended plot versions, and I read the comments on message boards. I discover the twists before I even see the damn movies.

I know that I shouldn't.

But I never once searched for my Christmas presents early. I wanted to be surprised. There are just some things that I won't do.

Mike and I are watching The Ring tomorrow night (in response to learning about our Halloween plans, my brother said, "You're watching a scary movie on Halloween? How cliche!"). I've been wanting to see it for years, but I've been too much of a chicken-shit to give in. But I knew that I would watch it eventually, so I never read about it. Really. I know the plot, roughly, mostly from the trailers (and from the trailers of spoofs like Scary Movie 3). I also know that more than one person has told me to avoid it as I will never sleep again, supposedly.

Mike has promised to keep me safe, but if I can no longer look at a future televsion without freaking out, that will make me very sad indeed. Because I like tv. I like tv a lot. TV is awesome.

And while I do love a good slasher flick once in a while, I enjoy psychological thrillers more. The Sixth Sense, Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, and The Others sent chills down my spine and had my heart racing like few others. I love scary movies, and I love to be scared.

Then there are movies based on video and computer games. These tend to scare me more than anything - at least so far. Silent Hill? Holy shit on toast, that movie scared the bejesus out of me. And then I imagined playing it as a game and decided that would be even more scary because I would be in control - or not. The only video/computer games that I remember being scary were Tombs and Treasure for Nintendo 1.0 and The 7th Guest, a game my cousins had for their first computer. Read the wiki for 7th Guest - it's fucked up. I can't believe my aunt let us play it to begin with.

Anyway, I'll let you know how it goes with The Ring. I'm really hoping that I don't pee all over Mike's loveseat.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh the 7th Guest was AMAZING! I loved that game. It got really creepy the more you got into it though. I definitely freaked myself out several times and had to turn it off.

RR said...

JLR and I played Silent Hill, and omg. We wanted to watch the movie but couldn't bring ourselves to do it--the video game was bad enough (and even involved a moment when her boyfriend and I leapt into each other's arms out of sheer terror and then tried to play it off like we were too cool to have done that). Although Sean Bean was almost worth watching it for, no movie for us...especially now that you've confirmed how scary it was.

Heather said...

lem - It was so awesome, and we could never get that far into it because we would have to come up to dinner or something stupid like that. And since we didn't have a computer at our house, we couldn't even borrow the damn thing. I know that it would be so ridiculous now, but I would love to play it again!

rr - The movie was so scary! It was both jumpy and psychologically jumpy, the characters were freaky, and the whole premise was creepy. I honestly didn't think that it would be that scary - I definitely had at least one nightmare due to what happened when all of the lights went out. HOLY SHIT. At the same time, it was pretty good! The acting was great. So... do with that what you will.