Wanna See Something Really Scary?

It's October and this weekend Suzanne hauled out all the decor - the jack-o-lanterns, the plastic spiders, the faux bubbling cauldron, the string of ghost lights, and the various witches. We added some new strings of orange lights for the outside of the house and bought "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" figurines for the shelves in the living room. (Charlie Brown himself with his ghost costume with too many eye holes, Snoopy as the WWI Flying Ace atop his dog house, and Lucy complete with an apple-bobbing tub.) For whatever reason, Halloween is our family's favorite holiday, second only to Christmas. The decorations, the candy, the dressing up - it's just more festive than, say, Arbor Day.



The thing about Halloween is that it's best (to me) when it carefully treads the line between spooky and fun. I don't really get anything from the severed-head, fake-blood, people-jumping-out-with-chainsaws aspect of the holiday. I never liked the haunted forest, haunted house, haunted cornfield, haunted shopping mall, haunted port-a-johns that proliferated all over my native southeast Idaho. I've never taken much pleasure in being scared. Some people love it. Good ol' Tony, friend of years and tears, loves being scared. Loves horror movies. Loves being in frightening places. When he was a teenager, he and a friend would go to a local cemetery at night and take turns hiding behind gravestones while the other wandered around, waiting to be leapt upon.

Not for me.

I don't like horror movies at all and never have. As a young teenager, there was some cultural cache among my friends in somehow finding a way to see the latest Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th. There was something supposedly manly and "cool" about watching people get cut up or impaled. I watched my share, mostly with my brother Jason who liked scary flicks, but I never liked them. Even as an adult, my tastes haven't changed. Tony took me to see Gore Verbinski's version of The Ring and, while he left the theater exhilarated, I left just feeling gross and bummed out. As I said, no pleasure there for me.

Interestingly, horror is a topic of great interest in the film studies world. It seems it's an "important site" worthy of examination for the cultural and psychological blah blah blah it reveals. Whatever. Certainly, it's fraught with all sorts of ideas and manifest desires. But I don't care. It bores me and when it doesn't bore me, it sickens me.

However, as I was mowing the lawn on Saturday between sessions of General Conference, I was listening to Dean Martin's Greatest Hits (yes, I am that eclectic and cool) and the music combined with the beautiful fall weather and all the Halloween decorations made me think of one of the few movies that actually creeped me out in a good way: The Lady In White.

Made in 1988 by a nearly one-man-show named Frank LaLoggia (wrote, produced, directed, and even composed the music) and starring a very young but post-Witness Lukas Hass, The Lady in White is about a young boy who witnesses a murder that is reenacted by the ghost of the victim. The whole thing is spooky and well-done but is never gross, repellent, or lame. There's one moment in the film (I won't say which) that still gives me the shivers every time I see it. It's a still moment but scary and unexpected. (Those of you who have seen the movie will probably know what I'm talking about.)



The other film I remember genuinely scaring me as a kid (and I know my brother Jason can get behind me on this one) is the 1980 film The Watcher in the Woods with Bette Davis. It was the third to the last film she ever did and I just remember her being really disarming and unsettling. IMDB's summary of the film reads, "When a normal American family moves into a beautiful old English house in a wooded area, strange, paranormal appearances befall them in this interesting twist to the well-known haunted-house tale. Their daughter Jan sees, and daughter Ellie hears, the voice of a young teenage girl who mysteriously disappeared during a total solar eclipse decades before..." Again, the film frightened me and filled me with a fun sense of dread without being gory or resorting to stupid shock tactics.



So if you're looking for a couple of Halloweenish movies to watch on a Friday night that don't involve blood and guts, I recommend these two. (Keep in mind that I haven't seen The Watcher in the Woods since I was seven or eight. There's a chance it's turned to pure cheese in the intervening decades.)

Anyone else? Genuinely scary movies?

P.S. Ten cool points for those who can name the source of my post title.