Welcome to Horror Month!!!
Like a typical horror fan, October is my favorite month. Nobody judges you for getting spooky or watching horror movies every weekend. This is our time, boys.
I thought it’d be fun to kick off the month with a laundry list of the things in horror that scare me the most. Now, this isn’t an excuse for those of you that know me in real life to torture me with these things.
I’m going to split this between a few categories, as different things scare me in books than films. I’ll also give a nice fun list of my creature fears and my phobias. And no, I will not be including triggering pictures for any of said phobias, because I’m not an asshole. Most of the time.
Alright, let’s get spooky!
Film
Long still shots– Nothing builds tension for me like a still shot that keeps you on edge. Think Paranormal Activity– we’re constantly searching the frame for any sign of movement, any indication that something wasn’t as it was before. That’s why, no matter your opinion on the PA movies, I’ll always be on edge while watching one.
Long still shots just make me nervous, and the whole time I’m just willing them to get it over with, which makes my heart pound. Love it. Side note, a fun example of this in books is that one scene in Paul Tremblay’s Horror Movie, where we get several pages that just let us stew on one static shot of a screenplay. Absolutely genius.
Slow panning shots- Not sure if this is a great word for it, but I saw it once and it got me so bad. If you’ve seen The Black Phone, you might remember a shot of our main character in the basement. The camera is doing an excruciatingly slow horizontal pan of the room around him, and a floating dead kid just appears as we pan over. No sound, no jumpscare, nobody on screen was even moving. God that was chilling.
Things emerging from darkness– Think those haunted house movies where someone’s up exploring the attic or basement. The corners of the room are cloaked in darkness, and as we look (bonus points if it’s not the focus of the shot) something comes out of that dark corner. There are actually several of these in The Babadook (thinking of that coat in the bedroom). I’m pretty sure The Grudge has one or two of these as well. These kinds of shots are way more chilling than just a screen jumpscare.
Books
Repeated phrases- Some good examples of this are found in And The Trees Crept In, which contains an entire two-page spread of just the words “stop it” over and over again in varying font sizes. We’ve also got this in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, right at the end of that horrifying janitor scene. I listened to both of those on audio, and holy crap that was unnerving. I had to turn off ITOET after that for a little bit until I moved to a well-lit room in my house.
Dramatic irony- Fans of Stephen King will have seen this many times. This is where the narrator tells us something that the characters don’t know, for example: “He had no idea that he would be dead before he could fulfill his promise.” There’s a really famous one of these in Pet Sematary, and it’s seriously the scariest line of the book. Just a total stop spine chiller. It’s also quite rampant in a lot of Dark Tower books.
Creatures/things slowly approaching- I’m specifically thinking here of the hedge animals scare in The Shining. That’s one of the scariest scenes King has ever written.
Also, when one of the losers in IT (can’t remember which one) is being chased out of the Niebolt house by the rotting wino. The way he’s described as approaching slowly but steadily, and the fear as our loser tries to run.
Stinks- This is really effective for me in books, and it’s something you really can’t do in film. When an author describes a terrible smell- usually rotting flesh- it’s perfect because it lets you imagine the smell for yourself. Smell is a really hard thing to portray in a visual medium because it’s often described interiorly (is that a word?). There are some fantastic examples of this in Nick Cutter’s The Queen.
Some great stinks in there.
Creatures
Deer/elk- There’s just something about their dead black eyes and twitchy movements that get to me. I don’t think it’s a taxidermy thing- that’s never really bothered me much. I think a lot of it has to do with their home environment, the forest, which is a classic setting for creepy shit to go down.
I’ve probably also been a little traumatized by The Only Good Indians. Bonus points if it’s a human body with a deer head. Oh, fuck that.
A human body with the head of something else- Don’t ask why this gets to me, it’s just always given me the heebie jeebies. Specifically thinking of the minotaur in AHS: Coven, but any examples of that will get me. Honestly, even the Nutcracker scares me a little bit.
Goats- I think we all know that goat eyes are creepy as hell. They literally look like they see past you and into your soul. Bonus points if it’s a black goat, because I’ve been traumatized by The Witch.
Large humanoid robots- Go ahead and laugh. I don’t care. This is a big fear for me. Not sure where it came from. Especially if they make some sort of noise. Thinking of the giant robot in COD: Nazi Zombies that roams around the playing field and can STEP ON YOU, all while emitting an occasional horrifying creak that sounds like the soul of a forest screaming in agony. You know what, here’s a clip of it so you can understand.
Also get the jeebies a little from IG-11 in The Mandalorian, and (don’t you say shit to me) the Iron Giant. Yes, I know he’s benevolent, but he’s still got that giant scary factor. And before you ask, no, I haven’t seen Pacific Rim, and now that I know what it is, I’m saving it for Horror Month.
Phobias
To reiterate, I’m not including any pictures to avoid triggering anyone who may share my phobias. This is a safe place.
Trypophobia- this is defined by Wikipedia as “an aversion to the sight of repetitive patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps”. This is my most pervasive phobia, one that actually affects my life on occasion. I can’t handle any sort of skin condition that involves bumps or patterns, the sight of a real honeycomb, maggots, or anything in a cluster, like a clump of ants in one spot. Fun fact- I can’t watch The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack because the artists seem to have a thing for horrible shots of bumpy skin. I don’t even like to cook ground beef because if I overdo it and don’t oil the pan correctly, little nubs of beef will get stuck to the pan. Blegh.
Pitch black darkness- I think this might be more tied to claustrophobia, but I can’t be in a pitch black room. It always makes me feel like I’m suffocating. My dad (hi!) sleeps in pitch blackness, and the few times I’ve had to share sleeping quarters with him on trips were definitely sleepless nights full of panic.
Acrophobia- Fear of heights. This is another one that I often experience in daily life. I’m not talking standing on tops of buildings or scaffolding or legitimately scary things like that- I mean that I can’t even approach a railing to a balcony if it’s more than, like, 30 feet off the ground.
Thalassophobia- Fear of deep water. This is kind of a partial one for me, because I don’t mind being in a boat or some sort of watercraft, but I couldn’t for the life of me swim in a deep lake or the ocean. It’s the dangling legs for me. Nothing between my kicking feet and the bottom of a several-hundred-foot-deep body of water? Nope. I’m good.
FUN TIDBIT: I am admittedly quite tough when it comes to most horror media, but I am a complete baby at certain types of horror video games. While I love it to death, Dead Space puts me so on edge that I’ve never been able to play it for long periods of time.
I was thoroughly horrified to the point of actual screaming when I played through the Layers of Fear games, and I never finished Outlast. I think I may have actually cried playing Outlast.
BONUS: Common fears that don’t bother me
This isn’t to make me look tough or “better” than anyone who does fear these things, but I think knowing what doesn’t do anything for me is a great way to know what kind of horror writer I am.
Clowns- These guys have never really bothered me. I love things that are brightly colored as well as fun costumes that accentuate or exaggerate human features. I think the whole fear of clowns thing was created by horror media, honestly, and I can sometimes get tired of people only thinking of “killer clowns” when they’re brought up. Yes, I get it, and you know IT is one of my favorite IPs of all time, but it’s not the clown part of it that I find scary. Clowns were created to help us cope with the world and be able to make fun of ourselves. I think that’s just too pure to really scare me.
Gore- Nobody better come at my parents for this, but one of our funny family anecdotes was that, for Christmas when I was 12 or 13, my parents got me the DVD of Saw as a gift. Don’t give them shit, they didn’t know what it was, just that I was into it. So, suffice to say, I’ve been seeing pretty crazy gore since a pretty young age. I mean, I also read my first King book around this age, so I really was exposed to a lot of horror during my developmental years. So, growing up on horror like the Saw franchise, I’m really not phased much by gore. I was fine during Damien Leone’s Terrifier 3. I watched The Long Walk recently (big recommend), and the headshots didn’t get me or anything. Loved that shot of walking on the broken ankle.
Slashers- This might be a common idea, I don’t know, but for me, a slasher isn’t what I’m going to put on if I’m in the mood for a horror movie. There’s nothing really scary to me about a long-winded chase scene, or an unknown masked man terrorizing a group of people for one reason or another. Don’t get me wrong- I love slashers- just not as horror.
I love them for the characters and the way they deal with their fear and the way they problem-solve to try to save themselves. To be nice, some of my favorites are I Know What You Did Last Summer, A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), and Scream. I also had a great time with My Heart Is A Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones.
Discussing my fears like this has been cathartic, and I’m super excited to be scared all of October this year. What scares you? Do you share any fears with me? Do you think any of my fears are goofy? Let’s start thinking about and discussing fear in media as we gear up for October, the month loved and long-awaited by every horror lover in the world.
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