Saturday, July 14, 2007
Boo.
I get great satisfaction out of giving people a good startle.Often, when I hear my husband -- calm, cool Christian with the oh, so perfect hair -- come home from work, I'll hide in corner or behind a door and just at the right moment, I'll jump out and yell "Yeeeeeeeeaaaa!"
Almost every time, he jumps and clutches at his shirt all wide-eyed and panicked. One time he actually screamed like a little girl and I was in hysterics for the rest of the evening.
The best fright I ever gave was to my good friend and one-time housemate, Laura. She's a very level-headed Veterinarian who doesn't really believe in things that go bump in the night, but at the same time hates spooky films because they scare the hell out of her.
I'd seen The Ring a few days before she did.
And I timed it perfectly.
I knew she was going to go see the 9:00 PM showing and I knew approximately how long it would take her to get home from the theater. And I knew she'd already be totally freaked out.
So, at the right time, I placed the phone call, hoping she was just pulling into her car port and would hear the phone ring as she opened the door... She didn't have an answering machine, so I just let it ring, until finally she answered all hurried and breathless... "Hello?"
To which I whispered: "Seven days..."
My God -- you would not believe the blood curdling scream I heard on the other end.
It was AWESOME.
Ghost stories scare the ever living shit out of me. I love them. When I was a kid, I read so many books about ghosts: from the "non-fiction" section (everything), The Amityville Horror (no, I have not seen the movie re-make), Blatty's The Exorcist, Stephen King, Peter Straub's brilliant Ghost Story -- and the movies... I saw them all. "The Changeling" is still the freaking scariest thing I've ever seen next to the Red Rum scene in "The Shining". Other top Scaries go to: "Rosemary's Baby", "The Omen", "The Lady in White", "The Sentinel ", and yes "The Poltergeist".
My first ghost movie that I saw in the theatre? Watcher in the Woods. My dad thought it would be safe because Disney made it. Hah. I had nightmares for days (we were living in England in the time, which added to my fear factor).
Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Halloween... whatever. Creepy, but they didn't really scare me. Just the ghost stories.
So, when I heard that Stephen King's son wrote a book about a ghost that the protagonist purchased on the Internet via an e-Bay copycat, I had to read it. I hadn't read horror in years. It was my genre of choice in high school: I read everything by Koontz, V.C. Andrews, King, Barker, and various other authors. I stopped reading King after "Misery" when he announced that it was the last Castle Rock story that he'd ever write. I was like: Fuck him then.
But the grudge didn't hold over to his son, Joe Hill who wrote the 2007 "Heart Shaped Box" novel, about an aging rock star who has an eclectic collection of weird shit, including a ghost. (The website is great). I finished it last weekend -- it was a quick read.
Either I'm a big girl now who doesn't get as scared as easily as she used to or it was just an okay book. I'm guessing it's a little of both. The whole time I was reading it, I was thinking that it would scare the ever living hell out of me if it were made into a movie. Don't get me wrong, it's actually worth a read if you are into the genre, but it does not hold all of the intricacies in writing that totally terrorize you like Anne Rice or Stephen King is capable of penning.
I actually hope it does get made into a movie, because it would be truly frightening with the imagery of the blacked-out scribbly-marked eyes of the ghosts (stolen from the X-Files black oil eyed aliens, I think).
Let me know if you have any great ghost books or movie recommendations for me, because they are few and far between and I am long overdue for a good scare.
Oh and happy Friday 13th.