Let's talk about what scares you
I love this time of year, because the opportunity to talk about scary things in media —books, TV, film, etc — is always an on-point topic. I'm not sure really where my fascination with frightening things started, it definitely wasn't inherent in me as a kid.
Yet suddenly I've found myself in recent years consuming as much horror as I can. I started thinking about this last night, as I finally watched the season 2 premiere of American Horror Story , a show I never managed to get into much during the first season because I felt the writers confused "scary" with "bondage."
For those not familiar or interested, suffice to say the show is an anthology, so each season is completely different but still pressing to check the pulse of the same vein of weird, freaky American terror.
One of the things I noticed and loved about episode 1 of this season's American Horror Story is the sound composition and editing, something that I find myself to weirdly be a nerd about.
My band does a re-soundtracking of various episodes of David Lynch's freaky television masterpiece TwinPeaks, so I think I've become attuned to how sound can make or break what should be a terrifying sensory experience — and American Horror Story this year has it, in spades. A well-placed drone or thunk can scare the daylights out of me more than, say, seeing a zombie attack.
It's for this reason I never really latched on to The Walking Dead, despite it A) being filmed in my hometown of Atlanta and B) being apparently an amazing show. It just doesn't scare me.
The first movie that really jarred me was shakycam recordsetter The Blair Witch Project. The first time I saw it, the cast had yet to be revealed as actors, and the strikingly low-fidelity composition of the film made it very easy to buy into the fear.
Even after I knew the whole thing was fake, I still saw it in theaters nine more times, each time digging my nails into the armrests of the seats. The terror, for me, resulting in being able to see absolutely nothing of the supernatural tormentor, and made me realize that my own imagination contains things much scarier than what Hollywood can craft.
That's why I'm obsessed with Blackout Haunted House. I'm sure you've heard of it at this point: it's in New York and L.A., you have to walk through alone, you have to sign a waiver, there are sexual abuse scenes and torture scenes, and on and on.
Yes, last year I got faux waterboarded, but that didn't scare me nearly as much as all the time you're forced to spend alone, in the dark, in silence, with actors walking around you coming just close enough to touch you but not, always completely out of sight.
The incredible underground hip-hop producer Lyle Horowitz has been documenting a 2012 virtual tour of haunted houses across the United States and so far he hasn't found anything that reaches this level of immersive terror.
So, for me, the biggest scare factor that film or television can employ is the unknown. Don't SHOW me the zombie, imply what it could do — a la Cormac McCarthy's The Road . How about you, though? I know many found The Blair Witch Project to be shaky, inane nonsense — as we work toward Halloween, what media scares you and why?