phrightening – MINDING MY P'S WITH Q

DAILY PROMPT – TRICK OR TREAT

It’s Halloween, and you just ran out of candy. If the neighborhood kids (or anyone else, really) were to truly scare you, what trick would they have to subject you to?

There are several ways the little ghouls in the neighborhood could scare me, in fact there are three themes that would work, not just at Halloween, but all through the year. All of these scary moments became ingrained in me through frightening scenes in movies and television.

I’m not so much a fan of “phrightening” movies as an adult in mid-life. (I think I swore off of them when I dreamt vividly of collapsing haunted houses after watching the first installment of Stephen King’s “Rose Red” mini-series.) As a child, teen-ager and young adult one of my greatest joys was being scared by a well-made horror movie. I began to turn away from the horror genre when it became filled with gore rather than good old-fashioned scares. Laying all these explanations aside, here are three horror scenes that scared me, courtesy of YouTube.

Theme One – A SCARY Doll
Maybe you are thinking, “Of course, Child’s Play.” No my dears, I am thinking of a real oldie, “Trilogy of Terror” and the Zuni Fetish Doll. Here’s a little clip.

Theme Two – A SCARY Animal

There are a lot of scary animal movies that would make good choices for this theme. My all-time scary animal is the man-eating shark in Jaws, but in this short clip you won’t see the great white shark that still, almost forty years later, keeps me hearing the same scary music any time I’m in the ocean. The first time my eyes were assaulted by this scene, in a Vineland, New Jersey movie theater, I jumped harder than I’ve ever jumped since in a scary movie.

Theme Three – Someone SCARY looking through your window.

This one is more my husband’s horror than mine. As a child he saw the Twilight Zone in which William Shatner, before his Star Trek fame, is horrified by a horribly scary (at least at the time of limited media special effects) monster on the wing of an airplane. My husband says this scared him for years as a child. Guess What? Whenever we fly I always find a moment to whisper in a frightened tone in my husband’s ear, “Shatner.” We always laugh, and he knows exactly what I mean. Seriously, he still tends to look out the airplane window at the wing when I say Shatner’s name. Funny…and true!