With this installment, Scarred draws to a close, and who better to show us out than one of the most respected horror and thriller writers of the past forty years. Ramsey Campbell is the critically acclaimed author of The Face That Must Die, The One Safe Place and numerous other novels and short stories. His latest novels include The Grin of the Dark and Thieving Fear, and a new short story collection, Just Behind You, which is forthcoming from PS Publishing. He’s currently working on a novel, Creatures of the Pool, as well as contributing a regular column in Video Watchdog.

What scares you, Mr. Campbell?

Very few films terrify me these days. I’d be happy if they did, and I always watch in hope. The Blair Witch Project, with its combination of documentary realism and Lovecraftian allusiveness, works rather well, and some of the Asian spectres that have haunted our screens recently are closer to M. R. James’ inhuman revenants than almost any of those in films of his stories. However, the one director whose work has conveyed unutterable dread to me several times is David Lynch. I’m not exaggerating: Eraserhead feels to me like being trapped in someone else’s bad dream. The old couple in Mulholland Dr. dismay me as soon as they start grinning, long before they shrink, and they’re by no means the only alarming element in the film. There are several passages of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me that I would find insupportably disturbing if they lasted any longer (the breakfast-table scene, for instance). However, Lost Highway outdoes them all for me. I’ve seen no other film that communicates such a sense of nightmare horror. The entire first section in particular does, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, and I was interested to learn that Lynch chose as his favourite scene from the film the one that terrifies me most - surely the most terrifying consensual sex scene in all fiction - where Fred’s impotence causes him to imagine that Renée’s comforting hand on his back belongs to someone else.

I discuss the film at length in Mark Morris’s anthology Cinema Macabre.

Tom Sullivan is probably best-known as the mastermind behind the visual effects and animation in Evil Dead 1 and 2, respectively. He also created of one of the most memorable horror props of the modern age; The Book of the Dead. Of all the entries in this series, his is the one I could most relate to.

I loved getting scared as a kid. I remember seeing the Vincent Price classic, House on Horror Hill, with my brother Mike and older sister Kathy after we had talked a babysitter into letting us see it. When the skeleton slides out of a closet we jumped through the roof and called it a night.

We both loved the film and Mike eventually forgave me for shutting the door.

Josh Simmons is the cartoonist responsible for the critically-acclaimed wordless horror graphic novel House, available from Fantagraphics. His next projects include Jessica Farm, also published by Fantagraphics, and Night of the Jibblers for the Kramers Ergot 7 anthology. He is also the first, and probably last, person to use the term ‘nuggs’ in this blog, and for that I will be forever grateful.

When I was about 15 I went to see Candyman in the theater with zero expectations, fully expecting it to be a ho hum, halfway decent waste of time. I’d started getting disillusioned with a lot of the books/movies/comics I had enjoyed up to that point, gettin a lot pickier in what I enjoyed. But from the very start of the film, with the screen completely filled end to end with bees, and the deep intonation of Mr. Candyman’s shpiel, I was seriously unnerved and sucked into the flick. And the rest of it did not disappoint; I recall really brutal violence hinted at or barely off screen; people getting ripped from genitals to throat, a little boy’s pecker chopped off and tossed in a toilet. This was probably one of the last times that a movie really scared my nuts off. However, I haven’t seen it in years, the present me may well consider Candyman silly garbage.

I must have been 17 when I was home alone one night and decided to watch Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I also had a mass load of marijuana, and so ripped nuggs before and throughout the film. I knew next to nothing about David Lynch at that point and had never
seen one of his films before. From the start I was sucked in and intrigued by the movie, but shortly into the flick was the scene that put serious chills up my spine. Laura Palmer is in a psychiatrist’s office and is crying and freaking the fuck out; She grabs his head and pulls his face real close, spitting out with slow, feverish intensity: “Fire.” “Walk.” “With.” and then for the “Me.” suddenly for a split second she has blue skin and orange teeth and virtually growls/roars the word. I jumped out of my skin over this scene, and then was afraid to walk around anywhere else in the darkened house for the rest of the night. The remainder of the movie’s surreal fever dream bad trip vibe seriously sold my ass on Lynch’s movies from then on.

It’s the final Tuesday installment of Scarred, and today we’re bringing you the nightmarish experiences of the duo behind The Blair Witch Project. Considering the tone of that landmark horror film, is it any surprise what scared these two men?

First up is Daniel Myrick, whose latest project was the murderous cultist film Believers.

The moment when the kid runs into Bigfoot in the woods in, “The Legend of Boggy Creek.”

Scared the pee out of me when I was young. Still get goosebumps.

Eduardo Sanchez has also been keeping busy, most recently with Altered, a tale of alien abduction and vengeance.

The PATTERSON-GIMLIN film is probably the scariest single piece of media that I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t know if you call it art or entertainment, but it chilled me to the core when I first saw it as a kid and it still creeps me out every time I see it.

Years later, the spirit of that little piece of filmmaking became a major contributing factor to the initial idea that later became THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Actually, our goal at the time was to make a feature-length documentary filled with PATTERSON-GIMLIN style moments. I can only hope that we came close to succeeding.

Author Simon Clark has been terrorizing Britain and the world at large for nearly 2 decades. His visceral, doom-laden prose is so relentless that it’s almost a miracle he manages to cram a little hope in there. I especially recommend Mr. Clark’s evolutionary takes on the zombie archetype, Stranger and Blood Crazy, both of which freaked me out. His latest includes The Rage of Echoes, a twist on the vampire mythos which just hit North America in paperback form last month, and if you’re lucky enough to live in the U.K. you can grab Lucifer’s Ark, a tale of psychosis on the high seas, on sale this month.

GHOSTWATCH. A MASTER CLASS IN HORROR.

You know something? I now own GHOSTWATCH on DVD. And it is still frightening.

Madame Tutli-Putli, crafted by Clyde Henry Productions in association with the NFB, is a short animated film I’ve been anticipating for quite some time. It’s the first instance I’ve come across of someone deliberately using the “uncanny valley” of realistic animation for the purposes of establishing an unsettling mood. What sold me was this statement, made by co-director Maciek Szczerbowski in one of the numerous interviews available on the site.

“When the train starts going very fast, you’re quite happy because you’re going to get there on time if not earlier. There’s nothing scary about a train going fast. What’s paradoxically very scary is the train actually being stopped in the middle of the night. Nowhere. And you look out the window and you just see 100 km of nothing until the horizon, and the other way as well. And that’s the kind of thing we discovered was actually the real fear of being on the night train.”

What other macabre images inspire Clyde Henry Productions?

Attached is a photo that we came across recently while doing research on an upcoming project, The White Circus, a fantastical war story we are in the process of writing. The picture shows a World War I battlefield, with earth, wire, clothing, and a German corpse blending into a macabre, yet oddly beautiful pallete of grays; a singular landscape broken only by bare white teeth.

Today’s journey into fear comes courtesy of Sam Costello, original member of the defunct horror weblog Dark, But Shining and proprietor of Split Lip, a monthly showcase of gruesome and original comic stories just entering its second year. Don’t let his poor taste in choosing testimonials dissuade you.

It’s a foundational tenet of horror that fear is motivated by, among other things, the unknown. Whether the unknown is embodied in The Other or a dark corner where something might be lurking, that possibility, that mystery is a source of fear.

Fear of the unknown is at the root of my favorite new horror movie of the last year or two, The Descent. When I started thinking about this essay, I expected to write about The Descent. It deserves to be written about — it’s nuanced, intense, and so scary that after seeing it I used my cell phone as a flashlight to illuminate the far corners of my bedroom.

But despite The Descent’s use of a fear of the unknown, I knew I’d be writing about something else when I saw this picture:

That’s a hole in the floor of the ocean, featured on a site with a collection of pictures of, no snickering please, giant holes.

No matter how scary I think The Descent is – and that’s pretty scary – this picture is far scarier, this goes to the gut, the viscera of what makes the unknown scary.

That hole, called the Great Blue Hole, is off the coast of Belize. It’s 1,000 feet wide and 400 feet deep.

I think this hole, especially seen from this perspective, is scarier and encompasses fear of the unknown better than any movie I can imagine.

I’ve always found large bodies of water, especially those so dark that you can’t see what’s beneath you, somewhat frightening. It’s a child’s fear, but even as an adult every so often I’ll swim in a lake with forests of long weeds growing from its floor that invariably brush my legs or wrap lightly around my feet. At the moment of their touch, a queasy electric charge shoots through my body, lighting my stomach up with fear.

It’s irrational, of course. What’s in a lake that’s going to harm me? A monster? Of course not, but those dark waters beneath me could contain anything – anything – and I wouldn’t know it.

I look at that picture of the Great Blue Hole and I imagine swimming or sailing over it. I imagine cruising along in the beautiful blue water, seeing the ocean floor beneath me and not worrying at all about unknown depths. But suddenly the ocean floor has fallen away profoundly, deeply.

And nothing happens. That’s surreal, it violates our understanding of how the world works. When a hole opens up below you on land, gravity pulls you down into it. When you see a hole below you, you should fall. Instinctively, in your pre-human, lizard brain, you know you should be falling and you panic. But you don’t fall in water. The world has fallen away from you and you haven’t followed it.

More than that, a hole like this feels wrong. These geological features occur, but we don’t expect them. And if something so profound as the ocean floor – the very skin of the earth itself – can collapse like that, then what could be in the hole? If the world contains mysteries deep enough to contain that hole, then what does the hole contain?

These pictures are beautiful, of course, but they’re also awe-inspiring. And that’s just the right word: awe. Dictionary.com defines it as:

an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like

Isn’t that feeling inherent in horror, the feeling that arises in a character when the monster is seen for the first time, when the terrible truth is acknowledged, when the unknown becomes known?

Mr. Lombardo Radice (aka John Morghen) would like you all to know that he’s made his peace with being a European cult icon, having appeared in such classics as Cannibal Apocalypse, City of the Living Dead, The House On The Edge Of The Park, and too many others to mention. His next theatre engagement will be acting in “Off” by Michael Kearns, which he has also translated into Italian, in Rome during May of next year. Also, his translation and adaptation of Reginald Rose’s “Twelve Angry Men” opened this month. Check it out and let us know how it went, won’t you? Finally, he’d also like you all to know he prefers to be referred to as Johnny. I hope one day to meet him at a convention (Are you catching this, Dave?). He seems like a nice, if not fearless, guy.

I definitely was an easy scared kid.

More recent movies?
You must be joking.
I stopped being a masochist many years and many hair(s) ago.

With the end of 2007 rapidly approaching I’ve been giving a lot of thought to which are my favourite horror movies of the year. One film that keeps fighting for the top spot is Mulberry Street, which I caught at the Fantasia Film Festival over the summer. It’s about as straightforward a siege film as you can get, with the denizens of a New York City tenement building fighting off hordes of people infected by a rat-borne virus. What really struck me about the film was how director/co-writer Jim Mickle and actor/co-writer Nick Damici made the audience care about the characters by making the characters themselves care for each other. It’s easily the best independent horror film I’ve seen in years, and you can catch it on the big screen as part of the 8 To Die For horror festival taking place across the United States. Don’t miss it.

“Black Hole” the Charles Burns graphic novel

Read it and dig it!

Today I present two of the actors that made Cabin Fever such an enjoyable experience for me. First up is Arie Verveen, unrecognizable as the hapless hermit who introduced the plague to the gang. Mr. Verveen recently wrapped up a pilot for Guy Ritchie’s new project ‘Suspect’.

In response to your question, the first thought that pops in my head was an almighty clap of thunder that woke me in the middle of the night when I was maybe 7 years old. Don’t remember what I had been dreaming at the time but when I hopped out of bed, my knees were so shaky, I could hardly walk down my hallway. Almost threw up. Of course I’m much tougher these days!!

If I had to name one thing that has prompted me to watch and rewatch Cabin Fever it would be Giuseppe Andrews’ turn as Deputy Winston and his return to that role is the only reason I’m looking forward to the sequel. His response is so to the point that it doesn’t even require punctuation, but it made me laugh, hence it’s inclusion here.

tv

Author F. Paul Wilson has crafted any number of terrifying tales, but his most famous contribution to modern fiction is the introduction of Repairman Jack, one of the great genre characters of the past 25 years. I recommend any of his novels, though I have a soft spot for Hosts, which takes the alien bodysnatching plot to new and disturbing conclusions. What could possibly scare F. Paul Wilson?

THE EXORCIST

As long as man is inhuman to his fellow man, as long as God remains hidden, as long as intelligent men of faith question their faith, this timeless novel will have a place on the bookshelves of the world.

Of all the horror sub-genres the one that seems the least likely to succeed as a comic book is also one of the ones that has been attempted the most often; the slasher. Tim Seeley is a man who finally got it right, by taking the emphasis off of the villains and placing it on their unlikely enemy, the final girl, in his horror comic series Hack/Slash. You would figure that this preoccupation with slasher fare would be reflected in what scared him, right?

The last thing that creeped me out was the H.P. Lovecraft story “The Whisperer in the Darkness.” The way he describes the method of communication between the creepy crab/fungoid aliens was both otherworldy weird, and oddly familair…the man is THE master for a reason. He could make bizarre, incomprehensible things eerily possible, and the skittering, flying crab thingies were no exceptions. It didn’t hurt that I read it while I was vacation in San Francisco, and had spent the day at Fisherman’s wharf, surrounded by the boiled bodies of those delicious water bugs.

I’ve been both surprised and in awe of the caliber of participants in this series, but of all the people who chose to write in, one in particular made me weak in the knees. It is my pleasure to introduce Judith O’Dea, the actress who portrayed Barbara in Night of the Living Dead and helped usher in a new era for horror. After that terrifying night, what else could possibly scare her?

When I was around seven or eight years old, my parents took me out to the movies one evening to see Vincent Price in the 3-D version of THE HOUSE OF WAX. They had no idea what the story was all about. Had they known, I’m sure I would have been left safely at home with my sister to read a Mary Poppins or Nancy Drew book. But that’s not the way it happened.

Yep, good old Vincent Price in the HOUSE OF WAX was my own NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD!

A few decades from now you’ll be watching the AFI’s 100 Greatest Movies and House of the Dead will take first place for the second time in a row. You’ll tell your granddaughter that there was once a time when Uwe Boll was not considered a genius and she’ll turn to you and say “LOL! O RLY? You’ve been pwned, n00b! LMFAO!” And she’ll take off on her hoverboard, leaving you behind with only your regrets to keep you company.

I saw ROSEMARY’S BABY when I was 10 years old. It came on TV in the middle of the night. My parents were sleeping and I silently went into the living room and watched the movie. I was scared shitless. In the middle of the movie my mother walked into the room and I was super scared because I thought the DEVIL came in. I jumped from the couch and tried to escape - till I realized that it was my mother. After the movie was finished (my mother was so nice to let me see the end) I went in my bedroom and I started sleeping till I heard a noise in my closet. Of course the noise was only in my head. The door of the closet opened up and a woman came out and screamed I’M BLIND. I’M BLIND. I had this dream with the blind woman walking slowly over to me for a few months and I couldn’t figure out why …because a blind woman has nothing to do with ROSEMARY’S BABY.

To many, there’s nothing quite as primal and terrifying as the depths of the ocean floor. Novelist Steve Alten knows this all too well, having our world and underwater terror collide repeatedly in his work, particularly in his popular Meg series. In this installment of Scarred, Alten offers up his fright-filled reminiscence as well as a peek at how it’s influenced his upcoming work.

From a film standpoint, “Silence of the Lambs” contained the most disturbing scenes I’ve watched on the big screen, things that I would think about long after the movie. I also remember watching the ABC TV movie “Night Stalker” when I was younger and that one really got to me. Any movie that you imagine yourself going through the scariest scenes makes an impact, and these two did on me. The more grounded in reality, the scarier the effect.

As I have said, to me, the more grounded in reality, the scarier the story.