THE BORE
General => Dysfunctional Hall of Fame => The Borecast/Cruncheons => Topic started by: Eel O'Brian on March 21, 2009, 06:13:06 PM
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Tell us the title and author of the scariest horror novel/story you've ever read, and why you found it so scary! We'll read some of the answers on our next show!
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The Bible.
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who is the author
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Atlas Shrugged.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
-some random dude on the internets
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Serious response? The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. Nothing is scarier than real-life and your body failing, eventually bleeding out as your insides dissolve into jelly.
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i can't think of anything which scared me.
i can think of things which unnerve me. a recent example is when i read off season by jack ketchum (his first book).
absolutely grotesque examination of humanity and the limits of deprived savagery
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Stephen King's Carrie, the novel, not the film. It wasn't a viceral scary, but more of being sickened at how Carrie was treated by her mother and those around her.
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Dianetics
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The Bible, Revelations.
When I was a kid and I was forced to go to church, everyone at church would talk about it, read from the book quoting some scary scriptures. It freaked me out!
I'd stay up and think about it, eventually making myself cry about the END TIMES. So I would wake up worrying my parents were going to die in the END TIME war. I would have nightmares of the END TIMES, then I would get out of bed to go wake my parents up, just to make sure they were ok. After calming me down, they had to reassure me everything would be ok. Talk about some terrible stuff.
That's probably the scariest one I can think of. :P Probably because people believe in it. :D
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we record on wednesday this week, so if anyone else has an answer you might want to go ahead and get it in
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The Bible, Revelations.
Actually, that's my answer, too.
And here I came into this thread thinking books aren't scary. That one is.
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the book I've seen that scared me I didn't even read, it was just the cover to these old horror books my brother had with creepy illustrations on the cover. Only real time a movie, book, video game, whatever scared me was the movie 'it'. Both cases were when I was younger since looking a them now, they're pretty tame. Only things that scare me these days are non-fiction things, from a dude willingly commit self-mutilation to creepy ass creatures in nature.
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Every time I read the Shining, I get creeped out. Listening to it on audiobook only creeped me out worse. I was listening to it in broad daylight with coworkers around and I thought I was getting cabin fever.
Although I still think It or The Stand is probably Stephen King's best work, there was a reason they tried to make a movie out of the Shining so many times.
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Gotta say, the book that scared me the most isn't really that scary to me now. The Tell-Tale Heart. It just freaked me out as a kid. It and The Monkey's Paw.
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Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door
Jack Ketchum has the ability to really kill hope in his readers.
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man, "the taily-po" used to freak me out as a little kid. old dude kills some raccoon thang and eats its tail in his soup (wtf), and then then raccoon thing -- which has claws the size of himu's schtuppenmonster -- hnts down the old man and rips his belly open to get its tail back. that is SO not the shit you tell a paranoid 6 year old! i was SURE my fam was gonna accidentally feed me some animal's tail and next thing i knew EVISCERATION CITY! fuck!
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Ha. When I was a kid i checked out a book by Ambrose Bierce. Oil of Dog fucked me up. I didn't get any of the context as a kid and just took everything at face value.
The opening paragraph is rough reading in a King In Yellow: Repairer of Reputations way.
My name is Boffer Bings. I was born of honest parents in one of the humbler walks of life, my father being a manufacturer of dog-oil and my mother having a small studio in the shadow of the village church, where she disposed of unwelcome babes. In my boyhood I was trained to habits of industry; I not only assisted my father in procuring dogs for his vats, but was frequently employed by my mother to carry away the debris of her work in the studio. In performance of this duty I sometimes had need of all my natural intelligence for all the law officers of the vicinity were opposed to my mother's business. They were not elected on an opposition ticket, and the matter had never been made a political issue; it just happened so. My father's business of making dog-oil was, naturally, less unpopular, though the owners of missing dogs sometimes regarded him with suspicion, which was reflected, to some extent, upon me. My father had, as silent partners, all the physicians of the town, who seldom wrote a prescription which did not contain what they were pleased to designate as _Ol. can._ It is really the most valuable medicine ever discovered. But most persons are unwilling to make personal sacrifices for the afflicted, and it was evident that many of the fattest dogs in town had been forbidden to play with me--a fact which pained my young sensibilities, and at one time came near driving me to become a pirate.
compare this against the opening of KiY (too long to post here) which lays out an alternate history and future.
http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/kiy_rr.htm
Thankfully I was probably too dense to appreciate The Damned Thing by pierce, but An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge did nothing to me until I was a teen and forced to re-read it. It was around the time that my interest in psychological vs external horror really manifested itself.
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Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door
Jack Ketchum has the ability to really kill hope in his readers.
Have you seen the movie adaptation for The Lost?
I haven't. I've only seen Girl Next Door. I would like to see Red as well. They're doing a movie based off of Off Season/Off Spring. My fear is that it will just be "crazy hillbilly" horror in translation.
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perhaps someone can help me remember the title and author to this:
when i was younger i read a movie adaptation of a slasher flick
yes, most movie adaptations are snoozeworthy, but apparently they'd given this journeyman writer free reign to do whatever he wanted with the material (or, more likely, just didn't care)
so he took it upon himself to write the entire story from the slasher's point of view (the slasher was one of those voorhees-styled mongoloids in the film)
it was written with broken grammar and spelling, and was nearly one long stream of consciousness run-on sentence
it was hard to follow, but i found it fascinating and spooky at the time
i want to say it was the funhouse (?) but i can't really remember specifics
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man, "the taily-po" used to freak me out as a little kid. old dude kills some raccoon thang and eats its tail in his soup (wtf), and then then raccoon thing -- which has claws the size of himu's schtuppenmonster -- hnts down the old man and rips his belly open to get its tail back. that is SO not the shit you tell a paranoid 6 year old! i was SURE my fam was gonna accidentally feed me some animal's tail and next thing i knew EVISCERATION CITY! fuck!
DUDE.
Me too. I'm still scared of the Taily-po.
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Director: Andrew Van Den Houten
Writer: Jack Ketchum
Starring: Art Hindle Pollyanna McIntosh Spencer List Eric Kastel Andrew Elvis Miller Tommy Nelson Jessica Butler Rachel White
Studio: Modercine
http://offspringthemovie.com/
trailer looks like they at least have some of the elements correct, but still, my own feeling is "avoid"
http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/bdtv/Player.php?id=2672
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When I was in elemntary school there were a shitload of SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK anthologies and knock-off anthologies. They were generally all completely inappropriate for anyone under like 25. But there's one that really sticks with me- These 3 girls go to school one day and see some lady washing bloody laundry in the creek, Turns out some lady had a miscarriage and now she forever washes her bloody laundry in the creek. Anyway, the characters start to die one by one in horrible ways, but the final girl drank her mother's hair dye by accident and the last page of the story is like "JANE FELT HER THROAT DISSOLVING WHILE SHE COUGHED UP BLOOD AND DIED AND SCREAMED AND DIED AND BLOOD". I was 10 and I did not sleep well for like 6 months.
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those books were some great nightmare fuel with fantastic illustrations. Not certain how they hold up now.
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well, the illus really hold up well.
these books were banned in my elementary school.
ahh, texas. where public servants can spank your kid.
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i remember when all the really cool books about vampires and werewolves and the occult were in the children's section of the library
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i remember when all the really cool books about vampires and werewolves and the occult were in the children's section of the library
yeah i def expanded my supernatural folklore knowledge in the kids section.
i also remember being never able to find lloyd alexander books because i kept thinking alexander was his first name.
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I've never really read a straight up horror novel but thinking back there's the scene in Firestarter with the college test group going crazy due to the experiments? I barely remember but the image of red just red and people mutilating themselves. Its been so long since I've read it, maybe my brain added that part it, I'm not sure.
There's also The Stand which I had read recently. The major one that creeped me out was Stuart Redman's escape from that Vermont Quarantine center. Traveling through those halls, everyones dead, he just fucked up a psychotic military man that came into his room to execute him (wasn't sure if he left him dead or alive). Also had the sense that something was trailing him, watching him.
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When I was in elemntary school there were a shitload of SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK anthologies and knock-off anthologies. They were generally all completely inappropriate for anyone under like 25. But there's one that really sticks with me- These 3 girls go to school one day and see some lady washing bloody laundry in the creek, Turns out some lady had a miscarriage and now she forever washes her bloody laundry in the creek. Anyway, the characters start to die one by one in horrible ways, but the final girl drank her mother's hair dye by accident and the last page of the story is like "JANE FELT HER THROAT DISSOLVING WHILE SHE COUGHED UP BLOOD AND DIED AND SCREAMED AND DIED AND BLOOD". I was 10 and I did not sleep well for like 6 months.
omg, i remember those! they were usually assembled by someone named daniel cohen or somesuch. i remember two stories vividly: one where a poltergeist multilated a young girl by making sewing needles stab into her eyes; and one where this ghostly stalker killed a kid's parents -- it was implied that the ghost was that of a pedophile, to boot -- and came to him to get the skin he needed to complete himself by ripping it off the kid. there was even an illustration of the ghost opening his coat to show his exposed ribcage that the kid's skin was gonna cover. the text claimed that both stories were "true" and after that i was SURE the undead were gonna get me and kill me in some gruesome-ass way.
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There's actually a psychological angle on why horror (written) fiction general sucks. I doubt you'd want to discuss this because it is too sciency, but I find it interesting and I can dig up lots more info if it is wanted.
In the limbic system of the brain, we have the amygdala (largely capable for producing emotion and emotionally "stamping" memories, and the thalamus, which bawsically puts the senses together and presents the full picture, sights, sound, hearing, et, to the cerebral cortext, the rational/human part of the brain.
When something scares us in real life or in a movie, the primal amygdala spazzes, and uses its own emergency, flight or flighty, pathway to the cerebral cortex, before the thalamus could accurately put it into the perception picture and figure out whether it was a threat or not.
Written text by itself is never scary or spooky. The amygdala probably pretty much ignores it on input. It's only post-processing by the thalamus and upon entry into the cerebral cortex (where higher language skills like reading are housed) that we realize the text is scary. So when we are reading horror fiction, by the time the horror text has made it to the brain, it's already been heavily rationalized and deemed safe, not a threat, by the nervous system.
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we had ghost story books by a lady named nancy roberts, which were "true" tales of weirdness from north carolina, like the devil's hoofprints, pirate ghosts, and even stories based in wilmington - like joe baldwin the decapitated railway man (who still prowled the tracks with his lantern) and the ghost in the library downtown
they were packed with staged "ghost" photos, but boy did they sure look real to me as a kid
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the combination of boredom, imagination and superstition created some great "true" stories in texas. I can't really recall any that aren't secretly Mexican folklore (Crying River Woman) gentrified.
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i think the show topic we originally had may radically change before wednesday :lol
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Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door
Jack Ketchum has the ability to really kill hope in his readers.
Have you seen the movie adaptation for The Lost?
I haven't. I've only seen Girl Next Door. I would like to see Red as well. They're doing a movie based off of Off Season/Off Spring. My fear is that it will just be "crazy hillbilly" horror in translation.
I have The Girl Next Door, but I'm in a state where I don't think I can watch it. The book affected me for weeks, and I don't really want to revisit that. The Lost on the other hand is more tame, and I found the move adaptation was a little too camp, but it still really worked.
I haven't seen Red either. Who's directing Off Season?
Red is pretty dang good. Not at all a horror film, more of a low-boil, 70's-esque thriller. Its the first leading role I've seen Brian Cox take and he just wins the hell out of it. Brian Cox is so good I didn't even know he was British for several years.
But anyways, back on topic. I'm with the Poe fans, I don't read horror. Perhaps because my formative experiences were too scarring. Thanks very much, Edgar Allen Poe.