What Movies and TV Shows Have Scared You?
With Halloween just around the corner, I thought I’d put my foot down and write something about fear in entertainment.
I remember the classic ’70s TV series The Night Stalker was often scary to me and my immediate family when it ran on ABC back in the mid-’70s. For those of you who are too you to be familiar with it, it followed the macabre and occasionally sci-fi news stories pursued by journalist Karl Kolchak. The episode descriptions and the previews for next week’s episodes had me intrigued. The first episode I ever saw was entitled “Firefall,” and it featured a vengeful ghost instantly burning its victims to a crisp as soon as they fell asleep. I had never seen anything like it on network TV, that’s for sure. To this day, The Night Stalker has its creepy moments, granted it certainly had its share of humor. Not that I’m complaining, but you can see similar things on broadcast programs such as Supernatural.
There was even an episode of the British TV series Space: 1999. It featured a number of mostly cheesy monsters in its second season, but a rare monster in the first-season episode “Dragon’s Domain” is scary to this day. A sort of distant relative to the Star Trek TOS episode “The Devil in the Dark,” it had classmates of mine talking about how sick “Dragon’s Domain” was.
When my sister and I were kids, trailers on TV for horror movies such as Night of the Living Dead and even Beyond the Door sent us hiding under a blanket late on Saturday nights. Otherwise, we were usually all right.
The first Alien movie scared the pants off my immediate family and me when it first burst onto movie screens back during the disco era. Many critics complain about vintage monster films such as The Thing, It! The Terror From Beyond Space, The Demon Planet, and others. But I would say Alien classed it up, and made those other movies look like Disney offerings. Some people don’t think it’s scary, but just startling or even boring. But slowly as it unfolds, I knew it was, indeed, unfolding. Unfolding toward something unforgettable. At least until Fox milked the franchise to death years ago.
Other kinds of TV shows and films have their scary aspects. In recent years, an ex and I agreed that the FX cable network’s Sons Of Anarchy was actually frightening. It was not for the faint of heart, with characters, innocent or not, dying or surviving often grisly deaths as enemy biker clubs never seemed to sleep in their vendettas against the titular biker club.
While Alien’s Xenomorph had many moviegoers trembling and maybe even wetting our pants, and the supernatural scares and creeps most of us out, Sons Of Anarchy, though ostensibly a Hollywood production too, is a bit closer to reality. It reminds us of the evil here in the real world, as do the police procedurals that have been all over TV for so many decades.
Speaking of which, back in the ’80s, I often found NBC’s period piece Crime Story a bit frightening, due to its emphasis on tragic murders, mostly masterminded by vicious punk of a gangster Ray Luca. Less often, I found Miami Vice a bit not just distubing and bleak, but a home invasion in their 4th-season cliffhanger episode was a bit scary, with an innocent family all being gunned down one by one.
I remember my mom always told me the original version of The Mummy scared her. She didn’t like the 1999 Indiana Jones-infused version.
Some directors have claimed that people like horror movies because life is scary. Unfortunately, it is, especially with crime and political unrest continuing to threaten world balance.
In short, we all have our idea of which TV series and films are scary. The last segment of ABC’s Movie of the Week Trilogy of Terror scared my sister and me back in the ’70s. But we can shrug it off as being make-believe, as far as we know.
Which TV programs or cinematic offerings scare you? Happy Halloween!