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Shrek Loves Stamps & The Scary Movie Poll.

Well I'll be! Thanks to those who posted about Shrek's biggest victory of all: a partnership with the United States Postal Service. It's nuts and I still couldn't give less of a shit about the movie, but jeez, archiving the insanity sure is a lot of fun. Speaking of which, I picked up two larger Shrek items for review, but that'll have to wait for the weekend.

In fact, everything else will basically have to wait till the weekend, too. Got some schtuff to do this week, I'll tell ya about it later. I wonder if I'm having surgery? Anyway, this'll be a cold week in terms of the full length articles, but I'm going into the trenches prepared with enough materials to keep the blog rolling. On deck for tomorrow night right here is a small tribute to something cold, sweet and somehow Mexican.

Meantime, let's get another survey going. What's the scariest movie you've ever seen? I'm not talking so much about retrospect: what's the most you've ever been scared by a movie, even if later viewings didn't pack the same kinda punch? For various reasons, some illegal, my pick is always gonna be Jacob's Ladder. Not joking when I say that the film fucked me up for months, with brought-on complexes ranging from fears of mirrors, trains, passing cars and generally any open empty space. You need the right environment to really collect the feelings this one is capable of throwing at you, but when the mood's right, it's just damned disturbing and relentless. Your turn, in the comments.

Posted by Matt on 05/10/2004. E-mail me!



Discussion Thread: 267 comments

Yeah, the text is all smashed over to the left on this end of the Internet, too. I think it used to look like ripped paper on both sides.

Here’s a question (Question of the Day, if you will): what would be your ultimate horror movie? What combinations of spooky characters and dim lighting would keep you saucer-eyed in the bright light of your bedroom until well after 3 am?

For me, I’d have to say, anything concerning small, practically invisible bad guys. Like sand. Killer sand. It could crawl along the ground, hide inconspicuosly, get into your tiniest pores, and multiply like mad. Also, how would you kill sand? Get He-Man to wipe his hand on top of it until it turned to glass? I just don’t see He-Man traveling this far away from Castle Grayskull, though. Unless he has some vacation time coming.

Chestnuts roasted by trajeal @ 05/14/2004 3:16 PM

The ultimate horror flcik would have to star Bald Bull, the second incarnation of dracula in the first Castlevania, eggplant wizard from Kid Icarus, John Basedow (fitness made simple), and the juice man. Just think of the possiblilties!!! I mean the juice man alone is enough to scare the piss outta you. I guess i would have all the characters go on killing sprees using the obligatory bad puns. In the end would be the ultimate showdown of all these characters with entrails and guts galore. The last two standing would probably be eggplant wizard and the juice man. I think you see where this is going….Juice man totally liquifies the eggplant wizard but in a suprise twist(isn’t this also obligatory?) Dave Coullier comes outta the shadows and rips juice man’s heart out and puts it in the juicer and feeds it to the juice man. Just think, Dave Coullier wins in the end….now THATS scary.

Chestnuts roasted by phunqsauce @ 05/14/2004 3:29 PM

O. Paul, my screen is doing the same thing. I think it’s definitely the site.

Chestnuts roasted by J-Dog @ 05/14/2004 3:50 PM

hey, phunqsauce, so you know poltergeist and gremlins were the pgs that got people outraged enough that the ratings board came up with the pg-13 in the first place.

as i believe, they had to cut down raiders to get a pg anything as the original cut got an R stamped on it. no wonder lots of people are mentioning those three :)

Chestnuts roasted by plagiarise @ 05/14/2004 3:56 PM

I was also terrified of Madame (the puppet).

For ultimate horror movie… anything involving the supernatural… not like occult, just ghosts and such… anything that seems within the grasps of reality like ghosts and whatnot totally freaks me out… Unsolved Mysteries always freaked me out when they had segments about Haunted Houses… (realistic) movies about haunted houses always freak me out… keep it low budget, "ghost hunter"-type (like Ghostwatch seems to be)… have things going on in the periphery – just out of view… subtle sounds and movements.

I think Fox or WB or a channel like that had a special on ghost hunting about four years ago, I believe,… they went into a haunted house with a psychic, some experts, cameramen… some tech equipment (e.g., infrared camera)… and they caught footage of "cold spots", cabinets opening, a plaster doll formed condensation on its face, the impression of someone’s backside appeared on a bed… Anybody see this special? And I’m not talking about the "Fear" gameshow that had kids go into supposed haunted locations to perform "tasks" as part of "dares".

All I’m saying is — ghosts are scary.

Chestnuts roasted by Nachokhaki @ 05/14/2004 4:37 PM

Oh, the reason I brought up the ghosthunting special was to ask, if anyone saw it, whether it was real or not… a lot of weird stuff went on, nothing TOO over the top, but I never could tell if it was real or staged…

Chestnuts roasted by Nachokhaki @ 05/14/2004 4:39 PM

Its all a conspiracy…

Chestnuts roasted by phunqsauce @ 05/14/2004 5:22 PM

Just had a good laugh over at FARK reading a item about kids freaking out over cicadas and running into walls, hitting each other with baseball bats, and stabbing each other with knives trying to kill the big ol’ bugs. Amazing that fear and surprise can turn one’s life into a Three Stooges moment. If it was Zombies what showed up, and people started busting each other upside the collective noggin with bats, wouldn’t the shambling undead change what’s left of their minds about eating those brains? And what happens when a Zombie eats a stoner’s brain? Would it taste like a fried egg? Or if you inject them with a serum derived from marijuana, would they eat more brains, or overrun convience stores for the chips and Twinkies? Yes, I do shift mental gears like this all the time.

Chestnuts roasted by kingklash @ 05/14/2004 5:37 PM

Dude… Labyrinth. That little English Catterpiller freaked me out. And those things that would rip off their heads and toss them around? When they tried to steal Sarah’s head? C’mon… All that AND DAVID BOWIE’S PENIS BEING VISABLE THROUGH THE WHOLE MOVIE! I was like 6 when I first saw it and even though I didn’t know the details of sexuality, I knew something scary was going on…

Chestnuts roasted by Malevolent Mogwai @ 05/14/2004 5:56 PM

phunqsauce- Your Ultimate Horror Flick would most definitely own. And I’m glad to found out someone else is terrified of the juice man.

Once I was flipping through channels and I came upon a Juice Man infomercial THE EXACT MOMENT when he stares at the screen and says, "Death… death, dying!" it was late at night and I was frightened.

Did someone say conspiracy? The Tuscon division of Majestic-12, man. They’re everywhere (in Tuscon) and they know everything (about people living in Tuscon). Fear them!

Chestnuts roasted by Night_Trekker @ 05/14/2004 7:24 PM

I hope Matt doen’t mind the following taking up space. Let me pull a ME (No offense meant towards ME) here with the following list of links I have found.

Here is a US seller site with Ghostwatch http://www.xploitedcinema.com/dvds/dvds.asp?title=806

Going through BBC’s site for Ghostwatch, the writer mentioned a major influence was another BBC production called The Stone Tape. The stuff I found on it makes me want to see more than Ghostwatch now because it sounds interesting, but it also has a connection with director John Carpenter’s Halloween III (writer) and Prince of Darkness (similar story). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069316/
DVD review: http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=3707
Same seller site from above also has this DVD: http://www.xploitedcinema.com/dvds/dvds.asp?title=1122

http://www.roogulator.esmartweb.com/horror/halloween3.htm "Kneale is a particular idol of Carpenter’s – Carpenter, for example, took the name Martin Quatermass on his script for Prince of Darkness (1987), makes Kneale references in In the Mouth of Madness (1995) and was at one point attached to direct a remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) from a script by Kneale. But Kneale departed after differences of opinion with Carpenter over the taking of his ideas in slasher directions and refused credit on the finished film. But there are many ideas present that are clearly Kneale-like – the idea of magic and the supernatural having scientific explanations; while the reactivated dolmens is a plot idea that was used The Quatermass Conclusion (1979)."

http://offthetelly.users.btopenworld.com/interviews/nigelkneale.htm
"OTT: The Guinness Book of Classic Television describes The Stone Tape as ‘one of the most frightening pieces of television ever made’. Was this your objective when you set out to write it?

NIGEL KNEALE: No. Never never. Why would I want to do that? I wanted to write a story that demanded the viewer’s attention. The magic word here is ‘paradox’. You set up a story and it turns inside out and that is, for me, the most exciting sort of story to write. The viewer thinks it’s going to be about something and it does the opposite. Now if the more simple-minded people found that a frightening experience well, too bad. Real horror movies are dead easy.

20 years ago I was in Hollywood to write a script for John Carpenter. He’d made Halloween I and II and wanted another. I told him ‘I didn’t like the first two but I’ll write you an original and quite different story’. I just told him the story in a café and he said, ‘Yes let’s do it!’ (which is not the reaction you ever get in this country). So I wrote a very good script – if I say it myself. It’s one of the best I’ve ever written. But he was busy working on The Thing. Now the object of that film is to frighten and it did so beautifully – very stylish. So in the meantime, the thing I’d written was being sidelined and Carpenter handed it over to a buddy of his called Tommy Lee Wallace who had never directed anything. So they took my script and to bring it down to the price they reckoned they could spend on it, they ruined it – they took all of the invention out of it. So I took my name off it and was contacted by the American Writer’s Guild who said ‘Do you really want to take your name of it? People here are trying to get their names on things!’

It would have been the only good Halloween film too. What they put into it was slashing and cutting of eyebrows and all the standard crap for a horror movie, precisely the stuff I avoided. They shortened the thing by about half and everybody hated it. But that’s show business I suppose.

OTT: Turning back to The Stone Tape. You said you didn’t set out to write a story that frightened people. What do you think it was about that drama that scared people so much?

NIGEL KNEALE: I don’t think it did scare people. It is unusual. Certainly, it isn’t a ghost story where people go into a haunted house. There have been two or three made on that basis, but I didn’t want to do that. The Head of BBC Drama asked me if I could write him a ghost story for Christmas. I said ‘yes I probably can’ and I worked this thing out. For me I found it very interesting to get away from the haunted house convention and things like the ghastly American film The Haunting (it makes me slightly sick to think about it, it’s such junk). The thing about The Stone Tape was to turn it inside out so that the people involved are in fact scientists attempting to uncover a new recording medium. By happy chance they find one all too soon and it’s ghosts. However initially they’re not in the least frightened. At first they are just angry at the hold up in their work and only become frightened when they get out of their depth at the end of the story. We as the viewer know far more then they do, because we are let in on something that is never in their sights. That’s the paradox – the whole story takes a twist. This greedy bunch of people who are after a new recording medium think the ghostly phenomena might be the way to do it. The stone is the medium."

Chestnuts roasted by The Other Hand @ 05/14/2004 8:36 PM

I remember two movies that really stick out as keeping me up all night, constant nightmares and checking the shower to make sure there was no one there waiting to jump out at me.

IT – Based on the Steven King novel which features an evil clown that terrorized and killed children.

Fire in the Sky – Based on actual events of an alien abduction.

I’ve seen both since then and I really enjoy both movies to this day. But I still remember how much they both scared me back in the day.

Chestnuts roasted by DMC @ 05/14/2004 9:15 PM

Thanks for the compliment Night_Trekker. Indeed the juice man is insane and has insanely large eyebrows. The thing he said alot in his one infomercial that made me cringe was the fact that juice "stimulates the bowels!!!" And the way he said it was very Charlton Heston-like but even more overdramatic. Ugh…. maybe we could put him in a cage match with Don Lupre (the guy who made MEEEEELIONS of dollar just by placing TINY little ads in newspapers) or maybe that bastard Matt Lasko (the dude who wears all the question marks). Maybe put them in the ring with some great 80′s wrestlers like Hillbilly Jim or Koko B. Ware. Just a thought….

Chestnuts roasted by phunqsauce @ 05/15/2004 12:43 PM

i was watching pee-wee’s big adventure on HBO today and i remembered being really scared when pee-wee was picked up by the trucker "large marge" and she told the story… then at the end her face went all claymation and her eyes bugged out! that freaked the hell out of me.
but the movie DID have Mr. T cereal in it… so it’s not all bad
-john v

Chestnuts roasted by John V @ 05/15/2004 1:48 AM

Ok, it’s not a movie, but when I was a little kid (maybe like 5), the Haunted Mansion in Disney World gave me the heebie-jeebies. I remember balling my eyes out, screaming, and not wanting to go into the place with the rest of my family. I covered my face for the whole ride, but decided to go back on and then loved it.

Ba-Chomp, Ba-Chewy-Chewy-Chomp!

Chestnuts roasted by Mutant Stan @ 05/15/2004 11:51 AM

The It’s a Small World ride at Disney World still gives me the creeps. I went on it when I was 13 and all the creepy dolls singing that horrible song still makes me shudder. Also the Alien thing, if they still have it. That was scary.

Chestnuts roasted by Stacey @ 05/15/2004 1:40 PM

On the subject of rides, once there was a theme park in San Jose called Frontier Village (Fastest Fun in the West!) that had one of those haunted house rides. It was called "The Lost Dutchman’s Mine" and it was borderline cheesy. half the time, it was pitch black, the other half was loud noises and black light dioramas. You know the kind. Even then, I wasn’t too keen on certain kinds of surprise. BLAM! AHH-HA-HA-HA! yeeeoww! Now, I can go into most Haunted houses and my MST reflexes take over.

Chestnuts roasted by kingklash @ 05/15/2004 2:38 PM

On the subject of movies scaring you…okay, I wasn’t exactly a kid (I was 14), and the movie probably wasn’t intended to be scary, but it freaked me out. The movie was the 1976 made for TV movie "Sybil". Something about it scared the bejesus out of me. I maintained, and still do, that it’s far too intense of a movie to be showing to a bunch of 14-year-old Health Class students. It freaked me out for a long time, and I finally got over it very recently by reading the book that the movie was based on. My own form of catharsis, I guess.

Chestnuts roasted by Jeremy @ 05/15/2004 4:16 PM

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
I have multiple personalities,
And so do I.

Chestnuts roasted by kingklash @ 05/15/2004 4:35 PM

When I was young I sat and watched Silence of the Lambs with my parents. OMG! they let me watch it with them b/c they knew I never really freaked out with scary movies, but when it comes to things that could acutally be true, my mind starts to think about ppl that would actually eat other ppl, and guys that take girls and stick them in their basement!!

Also when I was really young, I was scared of the old bird lady in Marry Poppins, the reason is she was so old and poor, it made me think about death. My mom told me I used to run out of the room crying when that part came on.

And in the movie The never ending story, I didnt like it when Artex the horse was sinking in the mud :(

what about the movie Labrynth(SP?) I loved it but, David Bowie was pretty freaky in some spots!

And thats about all I can think of right now!

Chestnuts roasted by Marzi @ 05/15/2004 8:37 PM

Mutant Stan, Trey Parker and Matt Stone based your name sake on a real person from Camp Jabberwocky in their Executive Produced "How’s Your News?"

http://www.howsyournews.com/crew.html?PHPSESSID=014de3086384503dff6133c02191235d
"Robert Bird or ‘Bobby’, as most of us know him, is 48 years old and lives in Massachusetts with his mother. He works in a pet store, caring for the animals and cleaning. He has downs syndrome and an interesting speech impediment which makes all of his words sound like gibberish. He understands everything which is said to him however."

Chestnuts roasted by Citizen X @ 05/15/2004 9:05 PM

Oh, I forgot to mention…there was a scene in one of Stephen King’s movies (I think it was Pet Cemetary) in which the main character has a flashback of when she was a child. She had a sickly older sister (might have had anorexia I think) whom she had to take care of…she’d go into the room only to find the older sister squirming in her bed screaming for her sister…she was very skinny, pale and in so much pain. Just the sight of the sickly girl gave me the heebie Jeebies…

Chestnuts roasted by The Dragon @ 05/15/2004 9:30 PM

>>The It’s a Small World ride at Disney World still gives me the creeps.

try having the freakin’ ride break down for 30 min.’s with the music still playing and the dolls still moving and junk. now THAT is creepy!

Chestnuts roasted by randomness @ 05/15/2004 10:07 PM

Twilight Zone: The movie.
I was five years old. Good idea, Mom.

Chestnuts roasted by Midi Amin @ 05/16/2004 12:25 PM

This is gonna sound really lame but the Nightmare on Elm St films always freaked me out.

Chestnuts roasted by Meatwad @ 05/16/2004 12:29 PM

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