What do you think the scariest monster is from horror films? I'm mostly talking in a visual sense but the character too.
I propose that, visually, the things from fright night are pretty bad.
(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g107/backlotcharlie/frightnightzzz.jpg)
any others you can think of?
Sadako.
East-asian monsters (demons/ghosts) in general.
I happen to find this child eating monstrosity on top of my list.
(http://vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Laberinto-Fauno-003-e1285253444180.jpg)
(http://vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/pale-man_l.jpg)
@abstauber, yeah thought about that one too :)
Actually, I once tried to analyze what makes monsters scary. I think that unnaturality (like eyes on hands and not on head) is one of the most important.
Yea, I too am trying to see what it is about these things that is scary. That's why i want to see what people find scary and if there is a correlation between the different monsters.
I think it's mostly the mixture between the known and the grotesque.
For me the scariest fact about the child eater is, that he's designed after a really evil grandfather (look at the facial features). Also his skin color and folds pretty much look like a fresh cadaver. So in sum we have a dead naked senior with eyeballs in his hands, who slowly eats the flesh of living children (or at least implies that).
@CW: ahh, that's Sadako. I didn't know her name in der jap. Version. Yeah, she's pretty scary too.
The vampires from 30 days of night are pretty good. Only ever so slightly different from a normal human but enough to make them look very unsettling
(http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/30%20days%20of%20night%20movie%20vampire.jpg)
(http://www.mattfind.com/12345673215-3-2-3_img/movie/v/y/i/30_days_of_night_2007_450x250_377212.jpg)
http://i277.photobucket.com/albums/kk44/DarkAngelPrincess25/30_Days_Of_Night_wallpaper_4.jpg (http://i277.photobucket.com/albums/kk44/DarkAngelPrincess25/30_Days_Of_Night_wallpaper_4.jpg) (large image)
Cenobites.
(http://www.horrorphile.net/images/hellraiser-chatterer-cenobite.jpg)
(http://www.fleshtwister.com/HR1/images/femaleCenobite005_jpg.jpg)
(http://lounge.moviecodec.com/images/attachment/pinhead-vs-deathstroke-14637.jpg)
(http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/69/14/4ae990b809a0e3952d695110.L.jpg)
Great mixture of grotesque, symmetry and body mutilation.
When I was a kid, I was terrified of Gmork from The Neverending Story:
(http://sweetberrywine.typepad.com/.a/6a014e8b452a7f970d015437e8f092970c-800wi)
...and Large Marge:
(http://gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs2/1324160_o.gif)
As an adult, I'm more bothered by supernatural creatures that instill despair instead of fear. Like most things in Guillermo Del Toro movies. Especially the ghost boy from Devil's Backbone. The sight of him makes me feel as though I have a black hole in my soul:
(http://faculty.guhsd.net/mejohnson/images/DevilsBackbone1.jpg)
Oh Jesus, Large Marge... Nightmares for weeks!
Personally I found PeeWee Herman far more creepy and scary than Large Marge.
The Jackel from thirteen ghosts was cool
[imgzoom]http://i1228.photobucket.com/albums/ee455/nickynyce/thCARJC94O.jpg[/imgzoom]
Looks kind of like a grown-up Linda Blair:
(http://images.mylot.com/userImages/images/postphotos/2199518.gif)
The scariest thing in The Exorcist, by the way, was finding out what MRI machines used to look like.
Sorry guys, the scariest monster was identified by Lee and Herring back in 1999:
Lee and Herring's Reasonably Scary Monsters (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV47hWehB0Y)
[embed=425,349]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV47hWehB0Y[/embed]
On reflection, Stewart Lee's tan/chest hair might be the most disturbing aspect of the video.
Damn you Large Marge! I had finally started sleeping through the night again! And now you're back!!! :shocked:
Gotta agree I think 13 ghosts was sick... It had alot of awesome stuff.
Prolly one of my favorite horrors.
(http://i.imgur.com/blKwU.gif)
Quote from: NickyNyce on Tue 07/08/2012 17:20:35
The Jackel from thirteen ghosts was cool
Are we talking of coolness, or of scaryness? I found many monsters "cool" but they weren't always really scary.
Quote from: abstauber on Tue 07/08/2012 13:42:23
I think it's mostly the mixture between the known and the grotesque.
Well, I won't probably say anything original if I tell that unknown can be frightening. Since "The Ring" was mentioned, I think most scary thing about the dead girl is that you don't know what's under her long hair :/. You have no idea what to expect precisely and so
expect something terrible. The facial experessions of people killed by her make us to assume that they saw things beyond human imagination, something
not the explainable (heh).
@Snarky: I hoped no one would do this... now you have seven days left. (roll)
BTW.
In Soviet Russia children scare monsters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj7SoDy4CQE
I think the Jackel is in the coolness categorie actually, but only because the Jackel played such a small part.
As for The Ring and the first Grudge, what you can't see is certainly the most scary IMO. I am a believer that less is more.
(http://i.imgur.com/ZDvWr.png)
The scariest monster ever?
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Mirror.jpg)
While we're at it, could somebody explain me, why the Cenobites should be scary? They are designed to look scary but for me they're completely implausible. Why should any villain in the world attach throat-opening wires to themselves? And where do they buy their gear... The hardware store?
These may not be the scariest, but since my movie-watching count is pretty low I don't have much suggestion.
I think the original Alien (mainly for its "unseen" feature and for the "seen" disgusting one the chest burster surely counts; Aliens in, errr, Aliens aren't as scary but it's intentional and understandable as the point of that movie is to just blow up a lot of ants; the one in Alien3 is just a stupid harmless small animal; whereas those in the fourth movie are laughable) and the head spider/crab thing in The Thing (the 80's one, as I've never seen the 50's and the most recent adaptations) could get into the list.
I find the cenobites entirely unscary.
They are not threatening to me in and of themselves. What gives the cenobites power is that they threaten to do the same to others that has been done to them. They are architects of pain in a very artistic and almost gluttonous sense. They revel in pain and that idea is *disturbing* to us but not terribly frightening in the same way that a monster is. The idea of masochism features heavily in Clive Barker's stuff because he is a nutcase.
Also, if any of that sounds familiar its because the chzo mythos is basically a retelling of the hellraiser mythos.
You can find some explanation in the novel (Hellbound Heart) and first two movies where they explain their motives (“We are explorers of the further regions of experienceâ€, etc.) and see creation of a cenobite (their tools and outfits come from their dimension: endless, techno-organic labyrinth). They aren’t really villains either â€" Frank and Chennard are the villains there (only in the later movies they are turned into villains to bring more focus to them).
Maybe they aren’t really scary, but at least interesting. Showing the monster and keeping it scary is nearly impossible.
Quote from: Calin Leafshade on Wed 08/08/2012 08:35:00
What gives the cenobites power is that they threaten to do the same to others that has been done to them.
There are different kinds of fear. Being afraid of monster's visage is one thing, being afraid of possible actions is other. Is there a reason why you want to focus the first type?
visual fear is more interesting i think because it is not as studied (at least not in my mind). When we think of visually frightening things we think of big teeth and claws and other evolutionary responses but most of the things that have been posted have been (superficiall) human. So what are we afraid of? Why are visually unappealing humans frightening to us and what makes them so? Also, why is there a point at which it goes too far? you can distort the human form too much so that it becomes laughable even though that should be just as terrifying visually..
It's these questions i'd like to answer.
Here's the fairy tale I read when I was a child; according to their names I guess it was originally written and illustrated by Romanian authors. Because of artist's peculiar drawing style the pictures were terribly disturbing and scared me a lot.
Here's a page where I found all of those pics:
http://cat-arch-angel.livejournal.com/69482.html
Specifically, monster images:
http://ljplus.ru/img4/c/a/cat_arch_angel/_____4.jpg
http://ljplus.ru/img4/c/a/cat_arch_angel/__11.jpg
When we see a human, we know what to expect. All the people share similar facial features, body shape, way of speaking and walking. When some of those features are removed or alerted - we fear the unknown. When changes are overdone â€" the creature becomes laughable. When there’s just little something like lack of facial features (Pan’s Labirynth monster, chatter cenobite), unnatural eyes colour (Grudge ghosts, 30 days of night vampires) or unusual behaviour (Orlock, Pan’s Labirynth monster â€" just look how they walk).
This might come from primal fear of the ill and disfigured; in animals world sick, disfigured or insane ones are feared and isolated.
You babies...scared of some movie monsters...pssshhhhh ;) No but seriously...I'm thinking hard about this...If i can come up with something I'll post it!
What is scary to look at is pretty much determined on an individual level. There are people who find the xenomorphs in Aliens to be tame but at the same time find the large-eyed depictions of Grays (a type of alien associated with abductions) from films like Communion to be horrifying, and vice-versa.
As someone who watches pretty much every horror and sci-fi horror film imaginable I can only remember feeling an unsettling sense one time and that was during a few of the scenes during Fire in the Sky when Travis Walton is abducted and being dissected. You're only given rather quick, tense shots of the aliens and the machinery they are using but all the fast movement and shock reveals are pretty effective, and there's certainly something unsettling about having other lifeforms treat us like we do lab rats.
I definitely think that with horror, 1940's horror movie directors rightly understood that less is more, because the more you see the monster the more desensitised you become to its presence, much like violence itself. If you have to reveal the monster, save it for some pivotal moment in the story like the climax otherwise you've just got another Freddy Krueger or Jason Vorhees tramping about killing people by the dozen and camping it up.
Quote from: Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens on Wed 08/08/2012 14:03:44
the more you see the monster the more desensitised you become to its presence, much like violence itself. If you have to reveal the monster, save it for some pivotal moment in the story like the climax otherwise you've just got another Freddy Krueger or Jason Vorhees tramping about killing people by the dozen and camping it up.
I think there's still such factor as compassion (is this word correct in this context?) to characters. I saw a number of movies where you know who the "bad guy" or "bad monster" is for a quite a long time, and yet movie keeps you in tension because you worry about characters' fate.
(I don't mean dumb teenage movies where you feel no care about the 'cannon fodder'.)
I don't think that makes the monster scary visually, though, which is what I was talking about. It just makes you worried about the fate of the character you've invested emotion into.
Ah, sorry, I keep forgetting this discussion is primarily about visuals.
I understand that the discussion is about visuals, but the less visuals the better. Fear comes from the unknown mainly, and I think that a good back story really helps conjure up those fears too. If you can leave it in the hands of the people watching the movie to build their own fears about what the monster looks like or how it will act or what it will do, that goes a long way IMO.
This was mentioned before....seeing too much of a monster drops the fear level considerably.
So I think the scariest monster is the one that's less seen, and left more to the imagination. Do it this way and everyones worst fears are true until proven (shown) otherwise.
The blare witch movie did this and I really liked not seeing any monster or ghost at all. By doing this, me and everyone else that put their mind to what she probably looked like was better than actually seeing her.
If I had to pick something that I had to look at for a good amount of time, I would say stuff like the thing which can take almost any disgusting shape is great. It almost never looked the same way twice. It walks in different ways, crawls in different ways etc. You never seem to get used to it.
Del Torro creates monsters that should be scary, but I always find them beautiful, from the imagination aspect of things.
From what I've read of Lovecraft again it's more of imagination than horror, though the monster from the stories Dunwich Horror and stories like Rats in the walls are what I visually find scary, when there's an overwhelming number of creatures, it usually goes to dread of something around you that you might not see but you can hear for example. Again, stuff like the Tooth faeries from Hellboy 2.
Hard to find the actual line where "scary" and "disgusting" dwell. Too many horrors go for shock scares and just overload of gore, instead of there actually be horror.
The only movie monsters that ever really got to me were the kiddie vampires scratching at the bedroom windows in Salem's Lot. Visually and otherwise, watching that movie as a kid freaked me out.
Pinhead was obviously disgusting, but I actually thought some of his minions were worse. If I'm realling correctly there is one monstrosity that were twins somehow combined into a deformed creature; that one was kind of disturbing.
It's been far too long when I've actually been horrified by a movie monster. I sorta miss those days. I also can't remember examples.
But I do remember being frightened/adrenaline rush by encountering that large monster in Half Life when it was first released. The big guy in the parking garage that you need to run ahead of as he's knocking cars and such trying to keep up to you. The screen shaking with his footsteps. Yes. I do recall being very frightened by it.
The other reason for fearing it was likely that I escaped it on my first attempt. I didn't know if I was going the right path or if I was missing something. Other than that, Fear had some moments and especially Dead Space.
Reggie Nalder, as Mr. Barlow, scared me in "Salem's Lot", but I was only about eight at the time.
But I agree that the unseen (and the unexplained, for that matter) are almost always scarier.
Dr Jennings from Howard the Duck.
The zombies in Thief: The Dark Project.
Quote from: Ascovel on Wed 08/08/2012 20:34:11
The zombies in Thief: The Dark Project.
+1. :) but that was probably because of their sounds rather than visuals (as everything else in Thief series).