While talking with Renee about the missing Air France jet and her intense wondering as to its fate, I recalled a movie that I consider to be the second most frightening that I've ever seen.
The Langoliers
This made-for-TV movie from 1995 chills me every time I watch it. Bronson Pinchot as Craig Toomey, the paranoid yet in-denial businessman, creates one of those classic character roles where you feel you couldn't bear to meet the guy - and yet you feel sympathy as he breaks down over the course of the story, regressing to childhood as his stubborn belief in the biggest threat being the delay in getting to his business meeting on time is eroded. Instead, he is forced to come to terms with the fact that his very life might come to a horrific end, one that mirrors his boyhood nightmares. Stephen King gives a hint that it is the existence of Craig's nightmares that causes the plane to slide into the eerie alternate reality where the mysterious Langoliers control the passage of time and threaten to consume the very universe itself.
Moreso than almost any other plotline, this touches a visceral fear inside myself. The down-to-earth nature of the events - a simple plane trip, no malfunctions on board, no external conditions causing a crash. And yet the lives of everyone on board appear to be at an end. If you haven't seen this, I won't spoil the story any more than that. Perhaps my own youthful dreams were too close to this for comfort.
So you may be wondering what the most scary movie I've ever see is...
Picnic at Hanging Rock
I have only watched this 1975 movie once - that was enough. It was screened on a Saturday night at the boarding school I was attending in 1978. I had heard it was based on a true story (though I now know that to be false), and I fully believed that what happened to the three schoolgirls and their teacher could happen to me, or someone I knew. At that time, I was apt to go on solo explorations of dangerous countryside destinations and I'm sure that played into the effect this story had on me. The setting - a boarding school - and the dynamics between the girls with the overweight Edith who couldn't keep up and felt the others didn't want her tagging along, the orphaned Sara who came from a different social class and wasn't even allowed to go on the trip, and the beautiful Miranda who was the object of Sara's admiration (cue lesbian subtext!) and who seemed to know in advance of the fate that lay ahead of her. All these factors brought everything closer to the life I was living - I knew people just like each and every one of them. I was a combination of Edith and Sara, with a longing to be a Miranda.
The haunting Aboriginal music that accompanies the scenes at the rock added to the fear for me. If you haven't seen this movie (or even if you have), watch the trailer here and come back to this post when you've done so.
The single moment that haunts my mind to this very day - and which I had not rewatched in over thirty years - is included in the trailer, as Edith screams "Miranda! Miranda! Miranda!" while watching the three girls far ahead of her disappear into the very rock itself. The non-resolution of the event, together with the subsequent tragedies in the rest of the film, combined with the terror of the moment of disappearance to create a lasting nightmare in my mind.
I'd love to hear from any movie buffs among my readers who might have seen either of these - were you touched in the same way? (I love comments!)
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I haven't seen Picnic at Hanging Rock, but I'm always looking for recommendations for a good scary movie. I'll try to find a copy to view. And, yes, Stephen King is the master of the plot that taps into a person's innermost fears. That is where the true horror lies. ;-)
ReplyDeleteI'd have to say that Pennywise the Clown from his novel "IT" most scared the hell out of me. But it's still "The Exorcist" that creeps me out to this day. Interesting that neither of your films involved religious images like demons and spirits, though I've never seen the Langoliers.
ReplyDeleteDon't be ri-di-cooo-lus (sorry, had to throw in Pinchot's Balke accent from his old tv sitcom!)
Never much of one for the horror genre, the last few years have seen me explore it's beginnings ("The Golem", "Dr. Caligari", etc.) and the "Resident Evil" movies didn't strike me as horror in the same sense these do.
ReplyDeleteI have no doubt that watching these you would watch me slowly crawl backwards out of my seat and up the wall...I could never do a "King" movie!
alan
The scariest movie I have ever seen gave me insomnia for two nights and disturbing flash backs for about two weeks straight. It was also based on a true story and on events that had actually occurred during WWII; The cannibalism of young children by other starving adults and soldiers that were left behind during the winter. It was called "Hannibal" and was about the childhood of the protagonist, "Hannibal Lector" from the movie, "Silence of the lambs".
ReplyDeleteI was an adult when I watched this movie and watching the movie as a mother made it that much more terrifying.
The fact that the movie conveyed the fear and emotions of these children trapped alone in a log cabin with these wandering soldiers, made it that much more disturbing and sickening to me.
I can watch ghost stories with monsters and demons and be fine but it is the things that can actually happen that scare me the most.
How does that phrase go? "It's the living you should be afraid of, not the unknown." (something like that. (-: )
I'm not a fan of The Langoliers (the movie or the story). It reminds me too much of a Twilight Zone episode about a plane that flew through one of those odd sideways cracks in reality.
ReplyDeletePicnic at Hanging Rock is another story entirely. I love that movie. It was interesting seeing the more recent edition of the film on DVD and comparing it to my recollections from 20 years ago. The director, Peter Weir, went through and tightened the editing of the film to make it even more ambiguous than it already was. Weir also made another interestingly ambiguous horror movie around the same time called The Last Wave that's seriously steeped in aboriginal dreamtime mythology.
As for the scariest film I've ever seen. I don't know. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, maybe, or the original version of The Haunting.