Welcome back for another installment of the 30-Day Horror Challenge! If you read the October 1st post and are playing along you’ll likely know today’s topic – “Your favorite horror movie scene.”
I started writing this piece yesterday, and wrote a couple paragraphs about the head smash scene in “Midsommar,” but then stopped. “Is this my favorite scene? What about the mom bashing her head on the ceiling in ‘Hereditary?'” and then THAT became my focus.
I did a couple paragraphs, while trying to remember the specific details of that scene when I was reminded of the last scene in “Audition.” with the needles and the saw blade and the giggling. That seems like a good one too, but then realized it is too predictable a choice. That’s a LOT of people’s favorite scene, and while I don’t have a definitive “favorite scene” I at least want to write an interesting article (or semi-interesting, just bear with me, this website is a vanity project that costs you nothing, after all) for the three or four people who read this website. Dig deeper. Then it came to me.
Years ago, years and years before Haley Joel Osment was a weird-looking short adult, he was a normal-looking middle schooler, he starred in a movie called The Sixth Sense. Remember the scene where he ran and hid in his special bedroom fort, and that unseen creepy ghost person was pursuing him? Then started pulling the fort apart and popped her little ghosty puke face over the opening? That one.
Holy shit, you remember being a child and there were your little bullshit childhood ideas, like monsters under the bed and a fort made out of your mom’s quilts and some folding chairs will protect you from evil? Put yourself back into that world, and you’re figuring out “Maybe ghosts ARE real… and I think there’s one in the house, oh shit, it’s chasing me! It’s trying to get into my fort now!” Somehow that scene transports me to that time in life when everything in an empty house just seemed that much more scary.
Good scene. I need to watch that again, see if it still hits.