Just when you thought it was safe to go back on the internet:
We are on record in favor of the horror genre as a positive and affirming force in one’s life. (Also, scares! Fun!) But that doesn’t mean that this overall very good thing can’t have unexpected side effects. Nicole Cliffe brought one such side effect to the fore in the above tweet, and it would seem it’s quite common. It’s proof that one need not be easily scared to be forever shaped by one simple viewing of Final Destination, for example. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be from a horror movie. This writer will always, always fasten her seatbelt before the car starts moving, lest she inadvertently World According To Garp herself on a stick shift.
So here you have a children’s treasury of shit horror movies have scared us away from, irrevocably.
It’s gone. Gone. This next one is completely reasonable:
As a sidenote, there’s a whole subcategory of places on Airbnb that are renovated grain silos and friends, there are worse places to convince yourself that you’re being haunted. Next up, mirrors:
And don’t even think about repeating any particular set of words into them three times.
One of the largest subcategories to emerge concerns knowledge one should not have. Your Ouija boards, your seances, your Magic 8-Balls.
Absolutely, @ItsTheBrandi. Like grain silos, that’s also totally reasonable, because presumably the good outcome is that you get Big-ed by Zoltar, and that would be totally fucking terrifying.
This next one also applies to any doll that blinks:
We heartily encourage you to check the thread, which is packed with people with hangups about locked cars (Cujo), baths (What Lies Beneath), and many, many other thins, up to and including seasonal decor.
We have but two notes to add. First, our congratulations to the Final Destination franchise, which in our admittedly unscientific survey of these responses seems to be the biggest source of our collective neuroses:
And last, this: Someday, if/when we’re all able to travel again, you should by no means allow Midsommar to stop you from exploring the world, except in precisely this circumstance.
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64 Comments
i have at least one friend that has an irrational fear of sharks, and will never ever in her life swim in the sea/ocean, thanks to jaws.
Swimming in a pool at night alone always creeped me out. Not for any direct reason just it seemed odd in my mind. If someone else was there it was fine but back when I lived at home and my parents had a pool, after a hard night at work I would jump in for a quick swim to cool off but always quick because I got the creeps
First time I saw that was on a VHS tape that they showed us kids on movie night at summer camp.
NOBODY went in the lake the next day.
Pretty sure they were just fuckin’ with us…
My college roommate was like that. Not that it had come up very often to that point, since she grew up in Ohio.
Not a horror movie thing (that I know of) but for years in our backyard pool I couldn’t swim directly over the drain cover or I knew it would pop open and launch knives
Now that I think of it, it was probably this one sadistic neighbor kid who gave me the idea
Clearly, he hasn’t read much Chuck Palahniuk.O__O
Final Destination covered that one too, except it wasn’t knives from the drain, it was suction. I think knives coming from the drain would have been too outlandish even for that series.
You ever read Chuck Pahlaunik’s short story “Guts”?You shouldn’t.
Nope, no one should. Ever. I love the stories of people passing out at his book readings when he read it, though.
First thing I thought of.
The Vanishing really got to me. When my significant other takes “too long” at a gas station or rest stop I start to get anxious. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but we take a lot of road trips so it’s still an issue.
After a mere excerpt of The Abominable Dr Phibes, it took me ages to trust ceilings again.
Or grasshoppers.
Does not wanting to watch the news anymore because it’s too scary count?
Yeah, it’s pretty frightening to think we might soon be living in a society where internal combustion and red meat are banned, the police no longer exist, and a senile career politician has access to the most advanced nuclear arsenal on the planet.
The Final Destination thing is too real… (lol, oh god, and I saw the original in the theater, haha!) I’m wary of logging trucks or really just anything carrying loose freight…and I don’t even drive! It’s also made me super-anxious about literally any even remotely precarious object or situation. 😂
Hell, LA Law made me double-check that an elevator has arrived before I walk through the elevator doors…
That’s the only reason Don Draper’s alive today!
He’s 94 and has a liver the size of a Volvo.
But he’s not driving one!
Huh, that happened AFTER she was on Star Trek TNG, I thought Pulaski’s transporter phobia might’ve been a meta reference to that but it was probably just because they were reusing old scripts and she got McCoy’s parts.
I definitely get paranoid after a Final Destination viewing. It’s funny how the movies are the farthest thing from scary, to the point where I’d consider them comedies, but I always find myself side eyeing literally everything around me for hours afterwards. I don’t blame Final Destination for my fear of lumber trucks and the like, though… that honor goes to that video floating around of the couple driving behind a truck carrying bricks, and suddenly a brick flies loose and instantly kills the passenger. There’s just something extra haunting about completely random, unavoidable deaths. Like, there’s another video in which a guy dives into water off of a railing but slips and lands face first on concrete… the footage cuts to him in the hospital, fully aware as the doctors uselessly hold his face together, and that image will always be burned into my brain, but the fact that it was his own stupidity that got him there makes it less… I don’t know, any word that comes to mind seems heartless, but less existentially terrifying, I guess.
A few years back, I saw the aftermath unfold outside my office window of a prius rear ending a lumber truck…that lumber protrudes out the back at face-level…do not go near those trucks.
I love that, for so many of the people above (and just people in general), the line of thought is “I won’t let myself know that the spookiness is happening, because then I’m fine”. If you don’t see the home invader in the mirror, you aren’t gonna get home invaded!Also- this article format is blessed- long live the functional article format! DEATH TO CLICKBAIT SLIDESHOW FORMAT
I will not accept rides from guys that are driving a ‘32 Ford deuce coupe anymore, no matter how much Coors they offer me.
I’m not gonna be all twitter-dramatic about how I CAN’T EVEN about it, but seeing a door on the far end of a hallway always makes me a liiiiittle uncomfortable ever since reading The Dionaea House fifteen years ago.
Wow, that brings back memories.Quality creepypasta there.
I read that as “Diarrhea House”
When I was 13, my mom decided to grow a fucking cornfield in our backyard that summer. She went away for the weekend and kept calling to check on it. My sister and I told her that under no circumstances were we going out there to turn the sprinklers on at 11 PM, her detailed list of instructions be damned. I was afraid of E.T. as a kid, and convinced myself that he was hiding in the bushes outside my elementary school, waiting to strike. It got to the point that I would walk around to the other side of the building to get in. Tales from the Darkside: The Movie also fucked me up as a kid; I was afraid of cats stealing my breath (somewhat literally, as I had asthma and was allergic to them) and had to spend the summer with my uncle, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s two demonic cats. The monster from the Lover’s Vow segment stuck with me, and as with E.T., I brought it into the mundane and convinced myself that it would get me when I was in the shower.
Cats stealing your breath is from the movie Cat’s Eye, not Tales from the Darkside, though there is an evil cat in that movie too.
What I meant is that it was already a pre-existing fear (it is an old wives’ tale, after all) so that + the image of a blood-soaked demon cat crawling out of someone’s mouth = bad combo for me that summer.
Understandably so!
I chuckled at “afraid of ET”, but I was freakin terrified by Howard the Duck. To each their own boogeyman, i suppose.
My old boyfriend (when we were in our early 20s) actually was almost decapitated by something flying off a truck and crashing through his windshield, but it was a length of pipe and not a log. If there had been someone (like me, for instance) in the passenger seat, they would have been toast, unless they had very good reflexes. It’s rare, but it’s not some horror movie bullshit that never happens in real life.I don’t think this is from a movie, but I HATE open staircases.Also elderly, nosy neighbors low key freak me out, and that is probably because of Rosemary’s Baby.
I don’t think this is from a movie, but I HATE open staircases.
You mean where there are spaces between the steps?These are most commonly found on unfinished staircases leading down to basements, and have thus been seen in numerous movies as a setting for hand(s) reaching through to grab unsuspecting victims by the ankle.
Friend of mine just had her car ruined by a steel pole going through the radiator and into the engine, like, last week!
My friend and I were driving through Atlanta completely boxed in on all sides on the freeway when an unsecured 2×4 flew out from under a big rig. It flew right at us at head height and there was literally nowhere we could go, but luckily it fell and hit the ground before we got to it. Terrifying.Related, my dad was driving on the highway in a carpool van with a bunch of other guys back home from work when a truck on the opposite side of the highway completely lost one of it’s wheels. The wheel went sailing over the median and smashed into the van. My dad turned the car just enough that the wheel collided with the strut between the windshield and driver’s side window. If he hadn’t been quick enough it 100% would have hit him directly. Luckily he only got a few cuts on his face and hands from the glass shattering around him.
Same. Open staircases? No th’ank yoooooou. Anytime I’ve had to house hunt, any open staircases in a home lands them immediately on the “nope” list.Also, there was a house we looked at that had a storage space/attic access door in the master bed room. When we opened it, we thought we heard light singing. We practically sleded down the stairs getting right the fuck outta that place.
Yeah, my uncle got a 2×4 lodged into the center of his windshield while behind a truck on the highway. The truck had no idea and kept driving. My uncle was fine.
The only time I’ve been behind a truck that had something fall off it was a regular truck that most have been delivering bread (honest to god Dave’s Killer Bread) and they hadn’t secured it in any way. Loaves of bread were flying towards my car. Luckily the bread caused me to slow down cause then the big plastic rack came flying out. My mom was behind a car that’s surfboard flew off the top. It ended up hitting her tire.
The scary thing for me (as a child) was a pretty stupid one- my first time ever seeing The X-Files was a rerun of the Fluke Man episode, and my very young mind thought he pulled people into toilets, so I was intensely afraid of the biffy, especially at campsites.
I assume it’s a typo and was meant to be ‘walking,’ but I think it’s funnier if Courtney’s tweet is intentional: she’s fine looking at the mirror normally, but dammit not when she is talking to her bedroom!
I was trying to figure that out as well…then I remembered I use my Alexa with a smart plug to turn off my bedroom light, so the last thing I do at night is talk to my bedroom.
FAIR PLAY.
We renovated our house recently (built 1958). Workers weren’t careful at all about stuff that was in the attic, they threw out most of it as the house was stripped down to the studs. But they found two things that they prominently displayed for us to find if we stopped by to check on the house: a 3rd grade class pic from 1972 and an old doll – naked, a lazy eye, missing voicebox like Gabby Gabby. I totally embraced her as our house mascot. I kept moving her around the house during construction. One day, the workers spray painted her. Kind of pissed me off. But that’s OK, because they still need to finish out the area under the stairs and that’s where she is now, waiting to tell them hello.
You can find a ‘lychee Baby Doll Sound Box’ that activates under compression for cheap, online. You know what you need to do. Bonus points if you can make it sound distorted.
And a year later the photo is of a 4th grade class.
I literally LOLed! Perfect.
The house I’m in now was owned by a weird old Italian man, who left, i dunno, maybe 15 large suitcases in the attic that I found a few months in. I waited another year or so to go through them and clean out all the 8mm snuff films and mysterious puzzle boxes that were almost certainly in them, but they were full of nothing but haunted Drakkar Noire bottles.
I’m something of a night owl but, when I’m alone, I have trouble looking out of our windows at my quiet suburban neighborhood in the wee hours. My reptilian brain is still worried that I’m going to catch Michael Myers doing that creepily unhurried walk between crime scenes and I’ll be the only one who sees it—worse, that he’ll notice me looking and turn to head my direction instead.
Me too!
I’m glad big CRT’s are no longer a thing, because glancing at the funhouse-black-mirror they become after being turned off in the night used to be unbearable to me as a kid.
When I see houses on very large lots or in secluded areas with those giant windows and nothing covering them, all I can think of is what kinds of scary shit I would convince myself I saw through those windows at night.
My wife’s mother raised them all to be very superstitious. She claimed she was a witch and she told scary stories about the shit her and her sibling did to conjure evil in their youth. I find it all rather silly but my wife wouldn’t let my son or her nieces get a Ouija board. I laughed at her and the idea of the evil Parker Brothers spreading terror. When my brother-in-law cleaned out her parents house when they moved in their was an old mirror in a closet and neither he, my wife or my sister-in-law(who heard the stories), would go near it. I had to be the one that picked it up and throw it in the dumpster. What is funny is I don’t believe any of that stuff on a logical level but I don’t like scary movies that much. My wife, who does believe in ghosts and evil spirits, loves horror movies.
My Mom used to like to claim she was a witch, too. She told my elder siblings that she put a spell on their ice cream and they would all turn into spiders at midnight. She loved spooky stuff. But we weren’t raised to be truly scared or believe in it. It was just a bit of fun.
I’m reminded of a great line from Alfred Hitchcock. A woman complained to him that after seeing Psycho, her daughter was too afraid to take a shower, and had stopped doing so – and asked what she should do. He responded, “then, Madam, I suggest you have her dry-cleaned.”
now I miss the Toast.
I liked the concept of this article, but now I have a severe phobia about visiting what I *think* will be an article with thoughtful reviews of horror movie scenes from a dedicated film advocate, but actually ends up being just be a series of semi-connected Tweets.
This may be the weirdest one, but for years the Chessie logo freaked me out because it looked like the devil from 5 Million Years to Earth (aka Quatermass and the Pit). I was going to post pictures to prove it, but even now, in my fifties, I can’t bring myself to search for a picture of that devil to show you. That’s hardcore childhood horror movie trauma, right there.
As a person who typically avoided horror films, the Final Destination one got me only because that was a part of the movie’s trailer.
Final Destination is a good source for this, but The Descent also features a car accident that has made me leery of any vehicle with shit riding on the roof.You could also take the lesson, “Don’t ever fucking go spelunking in unknown cave systems” from that flick.
Sometimes when I get out of bed I think of Gage reaching from under and cutting my achilles like he did Jud.
For me it’s caves. The Descent – crazy scary movie – ruined caves for me forever.