Scary Movies, Scary Books

Posted by Meesh in Mouthing Off with Meesh | 2 comments

Before I start writing, I want to apologize to the readers and the other staff at MVF. I’ve been an amazingly airheaded ditz the last month or so and I completely spaced on my blog post that was due this past Thursday. Sue was nice enough to let me know and offered to remind me when it’s my turn to write. Though I truly appreciate her kindness and concern, I don’t want any of the other staff to have to babysit me, so I created a Google calendar that will email me reminders of events every morning (hopefully). I hate being a dipshit, and I’m so sorry I flaked. Now on with the show.

One of the reasons I’m such a vampire fan is my absolute love of scary movies. Since I was a really young child, I’ve been scaring myself with scary books and movies, probably long before most people would have found appropriate. Vampires are, of course, one of the scariest concepts ever created, creatures trolling the night, drinking blood and leaving their victims either drained or turning them into monsters.

My children are much like me, loving a good scare, not satisfied with kids cartoons and shows. I don’t usually stop even my six year old from watching scary movies because when I was six, I devoured the books and movies that had me hiding under the covers at night. I found a movie that I thought was too scary and creepy for Dylan to watch.

I had seen Thirty Days of Night on FX, bits and pieces of it, as I rarely sit through a whole movie. It looked so good, with really creepy freaking vampires and great gore scenes, so I bought it. I popped into the DVD player and told Dylan to leave the room. From what I had seen on TV, I felt the vampires were too much for him to handle. I wasn’t disappointed with the movie. I sat perfectly still through the whole thing, which is such a rare thing. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen a vamp movie that made me scream, but there were several scenes where I was jumping in my chair, little involuntary yips coming from my mouth before I could stop them. Barrows, Alaska gets 30 days of darkness and the vampires came in for the buffet. Their language was very clipped and unrecognizeable. There were clicks in their words that made them seem ancient and very alien. They didn’t have fangs. They had a full mouth of razor sharp pointy teeth, like every tooth was a fang. They had a warning system that made me cringe – screeching when they found food so the others would know too.

If you like scary movies, I’d say watch this one for sure. There are others that I would recommend too. Darkness Falls is a movie that had my son, Travis, really and truly scared. Generations ago, a woman in the town had played the toothfairy, giving kids money when they lost their last tooth. Some kids went missing and everyone assumed she had killed them, so they burned her at the stake. (The missing kids came back too late, of course.) She came back as the toothfairy, collecting kids’ last baby tooth in the dark of night, except with a very scary and sick twist. If anyone saw her, she killed them, and there was no escaping. She’d follow you forever until she got you. Because Travis was close to losing his last baby teeth at the time, I think it was a little close to home. The boy who watched Jeepers Creepers without blinking was yelling for him mom to come sit with him.

‘Salem’s Lot, the first one made, is a creep-fest like no other. I’ve not been so scared from a movie before or since. I watched it when I was 12 and had nightmares about it until I was 20. The book by Stephen King is damn terrifying too. And if you haven’t been able to tell up until now, I love Stephen King’s scary books. He wrote a lot of scary books that they made into movies and for the most part, the movies are definitely much, much better. Cujo and The Stand might be the two exceptions.

I’ve been reading again. I finished The Hunger Games last week. Wow, talk about a sick premise. The country broken up into 12 regions, required to provide most of what they can produce in their region to the Capitol, a very wealthy and opulent place. At one point in time, the people of the regions rebelled against the Capitol, tired of being hungry and poor while the Capitol prospered off their blood and tears. The Capitol beat them down, and to remind the regions, called Districts in the book, that they could and would always squash any rebellion, they held a yearly competition called The Hunger Games. From each of the twelve districts, two kids between the ages of twelve and seventeen were chosen by lottery to participate in the games. Everyone in the districts were required to watch these sick games. 24 kids went into an arena, one kid came out alive. They had to kill each other in order to survive. It gave me the shivers. As a mom, to send one of my children into something like that would be my worst nightmare. The book was so good, though, and I have to get the second in the series very soon.

I’d love to get suggestions on other creepy, scary books that I could read. The soft core vamp porn is great, but I love a good scare and let’s face it, those books aren’t scary.