Don't have nightmares

It's Halloween, which seems an appropriate time to ask, what's the most scared you've ever been watching a film? I don't mean unsettled, or (incoming awful Americanism alert) grossed out, or spooked, or startled, but actually, properly, physically and mentally scared?

Slasher movies, gore, teenagers going into woodsheds, they don't do much for me, to be honest, never have. In fact, I'd go as far as to say I generally find them faintly ridiculous. No, for me it has to be a film that gets in your head as well as under your skin. Psychological horror, subtlety, atmosphere, tension and the uncanny or unnerving - these are the things that do it for me.

Back in 2010, when this blog was still in short trousers and most of you weren't reading it (except Rol, he was an early adopter), I wrote a Halloween post about my top thirteen unsettling films. Number two on that list was The Others, a 2001 vehicle for Nicole Kidman, and to this day the film that has scared me the most on first watching. I was going to enthuse about it again, but I can't improve on what I wrote about it thirteen years ago, which was this:

Like The Omen, The Others had such an effect on me because of the circumstances in which I watched it. Dispatched to the Big Smoke for a week to do a training course, my evenings in a soulless corporate hotel were boring beyond words. What better way to while away the evening than watching a movie on the old pay-per-view? After all, the company Amex was paying, right? Down went the lights and on went The Others... so it's late, it's dark, and I'm away from home, all alone, in unfamiliar surroundings. At one point, I had to get up and make a cup of tea to break the tension (you know the scene, it's when you think it's the little girl all dressed up under that veil). I had to put all the lights back on for the end, I was that unnerved. I know, almost as big a scaredycat as my sister. But not, because this film is unsettling in the extreme. What could be worse than laying awake in your darkened bedroom, only for unseen feet to thump across the floorboards and unseen hands to fling back the curtains? And Christ, how would it feel to realise all your hired help are dead? Not great, I'm guessing. Oh, and there's that scene where our heroine tries to escape into town only to be stopped by (quite brilliantly added digital) fog, and then she bumps into her long-absent husband... only he's not quite right, is he? And with good cause. I've tried to get my partner to watch this on a number of occasions, and she just won't. Tells you all need to know about the goosebump-inducing, dream-disrupting, lights-back-on-please qualities of this excellent chiller.

I still think The Shining, which topped my list, is a better, more unsettling film but for sheer heart-racing fright The Others, and the all-important circumstances in which I first watched it, still takes some beating. Here's that scene I mentioned in my chart-rundown review.

Not so scary out of context, I guess, and maybe even less so now we all know the plot twist. But back then, on first watching... oh boy. Anyway, as Nick Ross used to say, don't have nightmares ... or do. It is Halloween, after all. Maybe turn the lights off and watch something frightening tonight...

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