Frightful Friday

To wrap up my Frightful Friday series this week, I'm taking a little trip back in time to when horror movies were all about suspense and Bosco chocolate syrup. Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 thriller Psycho is the perfect movie for a spooky fall night, its chilling story seemingly old-fashioned to us now for its lack of gore (or, "gore" by our modern standards). Also, that terrifying string score! It's up there with the theme music from Jaws as some of the most iconic and evocative of all movie music.

Psycho is also, in some ways, a very sad story. The character of Norman Bates is deeply disturbed, and if he weren't so murderous he'd be rather pitiable. Janet Leigh plays Marion Crane, a secretary who has just embezzled a bunch of money from her employer and is on the run. She goes to the Bates Motel to hide and its there that she meets the lonely, reclusive Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), a young, handsome man who looks after the motel as well as his ailing mother... or so it seems.

Apparently, the initial critical reviews for this film were mixed at best, but after the overwhelmingly positive audience reaction to the film, critics re-reviewed it, publishing glowing reviews the second time around.

Final little bit of trivia for you: Psycho was the first movie to show a woman in just a bra and slip.

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
"Danny isn't here, Mrs. Torrance."
"Red rum, red rum, red rum!"
"Heeeere's Johnny!"

This week's Frightful Friday scary movie spawned several memorable lines that still manage to send chills down my spine. In addition to the creepy dialogue, one of the things I like most about The Shining is the pacing of the story, proving that a Stephen King-Stanley Kubrick collaboration is (or, was) the way to go when crafting the ultimate suspense/horror flick.

Jack Nicholson, in one of his eeriest and best-known performances, plays recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance who takes a job as a caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, where he also hopes to work on his writing. He moves his wife and son Danny to the hotel where the harsh winter sets in and they become snowbound. Indeed, the hotel manager cautions against cabin fever, recounting a tale about a former caretaker who went crazy and killed his wife, daughters and himself during the isolating wintertime. At first, Jack enjoys the peace of the place, but strange and spooky things begin occurring to both Jack and Danny. The creepiness starts to chip away at Jack's sanity, which proves unfortunate for everyone involved.

While Carrie is probably my favorite Stephen King story ever, I also find it to be terribly sad in addition to being terrifying. Every time I watch it I'm catapulted back to those high school days when kids were so outright cruel to each other. Then again, despite the sadness in Carrie's life, this is also the ultimate revenge fantasy — what victim of a vicious high school hierarchy wouldn't want to lock her tormentors in a gym and unleash the wrath of hell on them?

The movie follows the teenage Carrie (played by Sissy Spacek with the spookiest eyes in cinematic history) who can't seem to catch a break. At school, the other students ruthlessly poke fun at the socially awkward Carrie while at home her fanatically religious mother basically screams at her for constantly sinning. Soon, Carrie discovers that she has the ability to move objects with her mind which is at first confusing, and then pretty helpful.

At the school prom, however, things take a turn for the worse. She's nominated prom queen as a horrible prank and then is further humiliated by her classmates when they douse her in pigs' blood. The rest, as they say, is horror movie history.

Because of the imminence of Halloween, October Fridays always seem like the scariest Fridays. So, every Friday leading up to the freakiest of holidays I'll be featuring one of my favorite scary movies to help get us all in the mood.

Like many children of the '70s and '80s, Jaws scarred me for life. It didn't help when I went to Universal Studios as a kid and endured an animatronic white shark with glassy black eyes and sharp teeth lurching out of the water toward my young terrified face.

Memories of this film are woven into the fabric of my mind, to the extent that I feel a twinge of fear when swimming in the ocean, even now as an adult. Also, I have to watch the Discovery Channel's Shark Week with one eye closed every year.

In case you didn't have maniacal older siblings or cousins who subjected you to frightening movies like Jaws as a kid, the story follows a great white shark that terrorizes people. After killing a boy, a bounty is placed on the animal and shark hunters take to the waters in search of it. A few guys finally come head to bloodthirsty head with the shark and battle it out to the finish.

Tell me: What are your memories of Jaws?