And behind door number 22... a guide to some music of the more traditional kind
Catherine Munn and Jacob Martin list their Top 5 programmes to watch over the festive period.
And behind door number nine... some dazzling musical delights
The complete arts guide, for week 9
The fake blood has finally washed off and Halloween sale stock has been replaced by some pretty eager Christmas decorations in shops, making All Hallow's Eve nearly a distant memory. However, if you spent the evening watching a horror movie, you may still be feeling the effects. Horror movie watchers seem to have a sadistic yet insistent urge to scare ourselves stiff with films that tap into exactly what we are scared of, exploiting it and leaving us scared of just about everything. Soon we will all be scared to leave the house...or stay in the house...or look out the window...or even have windows....
10. Road Trips
A nice jaunt around in your car turns bad when it mysteriously breaks down. Cue being strapped to a seat at a dinner table filled with red neck cannibals, running away from an ancient Creeper with an insatiable taste for your body parts; or even worse, stitched in the middle of a human centipede.
9. Dolls
Child's Play's Chucky completely negates any notions of friendly toys that Toy Story produced, and with Jigsaw's puppet sidekick mascotting the Saw franchise that had people being sliced apart by swinging pendulums and drowning in minced up pig, I don't think I'm ever going to get those childlike notions back.
8. The Woods
Along with old creepy castles, the woods are a perfect setting for horror films. Characters are taken out of their comfortable domestic realms into an altogether more uncivilised one in which being hunted down by Blair Witches and being raped by trees a la Evil Dead are apparently pretty regular occurrences.
7. Showers
Getting shampoo in your eyes reaches a whole new level of traumatic when you expect to see the shadow of a psycho-style dagger to appear once your vision is restored.
6. Children
As a child I distinctly remember taking great pleasure in pouring salt on slugs, but this was practically angelic compared to horror movie bad boys such as Damian from The Omen, Rosemary's Baby, Children of the Corn and the generally creepy twins from The Shining.
5. Beds
This horror staple perfectly illustrates the way horror movies seek out and pervert the very things that give you the greatest feelings of comfort and safety. Forget a peaceful 40 winks, you can be chewed up like the young Johnny Depp, have a growling, half-dead Japanese girl curling up next to you or be shook around until you are spewing expletives at a priest and spinning your head 360 degrees.
4. Hitchhikers
This is never going to end well. Picking up a hitchhiker is the horror movie equivalent of going to explore an unexplained noise upstairs... in the dark...alone.
3. TVs
Thank the Lord for digital. Gone are the days where white noise would lead to the immediate conclusion that a long haired grubby girl is about to crawl out of the TV. Never fear though, we still have the chance of being sucked into the TV as in Poltergeist or developing a VCR in our torsos Videodrome style.
2. Public toilets
Logic tells you the person in the next cubicle along is most probably an innocent member of the public. However, they could also be a knife wielding psycho. Horror movies tell us it is almost definitely the latter. The examples are endless: Friday the 13th, Silent Hill, Scream 2...etc. Bad things happen in public toilets.
1. Germs
We are a nation obsessed with the outbreak of epidemics and if you've ever seen a zombie movie, bird flu will seem like a walk in the park. And no amount of hand sanitizer will save you this time when those zombies come a-munching.
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