Horror movies that actually scare you

ONE evening on the long drive home, I asked Vangie which type of horror movies scares her most. Maybe it's because a couple of days back we watched Kulam, a movie whose screenplay was written by one of our close friends.

Well I find the movie entertaining. Made in the same vein as the so-called Asian horror genre, which packs lot of surprises at every turn, and cashes in on strong sound effects and straightforward editing.

All through the movie, I was trying to recall if there are scenes that I may have been familiar with. Something its writer Elmer may have already told me back when we were killing long hours in between subjects at UST. Even back then, I knew he is a prolific writer.

But back to that conversation I was having with my wife.

Quickly she rattled off the movies that made her scream in horror while watching them,``Sukob...Fung Shui...Sixth Sense.''

For her, the presence of a murderous beast like that in Sukob is most frightening. The chase along dark, narrow alleys. Dimlit stairways. And the image of a grotesque, violent being gaining slowly on the hapless victim causes her fear worse than anything else.

Then she mentioned Evil Dead, the movie with zombies storming into a house whose occupants were dumb enough to keep another undead down its basement. That is also in my list.

But my idea of scary movie is different from her altogether.

I dread the movies which jolts you silly (The Eye). With evil spirits (Exorcist). Or a character who in the early part of the movie used to be stable but is slowly losing his or her mind as the story goes (The Shining).

There's a scene in The Eye where a disturbed ghost jumped straight at the main character because she was sitting at her favorite seat. Before that movie, ghosts generally scare people by just standing there. Here, they not only join people in elevator rides, they also attack. That scared the hell out of me.

But nothing beats the girl who throws up in Sixth Sense. The moment the boy turned on his flashlight inside his makeshift tent – and discovered he's got company – I let out a loud, primal scream. Something that I think if I kept inside me, would cause terrible damage to my health.

I was just warming up with several more films up my sleeves, when Vangie suddenly cut me and asked me to stop.

It's scaring her already.