I love being scared by movies. It thrills me to no end. But since I went through puberty, very few films genuinely freak me out. So it is cause for celebration when one does.
When a non-horror film comes along that freaks me out, it is even more exciting. In this blog, I will discuss some of my favourite non-horror scary films – some of them scared me ’cause I was young when I saw them and they maintain that power over me as an adult; others are just scary ’cause they’re so weird.
1985’s Return To Oz is a very peculiar film that scared the bejeezus out of me as a lad. Much darker in tone than the 1939 original (which wasn’t without its fair share of freaky moments), it stars Fairuza Balk as Dorothy, who is sent to a psychiatric instutution because of her nonsensical ramblings about a place called ‘Oz’.
With the threat of electro shock therapy hanging over her, she once again escapes to the magical land, which has fallen into ruin since her last visit. A sense of unease permeates the entire movie, and lends greater menace to characters like the ‘wheelers’ – evil minions who have big wheels for hands and feet. The concept of the ‘lunch pail tree’ (a tree that grew lunch boxes filled with sandwiches and fruit) intriuged me to no end, but also seemed kinda wrong.
The scariest element of the film however was the evil queen Mombi who now rules Oz – she changes her head daily from a wide selection kept on display in two rows of cabinets in a ghastly chamber. The site of all these disembodied heads screaming at Dorothy as she ran past gave me nightmares.
The creatures and make-up created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop are fantastically skew-whiff, bringing to mind the scarier elements of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.
The original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory film did such a good job of embodying a spirit of wish-fulfillment that any kid watching was drawn very easily into the story. Some of the early scenes have a weirdness that I found offputting as a child – like going through the tunnel on the boat, and Augustus being sucked up the tube.
But the scene that really caused me to freak out was near the end when Wonka is all disappointed in Charlie because he drank the lemonade earlier in the film. They did an amazing job of convincing me that Charlie really had let Wonka down, and that Wonka was going to deny Charlie his lifetime supply of chocolate. That really freaked me out.
Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil borrowed elements from Orwellian science fiction to create a terrifying vision of a totalitarian future. Sci-fi like this tends to work on a metaphorical level, but something about Brazil really gets under my skin. It’s message about the futility of fighting the system remains chilling; and the brilliantly executed future bureaucracy is all too believable.
Plus the slutty grandmother from Who’s The Boss getting all that weird stretchy plastic surgery did my head in.
I’ve talked about Young Sherlock Holmes a lot in this blog, but I’ve never really gone into detail about just how darn scary the film is. There are numerous scenes that still give me the heeby jeebies today.
The hallucination-inducing poison darts that spark the films numerous special effects set-pieces also give rise to the various alarmingly effectivescares – the bit where the female lead is being dragged into an open grave by her dead grandfather is particularly nasty. A stained-glass knight terrorising a priest and a pheasant dinner attacking its eater are other freaky highlights.
The stuff from the climax of The Empire Strikes Back has an ominous tone that is hard to deny, and is enhanced to no end by the expansive set-design. The sheer depth of the enormous shaft in Cloud City that the action centres around created vertiginous fears in me that remain in place today.
Maybe it’s just a result of watching it when I was twelve-years-old, but I remember really thinking hard about how terrifying the situation was that Arnie and company found themselves in this 1987 action classic Predator.
It just seemed so hopeless. And it freaked me out.
Which non-horror films freak you out? Am I a big nancy for finding the above films scary? Or did they freak you out too?
