Is your imagination scarier than being shown everything?

[deadeye]

In books, what I imagine from how the author words it is far scarier than how the movie can show it to be. I got this idea from a thread about how some fans want "IT" by King to be a gory version. Frankly, although it would be great for it to not be t.v. watered down in its themes, I don't think any gore shown could be worse than what goes on in my head when I read the book. The imagination is greater than the eyeball--what do you think?

[Boogeyman]

MUCH!
I couldnt agree more. The imagination is MUCH scarier than seeing it with your own eyes.

I mean, take SIGNS. It was scary because it didnt come out and show you the aliens. And, in JEEPERS CREEPERS, Victor Salva leaves the audiences imagination to project whats scary to them. By doing this, the director says "OK, Im going to leave it up to you to decide whats scariest to you."
If they flat out showed you the creatures, they would be saying "OK, we know this is scary and you will find it scary." It takes away from the creatures mystery and eerieness. The less you know about something, the scarier it is.

later

[this one dude]

totally agree. also, i think that leaving a little unexplained is much more effective than coming right out and telling you exactly why something is happening, etc...

a good example of this is The Ring. good idea for a movie, but i think it lost its tension and intrigue when it explained everything in detail.

[KillerKlown]

Most definately, sometimes being shown less is better. After all, it's your imagination that freaks you out after watching a scary movie at night and you have to go downstairs, but you put every light on (when you normally wouldn't).

[Cronos]

Hell yeah, i scare the shit out of myself all the time

[Xipe Totec]

I`ve figured out the same thing years back.......What you don`t know is scary........Take Blair Witch Project for instance. It is a hell of a scary movie, but you never see a threat or gore or whatever......
And I`d like to add one thing - what you don`t understand is also terrifing. It`s not used enough in horror movies, but surrealism would make them much scarier......I mean Mulholland Drive style, but with intentions to make a scary movie.....now, that would be something!

[Bloodybitch13]

I also agree. While gore can be great fun it sometimes brings the story to a dead halt. That's what I like about The Hitcher they didn't actually SHOW a character being ripped in two by two trucks but you KNOW that's what happend and it really makes you cringe.

[VicVega]

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. In the novel The Dark Half, I had some really grisly images in my head while I was reading (when George slices the cop's balls with a razor-blade, and when he cuts that one dude's cock off and sticks it in his mouth). It really wasnt really that graphic in the movie adaptation though.

[Antonio]

Trust me, my imagination is scarier than anything that can or will be shown on-screen!

[C-Desecration-]

In books, what I imagine from how the author words it is far scarier than how the movie can show it to be. I got this idea from a thread about how some fans want "IT" by King to be a gory version. Frankly, although it would be great for it to not be t.v. watered down in its themes, I don't think any gore shown could be worse than what goes on in my head when I read the book. The imagination is greater than the eyeball--what do you think?

Did you read IT? That book is way gory--kids getting their heads torn off, an arm ripped from its socket like a fly's wing. I admit the best parts of IT were the characters, but the gore made the adversary all that much more feared.


Take this for example: In a scene in a novel of mine, there is this . . .thing. . . speaking inside this woman's head. The story deals with mental maladies that perhaps aren't really maladies, other plains of existence, strange entities, spiritual battles. . . too complicated to summarize though
Goes a bit like this:


Dan--the fucking bastard
She smiled bizarrely then, and said somewhat nonchalantly, " Dan's my . . . ex-boyfriend."
He is going to hurt you, Kate
Again, very casually, she asked, " Dan?"
He will hurt you Kate. Unless.
" Unless?"
Dan will hurt you unless.
" Unless what?" She cried, a strang eagerness rising in her tone.
Unless you hurt him first.
" Dan would never . . . hurt me."
He already has
She paused for a moment, thinking the response over. Yes, Dan had already hurt her . . . only because he decided to throw his life away and sleep with the slut.
" Why would he hurt me?"
Cheryl--the fucking bitch.
" Cheryl . . ." She whispered, tasting the words like a fine cuisine. The bitter aroma, and sweet texture--she tasted it all. " What do I do?"
Hurt him before he can hurt you.
A smile emerged, but appeared terribly unnatural--the smile of a corpse, as she said,
" Hurt him . . ."
Hurt them before they can hurt you.
" Hurt them . . ."
As she continued her outlandish conversation, her vision shifted to the dusty, jagged table that Dan had built some time ago. Shifted to the tool that sat atop the table.
The drill.


Okay, that was a quick thing I whipped up (very sketchy, don't worry I write much better than that . . . but back to the topic). Now, the reader/viewer knows something bad will happen.

In the novel, I actually show some pretty gruesome things, and even a few scenes with a drill and someone's throat. For me, showing gore and brutality is a way of showing just how bad a particular adversary is.
The more brutal the villain the more we fear for the characters, or rather fear what might happen to them if this villain got to them.

I'm not explaining this right . . .

[the night watchman]

For the most part I agree that the more obscure or suggested something is the scarier it is. There are exceptions though. To this day I still find The Thing one of the most unnerving creations in cinema. You get good looks of it in all its forms, and the movie is all the more horrifying because of it.

[quoth_the_raven]

i agree. i tend to scare myself more often than anything on screen. Take The Ring- i dont think you really saw much during that film. but my imagination kept me gripping myself pretty damn tight during the whole movie. same with the thing. that still gets me going, even though i have seen it about 20 times, cause my imagination runs away with me.

[Donnie_Darko]

My imagination? Oh hell yea... I'm scared just thinking about it... :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:

[radikill]

The imagination is always wayyyy scarier, and here's the primo example:

In The Evil Dead, you never actually see the thing moving through the woods attacking people. All you got was the actors' reactions to it. And based on those reactions, my mind pretty much said "take the scariest thing you've ever seen and multiply by 1000". THAT'S FUCKING SCARY!

Then in Evil Dead 2, they actually showed it. And it was so horribly lame that I just about laughed my ass off.

[deadeye]

C-Desecration, I have read "IT" several times--its one of my favorite King novels. My point was based on another thread where fans were saying how great it would be to see, for example, Georgie's arm being torn off by the clown. From reading the passage which is the very beginning of the book, you get the innocence of Georgie, his playfulness at floating the paper boat in the gutters, and his childlike desire at wanting to take the balloon. It is all this characterization that makes what happens to him in the next few moments more horrifying than what you'd see on the screen as an arm being ripped off because you wouldn't get literally inside the character's head without the prose. Plus, at least with me, sometimes showing the monster so to speak (see King's Danse Macabre for further alluding to imagination vs showing your cards) makes me think, "oh, that's not so bad, I can deal with that." Through literature, your mind's eye tailors the fear to suit what scares you personally--that's what is so great about it.

[deadeye]

Excuse me--I meant Ralphie instead of George in the above post. That's what beer after a hard day at work will do :-)

Also, the above ramble basically means that a yanked off arm in a movie isn't going to scare me. It might be gross, but it's not scary.

[C-Desecration-]

Excuse me--I meant Ralphie instead of George in the above post. That's what beer after a hard day at work will do :-)

It IS Georgie--Bill's little brother. Who's ralphie? You mean Richie? What's going on!

On any account, I do agree that showing useless gore doesn't do anything. The miniseries didn't have a problem because it had so little blood--it had a problem because it blew chunks all over the room. Now give me an IT movie that actually HAS the book's characters, and the scary situations and sympathetic/likeable heroes, I'm there.

[the night watchman]

I thought the portion dealing with the children was done well, overall. (Obviously, it doesn't compare with the book, but ...) The adult half didn't work well at all IMHO.

[deadeye]

I was thinking of the kid from A Christmas Story when I did the Ralphie errors. "IT" would be a good show to put on verbatim, but due to time constraints, it can't be done unless splitting it up ala Lord of the Rings. Unless someone like HBO did a series on it--that would be excellent summer time programming.

[the night watchman]

That would be a great idea for the Dark Tower series.

[Wicked]

hm...

I do believe my imagination is scarier and more morbid than anything that's shown on TV. I think most of the people on this forum have developed imagination, ppl with no imagination can't enjoy horror.

However, I still like it when they show me stuff in a horror movie. I watch horror movies to enjoy the fruit of someone else's imagination. It's kinda nice when you can let someone's creation impress you.

"From the rich soil of morbidity grow the most fantastic flowers of imagination" - I love this quote, saw it somewhere on the Net a long time ago, I donno who said it.

[the night watchman]

I like that quote. Here another one by Barry Gifford from his novel Wild at Heart similar in sentiment, but a tad more vernacular:

“Anythin’ interestin’ in the world come out of somebody’s weird thoughts ...”

[SixStrangSmoker]

gotta find the right medium between the 2...some time we need to see..others we need to imagine what we see