by Pierre Roustan

Created on: February 15, 2007   Last Updated: September 14, 2008

I was looking for something to thrill me one night, something to get my blood boiling. I had just come back from leading a Superbowl Sunday party with a youth group from church, and I suppose you can say I wanted to 'relax' and have 'fun'. Namely horror, or thriller.

Don't ask me why I wanted horror. Sometimes I don't understand it myself. Typically, if you wanted to relax and enjoy a night, you'd get just a nice light comedy or something whimsical with fairies and pretty sights and fanciful wonders. Not me. I wanted to be scared out of my mind.

This brings me to my question: what makes a scary movie scary? The answer to that sort of ties into my intentions for wanting to 'relax' and have 'fun'. I, for one, don't get scared easily-at least not in the sense of biting my nails and sweaty palms and increased breathing rate and the heart thumping. No, to me, getting 'scared' is more a state of mind, a disturbing thought, a thinker. In my opinion, a movie that's 'scary' forces me to think-forces me to think of things that I'd rather not think about.

Allow me to explain. For me, the type of personality I have, I do enjoy a mental romp of sorts. I like to explore thoughts and absorb ideas, and frankly, horror films (at least the 'good' ones) really battle my mind in a very serious way. This, at it's very core, is fear at its best. Sure, everyone has their mannerisms of fear-screaming, gripping the seat, nail-biting, etc etc. But that's not the heart of it. What makes you scared in the first place happens right inside your brain. Your thought processes.

That being said, my idea of a scary movie is one that gets in touch with my mind in such a way that I am forced to really think about the situations that make it hard to sit still in the dark. For instance: the film, "The Ring". Now, this particular film wasn't exactly 'scary', I would say-well, it didn't have me begging to lock the door or covering my eyes (again, I just don't get 'scared' easily). But certainly that film really made me think about what was going on in the story. I became enthralled in it. I couldn't keep my eyes off of it. It was disturbing, to say the least.

A movie that truly scares you in this sense is a movie that asks questions that really shouldn't be answered. You don't need gore. You don't necessarily need the shaky cinematography or the intense musical score (although those elements do contribute). All you need is the question: what's going to happen here? And it has to be asked in such a way

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