While thinking about Kingdom of the Spiders in my last post, I was reminded of another movie I saw in the late 70s, The Incredible Melting Man. My dad took me to see it at the cinema and we ate Arby’s afterwards. No, Arby’s wasn’t the scary part. 

Overall, the movie didn’t really scare me all that much, melting zombie-like dude included. However, there was one scene which struck a very deep chord with me in a negative way. If you jump to 1:23 in the trailer you can see precisely the scene that scared the living shit out of me. 

Typically when I see scary movies - and I see a lot, let me tell you - only one aspect of it will actually be scary. Maybe the visuals were shocking, but the audio was not. Or something else will just be “out of place” to make the scene’s horror ineffective. However, that specific scene has everything just right for me. The scene is a long hallway with no side exits (another phobia of mine which resulted in a pretty bad experience just a couple of months ago) - so there is no escape. The camera is low to the ground - so you are in a submissive position. Everything is in slow motion - so you can’t get away. And the music is actually well scored.

All of those points alone would do well, but there are actually a couple more which resound with me which would quite likely illicit a “So what?” response from many people. Firstly, there is something about the film stock and lighting techniques used in the late 70s and some early 80s movies which just creeps me out immensely. Brian DePalma’s Carrie and especially The Fury freak me out on a visual level. Carpenter’s work from that era and a lot of earlier Cronenberg films also have that same look. The other, and this is the big one, is the fact that the sound and visuals are not in sync. She is running in slow motion, yet her screams are in real time. I have no idea why, but that creeps me out so very very much.

With the hundreds of horror films I have seen in my life, that scene alone is most likely the largest contributor to the scariest moments in my nightmares. Not a nurse being chased by some melting astronaut who got blasted with gamma rays (ahh… the 70s), but long hallways and odd out of sync sounds. That shit just scares me at my core.

Side note, the most recent thing which spooked me enough that I had to watch something funny immediately afterwards was the smoky Rorschach ghost thing in the 1999 remake of Hause on Haunted Hill. Starting at 5:50 in this video you can see it. The symmetry of it is what gets me. Oddly enough, Rorschach blots don’t scare me, but that ghost did. Again, probably had something to do with the sounds and how the voices, especially “The doctor is in” voice, are “flatter” than the other sounds. Shudder.

I’m a pretty weird dude, huh?