Ooooooooh. Scary!

All Hallow’s Eve. All these years and I can’t remember if I’ve ever been hassled by the little trick-or-treaters. Which means the fresh bucket of pig’s blood waiting beside the door has obviously gone to waste each and every time.

BBC1 shamelessly schedules John Carpenter’s Halloween late at night. Which is certainly not as horrifying as the night they followed a long, sometimes harrowing documentary on life in Berlin, post-World War II, with Where Eagles Dare.

Few horror films do it for me, unless they cross genres like Alien and The Keep. Slashers are definitely out. Especially when they do little more than catalogue ‘inventive’ deaths. Most of the victims are typically so dumb that I can’t wait for them to get what’s coming to them.

In fact I’m invariably cheering on the boogeyman and willing him to pick up his pace as he goes around dispatching the lot of them. Unless of course the killer turns out to be some doughnut, all bent out of shape because mommy didn’t love him or his peers gave him a shitty time in his youth. Then I just want the whole lot of them to get it.

There’s only two instances that I can think of off the top of my head that give me the screaming abdabs. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is one. Especially the sense of unease that pervades the film before Nicholson’s Jack Torrance goes completely off his trolley.

The second, which is perhaps one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen on television, comes from the second season of Twin Peaks when Bob appears in the Palmer’s living room, climbs over the sofa and advances right into camera. Because the set had a reversed forced perspective, by the time he arrives in the foreground, Bob just appears fucking huge and looks like he is going to climb right out of the television.

That’s what creeped me out. What did it for you?