Get it? This is a thread about scary stuff like spiders, which also happen to produce thread!

...

Anyway, Halloween is tomorrow, and I figured the site deserved its very own jack-o-lantern so I put one up there. Some creepy masked guy also popped up on the left-hand side; I have no idea what he's up to.

Halloween is the scary season, so let this be the thread where we discuss anything and everything scary. What kind of things scare you? What are your plans for this Halloween? Any good scary movies or books that you can recommend?

Also, since this is a website about Soul Asylum, here's a final question: Are there any songs by the band that actually scare you, if only a little?

I have long been a fan of zombie movies. The zombie genre has a reputation for being kind of lame at times, but many of the zombie movies released in recent years are actually quite unconventional. Two of my recent favorites are The Descent and Quarantine.

The Descent is a movie that doesn't start out like your average zombie flick, and it's also unusual in that the entire cast is female. I won't spoil anything about it, but suffice to say that it combines traditional horror elements with the claustrophobia of cave exploration.

Quarantine is an American remake of the Spanish movie [Rec]. I've heard several people say the original is better. I haven't seen the original, but Quarantine was definitely good enough on its own. The ending in particular is a memorable scare.

My all-time favorite scary movie is Signs, though. It's not technically a horror flick, but the atmosphere it creates is still frightening, in a "what-if-this-happened-for-real" kind of way. It's also the last movie by M. Night Shyamalan that I really liked.

Another fun thing apart from watching scary movies is watching videos where people scare each other. Here's two funny compilations of scares on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MOriOpcgeQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9IdVrUyaR8

The one in the morgue is just too evil...

As for scary Soul Asylum songs, I actually have two that sometimes give me a creepy feeling: Lies of Hate and Sun Don't Shine. Lies of Hate just sounds very ominous, somehow, and the lyrics "When you shine" make me think about the movie The Shining. Sun Don't Shine has a similar quality, at least during the first half, and it reminds me of an unsettling episode of the X-Files called Home.

During my junior year of high school, I had an English Lit paper due shortly after Halloween. I worked on it while I gave out candy. Since it was Halloween, I thought it would be fitting to listen to Grave Dancers Union.

I thought the video for Runaway Train was creepy, at least until I was desensitzed due to it being shown on MTV often. However, if I saw it now I'd probably not want to watch it before I go to sleep. The worst scene for me is the old-ish guy's grin when he drives off with the teenage prostitute.

I do like X-files, Fringe, Supernatural, Buffy, and Angel. By the way, thanks for bringing up that icky episode of X-files Jakob!

Sarah

Somehow, I forgot to mention the ultimate scary Soul Asylum song: Artificial Heart!

If you want to watch a zombie movie on Halloween but don't want to scare yourself too much, I recommend Dead Snow. It has a few scary scenes but it's basically a comedy. The plot is as follows: a group of young Norwegians are attacked by nazi zombies.

You heard me.

Me and my friends watched Dead Snow not too long ago and we thought it was great, except for my one friend Lydia of course. She hates scary movies and can't stand any kind of gory, bloody violence. The one scene where that guy's (or was it one of the zombies? I can't remember) head gets ripped apart, we rewound it and watched it like three times and she was just freaking out

I'm not a big fan of all zombie movies, but I love George Romero's original classics, especially since there were filmed right here in the Pittsburgh/Western Pennsylvania area.

I like Signs alot, and The Village, but after that M. Night Shyamalan just went straight downhill. Me and my brother were just watching The Happening a little bit for the first time since it was in theatres and wow, that movie is so bad it's confusing.

Anyway, MY two very favorite Halloween movies are An American Werewolf in London and Corpse Bride. American Werewolf is just hilarious and really scary too. I like Corpse Bride because it has a great story and characters and the voice acting is really good, and the animation is just amazing. The first time I saw it I thought it was computer animation, but then I found out it's actually stop-motion.

Halloween used to be so much fun, but it sucks being 19 and trying to celebrate it! There is NOTHING to do. We're too old to trick-or-treat but too young to get into any 21+ parties. It's so lame. I think this comic from the Oatmeal says it all: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/halloween

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRHIeblmIws[/youtube]

I remember as an undergrad one "halloween" was spent as "hallerween". Professor Haller decided to give us a test on Friday Nov 1st, so all of us lost our halloween. To make things worse, we got to class, and he's like "well, none of you are really ready, so we're not having the test today". I'll never forget that... ugh, it really sucked, but he was a really good prof.

Phil

So this weekend I watched the zombie movies Outpost and Diary of the Dead.

Outpost was an okay movie, even though it had a very unusual dramatic structure: the action didn't begin until very late in the movie, and when it did begin it was followed by off-and-on periods of downtime.

Diary of the Dead started out promising, but it really became too ridiculous at times to be scary or believable. I think I'm also starting to see a trend where "old" directors (40+ ) try to fit the internet and social networks into their plot in order to be "modern," but it ends up being way too forced and pretentious, bordering on silly.

But most importantly: How scary were these two movies? Not too much, as it turns out. Outpost was more action-focused (with a lot of military dialogue), while Diary of the Dead never built the tension enough to be scary.

I'm just waiting for somebody to make a parody: Dairy of the Dead. Zombie cows could be scarier than you think!