Recently watched this indie horror movie. It's not a success exactly but is darn clever and got me thinking again about what makes good horror.

The homeless guy unkempt beard I'm rocking scared the bejesus out of my neighbor last night when we both opened our doors at the same time. Pure panic response so a startle [surprise] but she apologized once she recovered--this took a bit--and said she had nightmares about such. She's seen me before, we're on good terms, so it was the startle triggering something else. How many levels else I don't know. Certainly don't know her well enough to ask if the nightmares are tied to childhood abuse.

I also watched every Hellraiser movie last month [note: not recommended; there's a lot of the buggers going steadily down hill] and they reminded me that Barker's fiction, while very specific to his own nightmares somehow twigs a non-obvious universal. Same as Giger's alien before it got abstracted into generic Bad Critter.

It's the idiosyncratic new creation which quickly becomes a generic which has always had me confused. Think about it: Giger's design for Alien is so specific, so odd, how did it become a widely copied critter? Sure, it's got the infection thing, psycho-sexual blah blah, scary stuff, but so did many movie critters before. Why did that incredibly specific one stick? It doesn't happen often. Very personal nightmare->broad reaction and relation to->ho-hum everyday copied critter.

Could anyone young watch Alien now and get how startling it was? Critter with mouth in mouth, tummy implant, got it, I played that C grade game four times last month.