BSA 106 (Screen Arts) Semester 2 Week 9 : Frightening and Disturbing Scenes

In class we were asked to think about some scenes from our childhood that stuck with us because they evoked a frightening or disturbing emotional response in us. Below I talk about two from early childhood and then two from recent memory that have evoked a similar response.

One of the worst from my childhood came from the TV series Twin Peaks, my dad used to show us TV series and movies from when he grew up (e.g. Cheers and Star Wars), one of his favourite filmmakers was David Lynch and because of this he showed us Twin Peaks. I think I was ten or eleven at the time and a scene from one of the final episodes really disturbed me. It was the scene in which the main character has a dream, in which we see a red room and a dwarf. The scene was unsettling because of its tone and surrealist execution - talking backwards and the weird movement of the characters was very strange.

This is quite a scary scene already, and one that is still unsettling to me, I think the interesting memories from our childhood are those that don't make much sense now. The movies we found scary that now seem silly.

An example of this is the nightmare scene that Woody has in Toy Story 2. Again the scene is very different to the rest of the film, throwing out logic and taking a more surrealistic approach. I think Andy's emotionless face and monotone voice added a lot to making this frightening to a child. That and the amputated toy parts.

A recent example of a disturbing scene was from Rosemary's Baby. I saw this movie two years ago and it still stands as the scariest horror movie that I've seen. The very final scene is disturbing because the whole film has only been hinting at whats actually going on. The fear was partly paranoia and the final scene is so open about the truth - with truth being the main characters' worst fear. These  chanting "hail satan" really disturbed me.