a question

[perlmonger]

This morning’s dead rat reminded me indirectly of something I’ve been thinking about posting for a while:

Do you have any sort of abiding horror that you read in a book, or saw in a film or on TV, as a child or adolescent? The sort of thing that haunted you for years and might still give you a queasy feeling years later?

Mine, and I only have the one, is the inside-out cat in Eye in the Sky: that made me feel physically ill with horror, and pity, and revulsion, when I first read it as a teenager. It still drags itself, somehow, impossibly, across the back of my mind today.

[ shudders ]

Comments

[ccomley.livejournal.com]

I have no issue with rats. Our lot bring in shrews, mice, squirrels, rats, people you tell recoil with extra horror at the latter but they're just rodents trying to raise their kids in the hedges and fields.

I would consider myself no more than normally claustrophobic, which is to say, i would expect most of us to prefer NOT to be confined in a tight space like, say, a coffin or similar sized container or room. The only time this caused me any practical qualm was when I had an MRI, and at the time I had lots on my mind. I can do lifts, I can do the revolving "capsule" doors at Telehouse, no probs.

But the only section of a book I've found makes me actually uncomfortable, and can come back and haunt me, described a chap pushing his way into a narrow cave, and, with NO idea if it was even possible to get through. continue to push himself inwards even past the point where he couldn't possibly have backed out again. Even typing about it now makes me shudder.

[thunderbox.livejournal.com]

Have you seen The Descent (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435625/)?

[ccomley.livejournal.com]

I have. I don't recall any part of it which captured the same sense of "ik". I have seen docu's of folks going pot-holing and it's deffo not the sport for me.

That said, I don't have an issue with *caves* as such. The french are quite fond of discovering cave networks then turning them into tourist visits, and that's fine, the formations are fascinating and I can see the appeal of being underground but if it means wriggling through holes that small, I'm happy to leave it to the ferrets.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

I've no problem with rats at all, though I'd be reluctant to share home with any as they're so good at what they do. They tend to give almost as good as they get with the Tribe, too; Lilith in particular has come home with some nasty bites.

Conventional horrors - rats, snakes, arthropods of whatever number of legs; claustrophobia, agoraphobia, &c… - have never had much effect on me, I seem to have needed events with emotional, visceral, impact. Though I did hide behind my sister when One dealt with the Zarbis, and I never actually saw a Rill; hey! I was seven at the time :)

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

the sense of loss of self in Flowers of Algernon - and an unknown Philip K Dick in which a rat dreams he is a man who dreams he is a rat; the rat has a larger ball of string than his strength and pecking order position will allow him to defend, he loves his string and knows that it will be taken from him, but not how or when ;-(

[spiritmoving.livejournal.com]

I saw the film "The Hypnotic Eye" as a child, and it gave me terrors for years. Storyline is about a disfigured woman who uses hypnosis to cause women to disfigure themselves. It starts with a woman putting her head in the flames of a gas stove, and the image of her on fire is the one that haunted me. I was afraid to sleep close to a wall, sure that somehow a hand could come out of the wall and set my head and face on fire.