Which is scarier: reason, or obsession?

At the risk of sounding like a hair-splitter, I wasn't really scared of Signs, but I found it very tense. A fine line, maybe. But the difference was stark with my friend Adam; when I saw it with him, he was absolutely terrified and bit a hole in his shirt on the drive home.

Some people are just super-freaked about the idea of aliens, specifically. I find ghosts scarier. There's an old thread around to this effect that I might revive, where I suggest that the difference is between an object of fear you can still potentially reason with (aliens) and one you can't (ghosts). The disagreement was about whether or not it was scarier to deal with an obsessive mindlessness, or a mind that understood what you wanted and went after you anyway.

I'm probably more scared by aliens than ghosts, I guess...

But I'm even more scared of the idea of zombies, partly for what you mentioned about them being unreasonable.

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It may have to do with me personally seeing zombies and evil aliens as more possible than ghosts. But I still think the Ring is very scary too.

Yeah, Zombies would align with ghosts in this dichotomy.

Funny you mention The Ring, because that's easily the scariest movie I've ever seen.

When I think about it, no, I don't find the Exorcist as scary as for instance Night of the Living Dead. Exorcist is to me more like what Yoda described Signs being for him: Tense, like a battle of wills.

The Ring definitely scared the crap out of me too, and I get a lot of flack for admitting that...

I've always been fascinated with exorcism movies, but I'm not clenching my pillow or biting my nails when I watch them. I think of The Exorcist as a really long, drawn-out History Channel special.

It's definitely one of the scariest I've ever seen, of ghost/supernatural horror movies. I don't know if I'd call it the scariest, though.

But your dichotomy you mention, it's about reasonable versus unreasonable, yet you could also split (maybe hair-split it) to create a further dichotomy between supernatural and "natural" monsters, if you get my meaning.

For instance, people infected with a virus and becoming zombies, that would be a contrast to supernatural evil spirits. Both are unreasonable. Aliens would be potentially reasonable "natural" horror archetypes, so what would be a potentially reasonable supernatural contrast, I wonder?

Perhaps, the Exorcist?

I will admit I got a little freaked out when I saw it as a kid during the scene where they showed the footage on the TV.

That sounds about right to me. There is nothing scarier to me than ghosts or demons. (Neither of which I actually believe in by the way) I guess what is so frightening to me about The Exorcist and demon possession in general is that these are things that can't be fought, at least not in the traditional sense. With aliens and zombies you at least have a chance to blow them up or cut off their heads. There is a way of stopping them. No matter how scary an enemy that stands in front of me is it's not going to be as scary as something I can't see, fight or run from.

There is also the element of demons and ghosts making the familiar and known the unfamiliar and unknown that I find particularly frightening too.

Irrational forces are always scarier than rational ones. There's your answer, Yoda. Now close the thread.

Dunno if I can explain myself better than I did already in this thread, but yeah, it's about the fact that there are no ground rules with ghosts, and not necessarily any appeasing them. An alien is just a physical being, and therefore just wants something. Something that is rational to want. And as powerful as it is, it will still be constrained by the same laws of the universe that you will. Ghosts are playing a completely different game on both levels. I suppose a sufficient level of technology might make the second distinction largely moot, but even so I think any fathomable alien is still killable.

I suspect the difference in opinion might also have to do with probability. That is to say, people might sometimes find aliens scarier simply because they find the idea of them more plausible, which is slightly different than saying you find them scarier even if you're positing that each exists.

How do we know there are ground rules with aliens, though? I've never seen a real alien in person, and I've never heard of anyone in real life actually encountering an alien. The only ground rules we have for aliens are rules set up by movies. I don't think there's nearly been enough films about ghosts to set up ground rules for them.

Alien invasion films have been around since the 50's, and most sci-fi films that came out during that decade had something to do with aliens. How many films about ghosts can you list off the top of your head? I just think that maybe if there were more films about ghosts, then there would be more ground rules.

As far as probability goes, I find them about equal. There's a plausible chance about each of them happening about equally, I think. Though in today's times, I find zombies much more plausible than each of them.

Well, we're all just speculating, but I'd think that an alien, by definition, is a physical being. It is grounded in the reality of physics. If it exists outside of physical reality, then it's something else. Ghosts, on the other hand, indicate another layer of reality that we are unaware of and have no firsthand experience with.

I didn't think we had firsthand experience with any of this.

Seriously though, I don't think anything can be completely indestructible. There has to be some way to take down a ghost, and there has to be a way to take down an alien.

There's usually some kind of weird way to appease the ghosts in movies, or some set of rules they have to abide by, but you never, like, punch a ghost, or shoot a ghost, or lop a ghost's head off. In some movies you can't do anything to them, and in others, at best, you have to learn, on the fly, the esoteric rules of the ghost's "world." Even when you can fight them, you have to learn a whole new set of rules and they're not always entirely logical or rational.

That kinda thing freaks me out. I've spent my whole life living in this world and learning how not to die in it. Being thrust out of my element (much like being chased in the ocean, which is an analogy I used way back when in this thread) makes the idea scarier, to me.

To be honest, if any of this actually happened in real life, I know I probably wouldn't be able to defend myself. Well, I think I could fight off zombies, but there's no way I'd live through an alien invasion or a ghost trying to kill me.

Neither of them scare me when they're portrayed in movies, though. I don't know what it is, but it just doesn't scare me. Movies about serial killers scare me more, because they're a lot more common and could easily happen to anyone. Whereas the chances of a ghost haunting you or an alien invasion are very slim.

I agree. I'm much more terrified when I watch movies like The Strangers, ones that involve murderous psychopaths and such. In my opinion, other humans are the true fear. You never know what people are capable of.

Scariest movie I've ever seen? Takashi Miike's Audition - perfect example of what I'm referring to...

I've never seen Audition, but I agree with on The Strangers. I did watch it for the first time late at night by myself, but it's still pretty scary when I go back and watch it again. The atmosphere to the film is just so scary, that and the fact that the entire movie is a bunch of jump scares one after another. At least they learned that to make jump scares work, you just have to continually throw them out one after another.

The Strangers definitely scared me. It also made me really, really mad. I wanted to kick the crap out of those stupid, hobby-less kids.