Which is scarier: reason, or obsession?

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planet news's Avatar
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I guess if we could defeat all the things that cause the body to fall apart and die, then maybe we will start living longer, perhaps hundreds of years, someday, afterall.
Believe it or not, the body falls apart because of its constant regeneration. Whenever a cell replicates, its DNA shortens. By the time you are of a certain age, each replication is essentially consuming the very DNA that makes it possible. That's why cloned animals live a shorter time than normal; their DNA is culled from already-shortened DNA. Of course, this not some kind of built-in mechanism. There is no "code of decomposition". It is a mere side-effect of the particular way in which we regenerate.

Decomposition per se occurs because of external organisms (bacteria, fly larvae, scavengers) devouring our bodies after its defense systems shut down. It can even happen in isolated portions of your body while you are still alive in the cognitive sense. But you would never decompose if you were tossed out into space or if there were no other organisms around. So, it is not only that no one can hear you scream; you also can't decompose.
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But you would never decompose if you were tossed out into space or if there were no other organisms around. So, it is not only that no one can hear you scream; you also can't decompose.
Wow... that's how I wanna be buried. Throw me out into outer space and let me fly around for all of eternity, never decomposing, staying sexy forever. It sounds glamorous. Why didn't they do that with Heath Ledger?



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OK I haven't read anything but Yoda's original post, so maybe these ideas have been said elsewhere, but ghosts also work better to me than aliens. Ghosts are mainly about escaping history or at one time were real. It's that human connection that makes it work.

mark f is a huge fan of The Innocents, to which I entirely agree with him, and that movie features ghosts - maybe, but at the same time we are left to wonder if they are real or not. It is a pyschosis? Ghosts present more of a cerebral scare in questioning ourselves.

Aliens can be scary, but in that classic monster - "how it is going to kill you" scary. The movie Alien is genuinely frightening and I even appreciated Signs. The way the alien is revealed in that film via the reflection in the TV set is simply amazing and that movie played on fears of aliens rather than aliens themselves which is decent. I think it's a better movie than the Sixth Sense.

Anyway I'm not a horror fan by any means and I typically don't seek out these types of films, but I do take recommendations.

Oddly enough one of the great screen moments of a ghost being scary happened on a TV show in "Star Trek" when the ghost/alien thing falls in love with Dr. Crusher. I haven't seen that episode since I was like 12 but I remember that being as frightening and creepy as anything else. Maybe it would be really cheesy today. Who knows.
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I know many people who will tell you straight up that there are no ghosts or aliens, so how can they scare anybody? I realize these people tend to be self-important because they are ones who say there is no God and we are alone in a cold universe but that somehow doesn't scare them because at least they, and we, are alive and able to share all these thoughts and feelings about creatures which our own minds have created. The fact that it's all over within a twinkling of an eye doesn't rattle them in the slightest because their acceptance of true reality only makes them stronger and somehow makes them want to live life to the fullest.
Well yes you're over generalizing. I don't believe in God and I'm not self important because I realize how little and how nothing I am and that I'm going to die and it scares the Hell out of me. I'm not afraid of aliens and ghosts for the reason that I don't believe in them. I am however open to the idea of Aliens, but am closed to the idea of ghosts.



I'm not old, you're just 12.
You know what scared me is the creature in Alien. That guy was instinct driven, savage, and relentless. You didn't get the idea that it was thinking about anything except Kill Kill Kill. And that made me terrified of it. The velociraptors in Jurassic Park were like that too. I'd never wanna run into those damned things EVER.

I guess they'd fall under "Obsession." That scares the bejeezus out of me.
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Alien (the movie) was also scary in some ways like a ghost is scary; you weren't sure what you were dealing with and it did some really weird stuff. Nowadays most everyone knows all about it, but if you were seeing it for the first time and had little or no information on what it was, it was scary and bizarre to see those things for the first time: The eggs and the facehuggers, the acidic blood, the chestburster, and the adult with its extending jaws/tongue thing. All that stuff shown gives us a hint of just how alien actual aliens could be, and it was fascinating for me the first time I saw those things.



will.15's Avatar
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Posession movies are scary no matter what is taking over, a ghost or alien.
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obsession is scarier



I thought more on this while bumping the Exorcist thread and it occurred to me how much Lovecraft's mythology blurs the line between reasonable & rational versus unreasonable & irrational.

His "gods" are basically extradimensional aliens, but are also so fundamentally different from us that they operate more in "supernatural" territory with their varying strange laws. They don't just look different; they think and behave in ways that may as well be irrational to us, even if they actually can and do reason in some sense, and even if their form follows some logic.

Lovecraft's core conceptual basis for his creations was that reality is unknowably strange and dangerous, infinite in nightmarish possibilities and dark perversions of existence... and ultimately, we humans live in some temporary illusory pocket of relative sanity...

All of which prompts philosophical conundrumming as to whether reason, rationality, logic can mean anything beyond their own arbitrary valuing. But I digress...



I wonder if it would be possible for zombies to be sexy. I wanna see a zombie movie where the zombies come back to life and become fashion models. NOBODY BETTER STEAL THAT IDEA.
I no longer care to see that movie happen now, by the way.



Boy, this discussion got really morbid. Sorry if we derailed your original intention, Yoda.
This was a pretty insane thing to talk about in the middle of the thread, I admit. (your body decaying)



To bring it back to subject, the question arises of how assuredly one can assert such a dichotomy to even the motivations of apparent supernatural entities eg. ghosts and demons whose behavior may be malevolently irrational from human perspective because it contravenes human value systems and so appear to be essentially transgressing a "natural" order, but they may also simultaneously uphold a higher order.