Horror Movies

I'm sick and tired of those Korean horror movies.

Ever since The Ring, the only ghost that appear in Japanese and Korean horror movies are Sadako-lookalikes. What happened to those good, old pontianaks that fly from trees, or the vampires that can climb on walls like bats??

Anyway, in conjunction with the Lunar Seventh month, I would to talk about horror movies.

Let's start with the scariest horror movie I watched when I was young. And that is, without a doubt, The Exorcist.

Scary girl with white face, long hair and a man's voice were certainly enough to scare the wits out of me then. But it was made a little less scary because my father was telling me about how horrible that movie was and how much it had frightened him when he took my mom to watch (when they were dating). So I was more or less prepared.

Then, there was this scary show named Evil Dead or something like that. Apparently, that story's about some supernatural thing that lurks in the basement. Which constantly reminds me, that I will never get myself a place with a basement. That is, if im moving to one of those countries with big houses and basements.

So I grew up watching horror movies (thanks to mommy who's favourite family activity was going to the movies; so my bro and I had to watch all the movies that our parents watched). And I sort of don't get scared of such movies easily. In fact, I do enjoy them. I get scared while watching (but of course!) but after that, I'll laugh at how silly I was.

There is this one movie, that has frightened me in recent years. That is, Dawn of the Dead. Not sure if this movie's about the supernatural, but flesh eating zombies are my least favourite of the supernaturals. I mean, vampires are pretty cool, you know, except, they can't go sun-tanning. Ghosts are just energy while witches can be pretty cool as well. But zombies just do not fit into the cool category. And zombies that can run faster than I do certainly freak the hell out of me.

The horror movies that I hate most are those stupid Korean or Japanese ones with Sadako's hair and nails. I mean, can the props supervisor or make-up artist do something different? Somehow, in all these Korean movies, someone must wear white (and maybe look bloody), and start crawling on the floor onto a very frightened victim or that white body would start scratching her nails on the floor. They really gotta stop ruining the floor tiles.

Anyway, the reason why I started talking about Korean movies is because I was on my way home from Malaysia (from our company retreat in KL), and we get to watch these movies on the bus, and they were showing this movie titled "Ghost Train". i slept through half the show, but I believed that i didn't miss much. Cos in the end, there was no proper ending and you're sort of left to guess who was the dead and who was still alive.

Some movies that I thought were scary and had every reason to include Silent Hill, Ghost Camp, Tale of Two Sisters and some others. At least the story lines' pretty original.

If I were to write a script, I'd like to write something to do with children playing hide-and-seek and finding themselves being hidden with something (someone) else in the closet, or people at a wedding banquet when half the room suddenly turned into werewolves and start feasting on all others, or the local S-11 coffeeshop that the supernaturals visit after midnight.

What would your scary movie be like?

News

There is this new project at work recently where we have to come up with little skits and video-cam ourselves. (By the way, if someone tells me he or she has to video-cam himself or herself, i would think of low budget porn straightaway. Dunno why. I think becos i have trash friends who had been injecting dirty stuff into my head from more than a decade ago, that's why.)

Being a perfectionist, I have many ideas on how we can film ourselves and the angles to take so that it's not so boring, and it'll look very much like how it does on TV. So for our first shots, I wasn't too pleased and wanted to re-take the whole thing, despite 374,638 NGs.

However, before I can suggest a re-take, a team-mate expressed that this is not her real work and she wanted to get her priorities right. That is, this project is not worth taking up so much of her time. She is not wrong. But am i obsessive with getting everything done with my best put in?

I don't know.

Anyway, I just want to say, it's damn tough being both an actor and a director. When I play director, I have to explain and get the team to understand how the angles should be taken, and the "steps" they gotta take in order to achieve the required results. Somehow, words are interpreted differently and eventually, the angles for most scenes are just not what I had initially wanted. But this is teamwork, so if the rest of the team think it's fine, then so be it. After all, being one of the actors, the re-takes and NGs had really worn me out.



***************************************

On other news, a friend just had a little baby girl and I went to the baby shower alone yesterday. Some friends came and left, while the others weren't there yet. I was left alone among hordes of people for quite a while. Despite the mommy trying to find time to talk to me, she was most busy and I couldn't keep her to myself for long.

It is during times like this that I would think: Thank goodness I smoke.

Congratulations to Cheryl and Wee Yong on the arrival of little Megan. Despite her size, Megan has really beautiful eyes.