Outtakes 321

Frightening

By Cait Collins

Blood and gore. Slasher movies. Halloween One to whatever. Some find these movies frightening. But think back to the shower scene in PSYCHO. A black and white movie instead of Technicolor. The music. A knife stabbing down. The heroine cringing in the shower. The scene was so artfully filmed the mind took over and the viewer imagined he saw the knife strike a woman’s body.

The mind is far more powerful than blatant scenes. Alfred Hitchcock had the creative talent to scare the life out of me without the blood and gore. To this day, the movie THE BIRDS still terrifies me. The swarming birds hid the damage to the humans. The teacher died from being pecked to death, but we never saw the sightless eyes and ripped face.

The point is a well-crafted paragraph that builds a villain has more impact than the blow-by-blow vision of a killer’s actions. Give me a masterful book or a brilliant movie and I can imagine so much more than what I read or see.