THE SAMHAIN PROJECT, SEASON 6: 10 SCARY NON-HORROR MOVIES

SEASON 6

Sometimes a movie is capable of scaring the shits out of you while not intending to exactly be frightening. I'm not talking about "disturbing", of course, because in this day and age there are a plethora of filmmakers who aim to only do that.  I'm talking about films with the capability of terrifying you by merely making you think...

Now there was a time people thought Idiocracy and The Day After Tomorrow were exaggeratory humor and science fiction at their most prime examples.  All, I can say is "Life Comes At You Fast, Bro". Because the government seems to be repeatedly stepping on rakes, and flashing stunning displays of self-dealing corruption.  With the weather being transformed into some sort of Frankenstein's climate monster due to those folks' indifference, neither film seems all that far off the mark anymore. 

Idiocracy has some things in the film that are just plain not funny anymore despite me howling in laughter at it almost 20 years ago.   And all those people calling Dennis Quaid's (serious irony there, innit?) warnings about the oncoming Whitley Streiber Superstorm "stupid movie pseudo-science" in The Day After Tomorrow, do you still want to hang on to that?

That's not where I'm going here today, but it's creating an extension to the "Scary even though..." genre.

Anyhoo.

1. Paradise Lost--Watching 3 teenagers being railroaded into life in prison or a lethal injection is terrifying.  The West Memphis 3 had it happen to them by a biased and discriminatory legal system and community.  However,  what happened to those little murdered boys is far worse, unfair, and disturbing beyond belief.

2.  Idiocracy--Yeah, it's a wackadoo comedy written and directed by Beavis and Butt Head and King of the Hill creator Mike Judge, but just think: If the morons of the world continue to reproduce at the current Jerry Springer rate, and smart people don't have time for kids, how off the mark is it really? Currently being proven out by Donald Trump and most of his supporters.

3: The Day After--It doesn't really hold up special effects-wise, but the build up to the button being pushed is undeniably creepy and tense. That poor woman, trapped in denial while trying to do laundry and fight off her husband's attempts to usher her into a shelter, is heart-rending.  From my knowledge, being pretty well read on the subject this film is fairly accurate.

 

 4. The Accused--Another standard legal system-gone amok movie, but the sequence where Jodie Foster is gang-attacked still haunts me to this day, and I refuse to watch it again.  A movie that made me somehow hate my gender and Leo Rossi simultaneously.  Men suck.

 

5. Trekkies--If you're a Star Trek fan, respect....really. But just like anything else pop-culture wise that you can be a fan of, some people take it to nausea-inducing levels of self-indulgence and hero-worship that exceeds even church-going zealotry.  Some of these people need help.  So many cringe-inducing moments.  Side Note: There's also a few moments in 25 Years of Terror where fans of the Halloween series are also shown in much the same light.  These people give me the creeps.

6.  Dopamine--A romantic comedy that poses the questions: what if love is just dopamine, and lust is just adrenaline?  Despite the saccharine ending, those questions posed by the movie chilled me to the very marrow of my bones. So it possessed me to ask my own question: Why are we doing this, then?

 7. Miracle Mile--The last 15 minutes of this movie show humanity at it's absolute worst, when knowledge that nuclear destruction is inevitable. I stared blankly at the screen for a good five minutes solid after the final frame, and couldn't sleep for days afterwords.  Yes, the atomic apocalypse would be awful, but somehow people would manage to one-up even that hideousness.

 8. Midnight Express--Please remind me to never, never, EVER, EVER try to smuggle heroin out of Turkey.

9. The Guyana Tragedy--Humanity's lemming mentality at its most pathetic and disturbing. Jesus Christ, this actually happened.  Learning of one person's ability to actually get people to willingly walk to their death literally scared the shit out of me.

10. Thirteen Days--The Cuban Missile Crisis and how close we actually came to flame-on. It's Goddamn eye opening to realize people who were gilded as one-time war-heroes also pushed for "collateral damage" actions and others agreed with them.  Thank the stars cooler heads prevailed, on both sides of the ocean.