Scary.....

Another day another buck. A very busy day yesterday but good in a way because I didn't get time to have any Monday blues and I'm expecting today to be much similar as once again it's me alone in the office, well in my department(s) anyway.

Have to watch Paranormal Activity 2 today as well and I'm not good with scary films. When I say not good I mean that they genuinely do scare the hell out of me. It's not that I don't appreciate them, indeed a lot of my favourite films come from this genre. When I was a teenager I used to watch all the old zombie films and of course the Nightmare on Elm Street series was big at that time too.

We used to watch them at my buddies house at the opposite end of my road and when walking back home on my own and invariably in the dark I had to walk past this alleyway and I was always petrified that there was going to be zombies running up it after my brains.

I have a couple of lasting horror movie memories and the first is from when I watched a film called "The Kindred". It was about horrible alien monster that had these slimy, knobbly tentacles and it would make these nasty appendages crawl under people skin and you would see it moving up. I was the most horrible thing I'd ever seen.

Since then anything to do with piercing skin of seeing things under skin turns my stomach. Hypodermic injections are a particularly gruesome to me and I'm not even going to get started on those horrid programs you see on TV about plastic surgery and liposuction etc etc.

The Exorcist is the other memory I have, I suppose it counts as two memories actually because I remember the first time I watched it again at my buddies house up the road but I don't remember it being all that scary at the time. However several years later in 2000 they released a digitally remastered directors cut and it was my duty to encode the brand new 5.1 surround sound.

Normally I'd have happily passed this on onto a colleague but it was one of those rush jobs that needed doing late at night to be ready for the next day and I was the only person in my team available...............great !!

So here I was completely alone in a hastily constructed cinema at the rear of a warehouse on a remote Berkshire industrial estate having to watch quite possibly the scariest film in cinematic history.

Even though I didn't have that many harrowing memories of my first viewing I was very aware that my opinions on scariness had changed and that this was in no way going to be a nice experience for me and I was right...........I have never ever ever been so jumpy and shaky watching a film in my life.

What made this different was that instead of watching in off a VHS cassette on portable TV in a room with 3 or 4 other friends. I was watching a crystal clear 35mm remastered film print being projected onto a 20ft wide wall with the sound coming from a full 5.1 digital setup being played at full THX level.......on my own.

The sound was what really made the difference. What I really like but also hate about horror films is those tense moments when you think something is about to happen but it doesn't.

The subtle background music builds up and you start to feel nervous about what's going to happen next, the eeriness slowly rumbles on and on until finally there is a massive crescendo of noise............................and bugger all happens !!!

Then comes a carefully measured moment of silence, you think it's all over then WHAM right out the blue there's a girl with a devils face wearing a blue nightdress doing a backwards crab down a staircase.

Well.................it was at this point that I was made all to aware that I was not infact the only person still at work because my boss was also staying late and had come into the cinema right at that point to inform me that she was off home.

Looking back now I understand why instead of saying she was going home she just pointed at me a laughed because there was I, a 26 years old man , knees up on a chair with my muffled screams barely audible from my mouth as I had my face buried into a cushion.

I do hope that she still tells this story too because it was a truly terrifying moment and testament to just how good that film is especially on the big screen. I vaguely remember being over in our Hollywood office and having to attend a sound check for the film "Cabin Fever" with my colleague and even he was laughing at my jumpiness but I loved that film too.......Hostel is another favourite, I even have the film poster for that on my studio wall.

Oh I've just remembered about a sound check I did for 28 Weeks Later where I was sat at the film lab with the post production supervisor and my coffee went flying at one point !! hahaha

I'm not allowed to let you know what I think of the film until it's released but if you see me later or speak to me at any point later today and notice that I'm a bit sketchy I think you can safely assume that it had it's desired effect.