A US company is paying people to watch horror films to study whether a big budget makes a movie scarier or not. Here, three horror fans reveal the extent of their fix
Representation pic
Ghost stories
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The Ring is a classic horror film from 1998
I have been fairly scared of ghosts since childhood because you keep hearing these stories about the supernatural in traditional Bengali families. I started with The Omen when I was about 15, and with some Hindi stuff like Raat and Virana as well. In fact, if you see the Zee Horror Show now it might seem funny. But as a kid, it was scary as sh*t.
I really like that feeling, and I generally create an ambience by turning the lights off at night before watching a horror flick. Some films I can recommend are The Shining, the first Paranormal Activity, The Blairwitch Project, The Conjuring, Ringu [the Japanese original of The Ring] and a zombie film called Rec.
Neil Chowdhury, 36, advertising producer
It’s fun to get scared
During the major lockdown last year, after my flat mate and I had got a hang of cooking and cleaning for ourselves, we decided to dedicate all our free hours to every known horror film and series ever, good, bad, you name it. This went on for a month. I discovered horror accidentally as a kid. I was about six and living in Assam, and my father would bring back video tapes from a library, which could be about anything. That’s how I saw 100 Days and Raat. Raat terrorised me, and what appeals to me about horror is its sense of the otherworldliness. [It aligns with] my desire to believe that there is something more to life itself. Also, I think it’s fun to get scared.
Ankita Sharma, 36, filmmaker and writer
The Thing about horror
My first memory of watching a horror film is from when I was six years old and I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street. It scared the living daylights out of me. I had these vivid dreams about it, and I never looked back again, because horror made me feel things I hadn’t felt before. These aren’t your slice-of-life drama or action movies. There is a sense of impending doom, which creates feelings of paranoia and dread. Take The Thing for example, the 1982 version. It’s right up there for me. I have watched the director John Carpenter’s retrospective. The same goes for Wes Craven; I really liked his film, Shocker. A lot of these movies are made on a limited budget because they are genre movies. I like that, because the more money you put into films, the more restricted the story will be because it’s a studio budget.
Andrew Lu, 38, tech writer
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