Jurassic Park and Me

Remember Jurassic Park? Yeah the movie that spawned two quite laughable sequels. The movie that sort of revolutionised special effects. The movie that scared me shitless when I was a kid.

You see, ever since I was a wee lad, I've always had a fancy for dinosaurs. I could name you the estimated height and length of nearly every "mainstream" dinosaur and tell you approximately when and where they lived. I could tell you the difference between a Brontosaurus and an Apatosaurus. Which dinosaur was theorised to have a trunk. Feathers.

Anyway, being a dino-loving kid, the opening of Jurassic Park naturally became a religious event for me, and I dragged my father to watch it, only because I was deemed too young to watch it on my own.

And I got scared. Shitless.

Now, don't get me wrong, JP isn't a horror movie per se, nor is it a light-hearted comedy. It's scarier than Evil Dead or Barney, but will never be Ju-On. But I don't really need to explain what the movie actually is, do I?

Anyway, what scared me the most about JP were the Velociraptors. Now, in my many (about 2) years of dino-research, I always envisioned raptors as cold-blooded killers, much like how they were portrayed in the movie, but not quite as cunning and... merciless.

When the guy gets ambushed by the group of raptors ("Clever girl...") I was amazed.

But when the two raptors stalked the kids in the kitchen, I was scared. (Shitless).

The next few months (seriously) saw Naz checking everywhere for raptors. Behind my bed. In my closet. Under the car. Waiting for me at the dinner table. I was one paranoid kid.

Course, back then I also thought that the raptors and other dinosaurs used in JP were real. Now, I knew dinosaurs had been extinct for millions of years. But I thought the technique they used in JP (extract dino blood from amber-preserved mosquito, copy and modiy dino-DNA, die gruesome death) actually worked and that was how they filmed the damn movie.

I grew wiser, of course, and like any other kid, got over my irrational fear.

It seems the movies do indeed induce mass hysteria sometimes though. Look at The Ring (the Japanese version, not the cheesy Hollywood remake). Till this day, hordes of people still scream and faint and run and cry and wail and generally panic everytime someone so much as flashes the opening scene of the cursed video.

Watch this.

Don't get me started on Ju-On (The Grudge, for those of you more Hollywood-inclined, though the only saving grace of the remake is Sarah Michelle Gellar). I was like, what? 17 when I caught it? And it creeped me out. I remember shampooing my hair a few days after catching it and freaking out when something knocked against my bathroom door (stupid cat).

Yeah, we've all been scared out of our minds due to some movie or other, and if you haven't, pity.

My list of favourite scary movies (not neccesarily in terms of scariness):
*Ju-On
*Signs
*The Village (At least the first half...)
*The Sixth Sense
*House of Wax (Gore, FTW)

I'd add Final Destination, Saw, and a few others, but they're not really horror, and even if they are, aren't really billed as such.

Ah well.