I forgot to mention the scariest thing I've seen recently, and it's scared me like nothing else in the last couple years.
GHOSTWATCH
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwatchhttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0200659/
For us Americans, it's pretty obscure. If you're from the UK, you're probably all too familiar with it. Filmed in 1992, before the internet could spoil shit, it was basically a mockumentary about a real life BBC investigation of a haunted house. It was supposed to be presented live, with a camera crew and audience surrounding the house, with a second camera crew inside, filming everything. Viewers were encouraged to call a 1-800 number and share their own stories. On the set is a real life psychic, and a skeptic, reach offering their own opinion on the events as they supposedly happened in real time.
Mind you, this was presented as real.
The hosts, and all the interviewers played themselves, and acted as they would on any other broadcast. Imagine if 60 MINUTES pulled the meanest prank in the world, and you would have GHOSTWATCH.
What's so scary about it? Nothing really. Not for the first hour. A working single mother and her daughters are living in an estate house. But, they're experiencing some very strange night terrors and poltergeist phenomenon. They think they're being haunted by someone whom they've nicknamed PIPES, because he likes to bang on pipes when he's mad.
Pipes apparently lives in the cubbyhole under the stairs, which they've since nailed and taped the fuck shut. He seems more interested in the 13 year old girl, than the mother or the baby sister. He'll randomly assault her, scratching up her arms and face.
And nobody believes them.
We hear the traditional bumps, and creaks, and cats hissing. Water dripping on the floor. Knocks on the pipes.
SPOILERS
But then, this gradual build up of small scares finally starts to pay off, and all hell literally breaks lose in a terrifying apocalypse in Northolt, London.
We learn that hundred years ago, the house was an orphanage, and the mistress who ran it used to lock girls in the cubbyhole under the stairs - and that's when the bitch wasn't drowning the girls in the bath tub.
A glass window shatters. They capture a video image of a skull face fucking THING, standing behind the drapes, watching the girls sleep. The sound of the cats returns, louder and angrier than before.
The phone callers, all fake of course, begin to report similar stories with greater and greater urgency. They're hearing cats in their home. They're hearing knocks on their pipes. All across England, glass is breaking and tables are lifting, and all kinds of shit is going down.
Suddenly, the little girl is attacked inside the house. The mother drags her out, leaving the older daughter behind with the camera crew. The interviewer watching over her is basically like Paula Zahn: pretty to look at, but pretty much fluff.
And that's when it happens. The power goes out inside the house. The crew is attacked by an unseen force, nearly killing the boom mic guy. The older daughter is yanked under the stairs, and the door is locked shut from the inside. We hear cats screaming. We hear the girl basically being raped by something inside.
The studio loses its video feed.
The call lines are jammed. They hosts are freaking the fuck out, until the video feed returns, and we find the camera crew and the girl playing pictionary, or some shit.
Then they receive a phone call from a man who used to be a probation officer. He's clearly scared, and doesn't want to be on the phone. But, he's got a story to tell. He used to have a client, 30 years back. A child molester. The Molester rented a room in that same house, and swore up and down that he was having dreams about the old Mistress who used to live there.
She was commanding him to kill more children.
Eventually, he stabbed one child to death, and then racked with guilt, climbed into the crawlspace under the stairs and hung himself. With all his cats. They didn't find his body for 3 days. The cats got hungry.
And ate his fucking face off.
And then the psychic realizes something. The video feed from inside the house is 6 hours old. It's a goddamn VHS tape. They struggle to regain the video feed, and when they do, they see the POV of a downed camera.
The interviewer chick is trying to pry the cubbyhole door open, screaming for the hundreds of people outside the house, and the million watching at home, to come inside and hold her.
The door creaks open. Blackness. We hear a cat screech. THEN she gets pulled inside, and the door slams shut again.
At this point, the actually BBC studio starts going crazy. Pounding. Leaking pipes. A gust of wind blowing everything the hell around. The psychic finally realizes that the BBC just created a giant, nationwide seance, and essentially opened the gates of hell.
The power goes out inside the studio, and the HOST of the show, now alone on the stage, suddenly walks towards the unmanned camera, singing the child molester's favorite nursery rhyme, now clearly possessed.
Cut to black.
END SPOILERS
And all this was presented completely straight faced as real by the BBC, with famous news personalities playing themselves, ending with - what our equivalent would by - Paula Zahn raped and killed by the ghost of a child molester under the stairs, and Dan Rather possessed by the demonic spirit of the homicidal orphanage mistress.
And the actual end of the world.
Now imagine turning on the television on Halloween Night, not knowing that it was all just an elaborate prank by the nice men on the TV, and watching with horror all these things happen on live TV.
One of the single scariest things I've ever seen in my life, and I knew it was prank! I even knew how the story played out, and didn't matter. My heart was racing by minute 50, and didn't stop until I hit the Pizza Hat after words.
Netflix this and enjoy.
