Monday, October 28, 2013

Boo!

As Hallowe'en approaches, and we try to decide our costume--Frankenstein's monster or Mike Duffy?--it is time to once again declare our Spookiest List.

Spookiest music: Many might pick the bone-crunching theme from "Jaws" or the piercing shrieks Bernard Hermann wrote for "Psycho," but our choice remains Miklos Rozsa's dream sequence music for Hitchcock's "Spellbound," with that eerie, ghostly theremin.

Spookiest movie: We have a friend who still shivers when he thinks of 1932's "The Mummy," and "The Shining" and "Rosemary's Baby" can set goose bumps in motion, but our choice for best in this category is still "The Uninvited." Think of Ray Milland carrying a candelabra up the stairs into the icy darkness...

Spookiest book: M.R. James's "Collected Ghost Stories," given us by an elderly archbishop, is fine Hallowe'en reading, and Saki's tales always raise a chill, but the best of all ghost stories, for this edge-of-the-seat reader, remains "The Green Man," by Kingsley Amis.

Wait a minute...what's that noise behind us? Where did that black cat come from? Why is that shadow coming closer..and closer..and---

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