I saw the Ring on opening night, and it was a pretty scary movie. I think you
should go see it, if you’re into really weird and twisted things. I kept
getting pulled out of the film by funny little plot holes and technical
things that kindof bothered me, but for the most part it was creepy and
chilling.

So, I was thinking about things that are scary, this evening, while I was
waiting in the cold at a bus shelter (Mental note… get a car and drive on
all that pavement in that map down below) and came up with a little list of
things that I think you could make into creepy horror movie elements.

• The squeaky-squaky interference in between radio stations. They make some
  use of this in “Signs” to good effect, but I was surfing through the static
  the other day to find the very weak hard rock station here, and heard all
  kinds of wierd whistles and mumbling and strange languages (from the
  univesity station, mostly). I think this works for the same reason a lot of
  the weird video in the Ring was scary… it’s disconnected and seemingly
  random, and hard to find comfort in because it’s always changing.
• Laser Eye Surgery. I’m pretty sure that in just one film, Hollywood could
  destroy the laser eye surgery market. If you want to get your eyes lasered,
  but don’t know how it’s done… just go. Make sure they drug you lots, and
  never look at the tools they have. If you -have- been witness to their little
  lens-guillotine setup… egads. They’ll never get me into that chair.
• Things that go bump in the night. The scariest night ever was the night I
  had to walk home about a kilometer along country roads from my friend’s house
  after seeing “Fire in the Sky”, which is that alien abduction movie
  supposedly based on real life. Every broken twig, every rustle of leaves,
  every squirrel chittering made me stop and dive for cover in a ditch.
  They show off the aliens/ghosts/zombies way too much in movies, and it’s -
  always- a letdown. Your mind can play all kinds of horrible tricks on you
  when you can’t see what’s after you, but you can spot a cheap rubber suit in
  one second flat.
• Really really screwed up art. The most screwed up thing ever was at the
  National Gallery in Ottawa. It was a small dark room, curtained off from the
  rest of the gallery. When you went in, there was a video installation in the
  center of the room… images of a skinny asian dude in a padded room,
  stagering around, shouting random japanese things and curling up in a corner.
  Right in front of the video installation was a little plaque, and it talked
  about the artists’ manifesto (blah blah blah, breaking from established
  norms, blah blah) and then it mentioned that one of his most bold and daring
  techniques was to have himself cremated and put into all of the urns around
  you, the ones that lined the room with the video installation. We were inside
  a tomb, that he sculpted for himself. That’s when I got the chill down my
  spine.
  I was out of there like -that-. I think someone should make a movie about
  death-pact artists who attach their corpses to their paintings and hang
  themselves up to dry. It could be really really screwed up.