Image: The dog from The Thing

Although I haven’t seen a really scary movie in a long time, there were two movies that terrified me as a child, and they ended up being two of my favourite movies, too! One was called The Thing and the other was Alien 3.

The Thing is about a group of arctic researchers who discover an alien that can take the shape of people and animals after killing them. When the researchers first encounter it, it seems to be a dog, so they put it in a kennel with their other dogs. The dark and suspenseful scene of the creature in the dog kennel, when the other dogs notice something is wrong and start barking and trying to escape as the creature transforms, really freaked me out when I was a kid. I had to try three or four times to get past that scene before I could finally watch the whole movie!

Unlike with The Thing, I was able to watch Alien 3 all the way through, but that night I had terrible nightmares. I must have been 8 or 9 years old at that time, and the alien creature came to be a powerful symbol of fear that would stay with me for many years. Even though the aliens haunted my dreams, I grew to love that series so much that I bought all of the movies, comics, and toys related to it, and I still love it even today. 

Although the special effects in both movies sometimes make them seem a little silly when I watch them now, the acting is fantastic and they make excellent use of suspense to create fear even before revealing the creatures. I also think the remote and desolate locations add a lot to these horror movies, heightening the emotion because you know that there is no escape and no help is coming. A final element that makes these movies scary is the fact that the people turn against each other as well, so the threats come from within and from without.