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Post by Sìle on Nov 11, 2008 0:25:15 GMT -1
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Post by Tegernacus on Nov 11, 2008 7:11:12 GMT -1
I found number 8 interesting, where they are trying to ward off people from a nuclear dump by scary architecture (the reasoning being that if they put up "keep out" signs, in 500 years no-one would be able to read the language so wouldn't know what it means).
Only problem I see with that is like... in 5000 years you'll get neo-neo-neo-druids thinking it's some kind of sacred site and holding rituals on it. Eek!
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Post by arth_frown on Nov 11, 2008 7:47:21 GMT -1
One man's scary place is anothers special place.
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Post by brongoch on Nov 11, 2008 8:05:28 GMT -1
I found number 8 interesting, where they are trying to ward off people from a nuclear dump by scary architecture (the reasoning being that if they put up "keep out" signs, in 500 years no-one would be able to read the language so wouldn't know what it means). I used to work in nuclear decomissioning and some of the eastern european sites gave me the creeps. We had to work one month on, one month off because these places were so stressful to live in. If it hadn't been for the six months a year spent in Prague I would have chucked it in. Number six was interesting, clearly a French painter but painting about ghostly washer women, does the bean-sidhe/banshee legend exist on the continent? |
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Post by Sìle on Nov 11, 2008 18:22:44 GMT -1
I was hoping for a better explanation for why some places feel "scary"; I guess the unknown is as good a reason as any.
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Post by Tegernacus on Nov 11, 2008 19:20:15 GMT -1
In my experience you can't take a photo of a scary place. You can take a photo and make it all dark and moody, but that's not the same thing. "Scary" is an atmosphere, you have to walk through it, feel it.
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Post by reave on Nov 12, 2008 0:19:49 GMT -1
In my experience you can't take a photo of a scary place. You can take a photo and make it all dark and moody, but that's not the same thing. "Scary" is an atmosphere, you have to walk through it, feel it. I'd agree, if it's a photograph of somewhere you've never been it's unlikely to scare the hell out of you, no matter how creepy it's been made to look. And even if it's of somewhere really scary that you have visited in person, its image is unlikely to have the same effect as being there. Unless you'd been very, very deeply scarred by your experiences of the place - in which case the photo might make you go and curl up quivering in the corner, possibly. Never had that happen myself, but you never know. The only photos that ever really gave me the creeps were of - supposedly- the faces of two dead sailors visible in the water next to their ship after they'd drowned. Can't remember which ship it was, but I know I have an old book (somewhere) with a couple of photos of these dead faces in the water, which were said to have stayed alongside the ship throughout the voyage upon which they'd gone overboard and drowned. That's the only photos that ever really creeped me out as a kid, and I can still appreciate the creepyness of them now that I'm a bigger kid. |
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Post by Tegernacus on Nov 12, 2008 11:05:38 GMT -1
yeah, I saw a photo when I was a teenager, some victorian photo of someone in an Asylum, that still creeps me out to this day. It's the eyes... I'll try and find it, but I don't like looking at it. Landscapes: no. Lonely, beautiful, breathtaking, sad, inspiring: yeah.
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Post by Adam on Nov 12, 2008 11:48:05 GMT -1
The scariest place I have ever been was an obscure village in Norfolk... walking down by the river, small houses down one side of the path, clearly occupied, but no larger than huts (prefabs) with windows so dirty you couldn't see in, but you could imaging people seeing out... fields with allotment style growth down the other, with the odd scarecrow... birdsong just died away, breeze stopped... and man was it flat... scared the willies out of a grown man, I can tell you. If a place can have dramatic tension, that had it. As a kid, I grew up in Olney where John Newton (ex-slave trader and writer of the Olney Hymns, including "Amazing Grace") preached and I was choir/altar boy at the church of St Peter's and St Paul's, the High Anglican church he preached at. Newton's grave was tucked away in a corner, one of those big marble blocks... the story went round as kids that if you went there after dark, walked round three times anti clockwise, stood on the spot with your eyes shut and turned round three times, faced out, looked up and open your eyes you would see the devil (cue Hammer House music...) Well, what can you expect? we were lads... a bunch of us went down after dark one autumn evening, egging each other on as only kids can... I went first... disbelieving but slightly nervous... stood in the corner... walked round three times anticlockwise, slowly... closed my eyes... turned round three times, faced out, looked up and with heart pumping, opened my eyes........ less than a foot away from my face was a f*cking gargoyle glaring down on me!!!  If you look carefully, you can see it in the left of the image  |
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Post by jeanwall on Nov 12, 2008 13:27:31 GMT -1
Just a quick anthro lesson: Humans have , in ages past huddled in groups for safety. As those groups became civilizations, properly speaking, we have tended extrapolate that to a world construct .Population centers became a central point of civilization and the rule of law, and concentrically, the regions surrounding that became increasingly remote from the civil ,increasingly wild and increasingly fear inducing. There has always been a habit of creating a" locus of evil" within the bonds of civilization in order to contain it ,and maintaining that given place ,generation after generation as a spot wherein to quarentine the evils that beset a given generation. During the Crusades, leprosy was imported back into Europe by returning Crusaders and at it's apex affected perhaps 20% of the population. Leprosariums cropped up all over the place, and as leprosy receeded, those places tended to be converted to prisons,insane asylums(Bedlingham was originally a leper colony) and places of execution. Those places were probably "creepy" to start with , they probably elicited some deep inchoate response generally in order to be designated as the locus of evil and avoided by the common folk. By adding observable disease,madness, death , misery, isolation and legends and tales meant to scare schoolboys into obedience  Not to take the fun out of having the bejeezus scared out of one's self...it's evident that we enjoy the memory of seeing the devil at Newton's grave. We don't always like confronting our fears, but we REALLLLLLLLLLY like overcoming them.Wasn't it Churchill that said the "most exilerating feeling was to be shot at...and missed". Nobody took that as an open invitation to keep shooting at him, though. the persistent state of fear has a decidedly different effect on us. Best, Jean |
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Post by Adam on Nov 12, 2008 14:09:41 GMT -1
At high levels there is little to distinguish fear and excitement other than the cognitions we associate with them... why I go WEEEEEEEE on a rollercoaster and my wife goes WAAAAH ;D It's why I like a certain level of fear... I have a proper swimming head phobia of heights, but will put myself in situations (where the swimming head isn't going to cause danger) where I can confront that, because it feels like a hell of an echievement where I do. Close-to-liminal-fear though is a different kettle of soapy frogs... there isn't that clear kinaesthetic sensation to attach the cognitions to... it becomes a background noise that influences every aspect of thinking and decision making without us even being aware of it... it's why it is such a powerful tool of social control. And I do the Newton's grave story so much better after dark, in person ;D
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Post by Craig on Nov 12, 2008 17:05:49 GMT -1
You want fear?
Walk up Cader Idris and stay overnight. Around 2am you are ready to jump at just about anything. I've done it half a dozen times and the grim old bugger keeps me awake every time.
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Post by Heron on Nov 13, 2008 11:30:01 GMT -1
My most scary recent experience was last year in Norway. Two of us were walking along a glacial lake and stopped to look at some Amanita muscaria (the fly agaric red magic mushrooms with white spots). Moving on I suddenly looked up to see a huge face staring out of the cliff. This was not an imagined configuration of markings but a massive shape sticking out of the straight cliff face with distinct eyes, nose and mouth and even some vegetation on top for hair. But the expression on the face was a grimace of pain and anger. It was terrifying. We had been joking earlier about seeing trolls and now one seemed to be confronting us. In spite of standing spellbound for a while, I eventually found myself reaching into my pocket for my camera. As I did so I heard the sound of what I thought was a trail bike, though we had seen no-one else but two other walkers for hours. Then a motorized tricycle came skidding round the bend being ridden by a teenage girl with blonde pigtails. She looked like the very image of a valkyrie. We jumped off the path as she careered past. When she had gone I looked at my camera and put it back in my pocket. That grimace belonged by the lake not in my camera and certainly not out on the Web where I might have posted it.
I learned later that there had been two avalanches along the lake in the 19th and 20th centuries which had killed people, and in one case wiped out an entire village, because of the glacier on the mountain above. An angry landscape underlying the placid beauty of its surface.
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Post by littleraven on Nov 13, 2008 12:06:38 GMT -1
I once spent a lovely afternoon sitting with a book, in the crook of a large old Silver Birch tree near the banks of the Ogwen.
Went back the next week, same intent. Tree wasn't there. It hadn't been cut down either.
That was quite spooky.
Same place, a graveyard I know quite well, a graveyard attached to an abandoned church (mucho history, I'll tell you sometime). I noticed a big old gravestaone I hadn't noticed before, one of those really big Victorian jobs. I went to have a look at the name on the other side. It was mine.
That was quite spooky.
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Post by Adam on Nov 15, 2008 13:30:10 GMT -1
You want fear? Walk up Cader Idris and stay overnight. Around 2am you are ready to jump at just about anything. I've done it half a dozen times and the grim old bugger keeps me awake every time. It's on the list... first I need to speak top someone who has done it, and then convince my wife I won't die |
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