Eighteen Film Buffs Talk About The Scariest Movies They’ve Ever Seen
Even film critics watch these movies with the lights on.
Night Of The Creeps
Jake Stone, singer/songwriter in Bluejuice
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with looking at the backs of videos in the horror-movie section of the video store. I was too young to actually rent anything, but I could stare at the backs of Critters, A Nightmare On Elm Street, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as well as all the the straight-to-video nasties that made ’80s horror films so good.
Sometimes I’d manage to catch one such rotten shocker on TV, and those would usually be the really porno end of the genre spectrum. I’m not talking about The Exorcist. In this case I’m talking about real video nasties, like 1986’s Night of the Creeps.
The story is straightforward enough – it’s prom night, and somehow that coincides with the arrival of alien-slug brain parasites who take over their human hosts by slithering inside their mouths and turning them into murderous zombies. I think the thing that got me was the remorseless, horrifying violence and slithering terror provided by the slugs.
There’s a great scene where a bus full of young male revellers are on their way to the party, and swerve to avoid a slug-infested dog on the road, crashing the bus and killing everyone, or at least mortally wounding all the kids on the bus. Worse yet, the dog simply hops into the wreckage, and infects everyone onboard by vomiting the alien slugs into the dead and dying teenagers mouths and eyes. Horrible. You’ll love it.