Coming out

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Ensign Steve

When my class did Old Yeller (the book, not the Disney movie, we read books in my school, unlike in rural GA) my group presented the part with the wild boar attack (srsly, Stormy, you need to read this shit, it's totally relatable) and it's pretty graphic and I passed out in front of the whole class. It was awesome.

I had the same reaction to Wilson Rawls' Where the Red Fern Grows.

To set the story up, we went without a TV for a time in our house, and when we got one it was set up in my parents' bedroom and was one of those ones with built-in dials and built-in bunny ears (bear in mind, this is an antique already in the late 80s). So I didn't do a lot of TV watching as a kid until we got one for the den. Instead, I'd read and listen to old radio shows and serials... which gave me a very vivid visual imagination.

For those who haven't read it, Where the Red Fern Grows is about a boy's efforts to make enough money to buy two coonhounds and how he raises and trains them himself from puppies. They have several adventures together, eventually winning a gold cup for raccoon hunting, and then the climax comes when the dogs try to tree a mountain lion. Little Billy goes after the mountain lion with an ax, hoping to save his dogs, but his dogs end up having to save him, one of them at the expense of his own life. The description of the dying dog is extremely explicit and, lucky me, this is the passage I was called on to read when I was in an elementary school class. As I was reading it, I saw the whole scene flash before my eyes — entrails and all — as if it were taking place right in front me and turned several interesting shades of green and almost fainted. My teacher had to send me to the nurse's office.

That's one reason why I find most splatter films rather tame, but still love reading 19th and early 20th century horror writers. The modern films leave nothing to the imagination, whereas the earlier writings were all atmosphere and suggestion and what my imagination fills in is scarier than anything Leigh Whannell and Eli Roth can come up with any day of the week.