“…non-stop all day and all-night there were strangers coming in…”
Tag: creepy houses
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Nightmare #230 – Shot AGAIN
(Male, 40’s) Twice this week, I’ve had dreams that involved being shot or nearly shot with a handgun. I have woken up with my heart just pounding. The second one wasn’t very remarkable apart from getting shot – I should probably mention that I don’t own a handgun and I’ve never been shot, nor is it one of my great fears.
However.
“…I get him to put the knife down…”
In the first nightmare, I am visiting my grandmother’s house, a grandmother who’s been dead for decades now. Her house was never in a great part of town and it’s only gotten worse, like far worse over time. I am responsible for cleaning out her stuff, all her furniture and belongings. When I go to the door my daughter greets me and I’m a little shocked that she’s there and not at college. I ask her if she’s alone in the house and she says no. And then I ask if she’s safe. She shakes her head like she’s answering a different question, “Oh Daddy, it’s not like that at all.” I ask her to go and wait outside with her mom in the car. I enter the house and the first thing I notice is that there is a huge whole in one wall like someone has driven a car into it. And there’s a man with a knife. I ask him if he’s OK. I offer to get him some food. I get him to put the knife down. I explain that I’ve got to get rid of the stuff in the house. And he starts acting as if it all belongs to him simply because he’s in the house. I simply reach over and take the knife from where he’s set it down and I throw it behind me because in a fair fight I’m pretty sure I could take this guy. “No, you don’t own any of this stuff and you better get moving before I call the cops.” He says he’s got a gun in his pocket, which I think is pretty unlikely but I don’t want to take the chance so I jump him. We wrestle. He’s trying to get his hand in his pocket. I keep hitting him, trying to knock him out. All of a sudden a shot is fired. I don’t hear it as much as I feel it shooting straight through my heart. It felt more like I was getting an electric shock. I woke up with my heart simply racing, pounding hard like I actually had been in a fight.
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Nightmare # 200 – Sewers
(Female, 30’s) This dream probably reveals too much about the things that disturb and scare ME!
In my dream, I was scrubbing a shiny white toilet with a cheap little brush, a flimsy stick with a blue and white ball of netting on the end. (A dream about cleaning a toilet– how totally WEIRD is that??) As I finished and tapped the brush on the edge of the bowl, I flushed at the same time– and then the cheap little brush came apart, and the cleaning part started to get sucked down the drain! I didn’t want the toilet to get clogged, but I didn’t really want to stick my hand in the water either.
I worried about deadly fumes– I didn’t smell anything but that didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous to my health.
Then I remembered that we had access to something like the water exit chamber (??) of the house, so I could get the broken brush ball out of there! I walked into a utility room where there was a small white door with a strong spring hinge that opened to a sort of chamber where all the drains in the house emptied. (I have no idea where this image came from! Completely imaginary view of plumbing!) The chamber was stark white, very clean and with a big cone-shaped impression in the bottom where all of the waste water drained. It was so clean and smooth and shiny in there. I could see the blue cleaning ball a little way inside, just out of reach. So I got a broom handle and tried to hold the spring door open with one hand while reaching for the ball with the stick with the other hand. I worried about deadly fumes– I didn’t smell anything but that didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous to my health.
As I leaned in further, I could see the edge of a storage box, just around a corner. How the heck did that get in here? Did someone accidentally flush that down the toilet? As I was reaching and looking, I was slowly climbing inside that chamber. I crawled in far enough to see around the corner, where I found a stack of 6 or 8 storage boxes. We must have put them in here; what had we been thinking? Were we that desperate for storage space?!? I was getting a little panicky at this point, but I looked up and noticed that the ceiling opened to the sky. I could stand up in one spot, and I could put my head and shoulders through the opening. It was sunny and bright outside, and I drew a deep breath of fresh air and felt an enormous relief. Then I started to worry about how I was going to get out of there!
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Nightmare #189 – Falling
(Male, 40’s) Strange dream, almost like it was someone else’s dream or a dream that was mine when I was much younger. Or something. I woke up from it at 3:00 in the morning and had absolutely no interest in going back to sleep afterward.
We were in my Grandmother’s house which didn’t belong to my Grandmother anymore, which is probably obvious because she’s dead. But the family continued to rent the house from the Man who owned it now. He was doing all sorts of really drastic renovations on the place. Like the back room was now going to be the kitchen and he had put in this oddly shaped kitchen island in there. I was trying to convince someone that this was actually a good thing, that it would come in handy for when we entertained. But in the dream, I knew that we’d never entertain here, that we’d never invite anyone over here.
And then the Man showed us the new ceiling he was putting onto this huge addition. Honestly the addition was larger than a basketball court and easily as tall. We were walking along the drop ceiling above it. It was constructed of long metal slats that bowed under our weight as we walked with large piece of corrugated cardboard in between. There was some trick to walking up there, to making yourself not weigh your normal weight. Like positive thoughts or something would make you float or something. The other people had no problem with this but I kept having doubts about whether this whole thing would work. My foot got caught between the slats and the cardboard and my foot slipped between. My leg was dangling into the vast cavernous basketball court beneath. It was brightly lit up as if for a game. I knew it was just an instant before my whole body slipped through. My mom started moving closer to me to try to save me. She was younger, much younger, probably 40 years younger than she is now. And I was younger too, just a child. I was swooning with vertigo but I knew that if I pulled that piece of cardboard out with me, it would de-stabilize a whole area of the ceiling. I told mom to back up, to get away from me. Just then the cardboard gave out and started falling. I held onto the edges of the cardboard like a magic carpet. It just plummeted down and down. I fell much further than I could have ever imagined, much farther than the floor. I was hopeful that I would survive the fall but the trouble was I never landed. Just a constant never ending fall. I was dizzy and nauseous and afraid.
“…there’s someone buried underneath there…”
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Nightmare #184 – The Bloody Drain
(Male, 30’s) Once I thought about this nightmare, it became rather obvious to me where it was coming from. My mother is undergoing chemotherapy right now and also for as long as I’ve known her, my mom has also tinted her hair with red hair dye. Still, that’s not exactly the same as what I dreamed which was highly disturbing.
I was getting ready to take a shower but the drain in the bathtub was sluggish. I un screwed the drain cap and discovered that it was clotted up with long strands of hair. I pulled out a big fist full of this hair. It was ally matted into each other and it was deep red. It pulled up even more hair from deeper in the drain so I pulled on that. This hair was sodden but not with water, rather with some liquid that was deep red, like arterial blood. Where ever this blood splashed it seemed to stain. The porcelain of the white tub was stained with this blood. I tried squeezing the mats of hair so there were be less staining but all I did was splash more around. There was splatters on an army green t-shirt that I used to have maybe 20 years ago and also on a pair of camoflage pants that I used to have around that time too. They had just come out of the washer and dryer and were neatly stacked on the floor next to the tub. The blood – no use calling it anything else, at this point it was blood – was spattering everywhere and still the drain was clogged. There was a huge pile of hair now, maybe a bushel basket full. But the deep red drops turned brown when they hit the drab green clothing. I looked at the shirt and the pants and tried to tell myself “Yeah, I could still wear those. Nobody would notice.” All while I’m up to my elbows in gore and human hair.
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Nightmare #180 – Housesitting
(Male 30’s) This wasn’t so much a nightmare as a really strange dream. Then again, maybe it was a nightmare. I dreamed that my therapist asked me to house-sit her apartment. I know, I know. There’s absolutely no way that this would happen in real life but I didn’t think anything of it in the dream. So she evidently leaves and I stop by and I’m not really certain what I’m supposed to do. It’s a small apartment, basically a large one bedroom with a kitchen at one end and a living area at the other. It’s very stylish though. She’s got this huge floor to ceiling bookcase though, and it’s absolutely filled with DVDs. I had to chuckle because whenever I bring up a movie, she always makes me explain what I mean. She’s got all the classics: Casablanca, Citizen Cane… But then she’s also got a whole shelf full of horror movies. And by horror, I mean those nasty torture / slasher movies that seemed so popular a couple years ago. For instance, she had like THREE copies of “The Toolbox Murders.” These weren’t classics and they weren’t even very good horror movies. They were the kind of movies watched by folks who like watching grisly, twisted violence. I tried to tell myself that it must just be a professional interest or something. But seeing those, it felt funny at first and then a little sickening and then I was rather scared, like I should really be getting out of there.
(Male, 30’s) I sent you a nightmare a ways back that felt like this dream or at least I think I did.
It was a weekend and I was trying to avoid seeing my Mother who at least in the nightmare was a nagging hypochondriac. So me and a buddy get in the car and drive up to visit my Grandmother. This is creepy thing number one because my Grandmother is dead.
We get there and Gramma welcomes us in but there is strangely very little furniture in the house. Then there’s a knock at the door and Gramma tells us we have to hide in the basement and not make much noise. At the door are a couple of my aunts and uncles as well as my mother. They’d gone out on a singing excursion, sort of showing up places and singing songs, kind of like Christmas carolers except it wasn’t winter and they weren’t singing carols.
My buddy and I go down to the basement and Gramma locks us in. It is dark but we can still see quite a bit from the light coming in by the side windows. The walls are a rotting brick, red brick that’s powdering away to dust. The basement also feels MUCH larger than the house above. We hear something skitter across the concrete. We investigate. There is this huge cut of beef, already roasted, like the kind you sometimes see at fancy buffets but this huge roast is just sitting on the floor of this filthy basement. It is all dried out and what’s weird is that it’s been nibbled and chewed at. I tell my friend that we need to get out of here. We slowly move back to the stairs when we hear more skittering. I bend down close to the ground to look under neath the random pieces of furniture. I see at least three creatures, a squirrel, a ground hog and a cat. All are extremely ragged and mangy. Their fur is grey blotched with white. For some reason, I know they’re cannibals maybe because they’ve been eating the dried beef.
(Female, 40’s) This dream started out as “merely” an anxiety dream but it became a true nightmare before the end.
In the dream, we were getting ready to have a big party at our house. It wasn’t our real house, but some weird mash-up of a bunch of different houses: the basement was from my childhood home, the kitchen was from an aunt’s house, and the huge living room was like something from a magazine, really big and modern with a wall of glass sliding doors. My whole family was helping to clean up the house and get organized for the party. My husband and my mother-in-law were setting up a dozen round tables in the living room and covering them with table cloths. It looked like a reception hall. The problem was that I just wasn’t sure why we were having a huge party at all.
Then I remembered: our daughter is graduating from high school so we must be having her graduation party. I was confused however– had we sent out invitations? I didn’t remember doing that! What were we having for food and drink? I didn’t remember doing anything about that either.
Some guests started showing up suddenly. I suggested they sit on the stairs until we were ready to get started. So they sat down and talked to each other and I ignored them.
…I kept saying, don’t worry– it’s under control…
I remembered that in the basement there was a box of party supply odd and ends: some pink plates, some red cups, napkins of various colors. If I could find that box, we’d be all set! So I went in the basement and started looking. I looked for a long time, interrupted by various people asking questions about food and drinks and guests and what time the party was going to start. I kept saying, don’t worry– it’s under control. And I kept looking, but I couldn’t find the party box.
Then I started looking for my daughter. It was her party after all so she should come and talk to her guests. No one had seen her. No one knew where she was. I was worried about her missing the poorly planned party, but I was more upset because I knew she was gone now. Just gone.
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Nightmare #117 – A Fixer-Upper
(Male) My wife and I were helping my elderly mother get her house ready to sell. She was sitting on the front porch in a house dress, distraught, acting senile if not downright psychotic. Mom said something like “I’ve got less that you expect. You’ll see.” Which made absolutely no sense to me but I ignored her because I knew I had a LOT of work to get the house into an even somewhat presentable condition. I went inside the house and over heard my wife talking on the phone very sternly to someone. There must have been something wrong with the roof. She said something like “We’re VERY disappointed with this, Mr. Brockway.” I thought that was kind of strange because Brockway was the name of a friend that my Dad knew when he was a child.
…I knew I had a LOT of work to get the house into an even somewhat presentable condition but I didn’t expect this….
I continue walking through the house which is in bad condition but not beyond repair. I walk out the back door to the back yard where I’ve decided I’ll start working because it’s a nice sunny summer day. I’m walking around in my bare feet. The grass if vibrantly green and perhaps it needs to be cut. There is grass everywhere, even where there used to be drive way. Unfortunately, someone has driven a vehicle down this grassed area and the wheel has cut a deep muddy furrow probably 8 inches deep. The strange thing is that there is only ONE tire gash so this vehicle must have been one very heavy unicycle, or so I imagine. I walk up beside the house and there, right beside the chimney is the true horror: an immense rodent hole. It was probably a foot and a half in diameter and from the scratch marks all around it and from the way that all the grass had been torn up, I figured it was pretty well used. I tried to imagine whether it was occupied by lots and lots of regular sized rats or whether the inhabitants were just a few but much, much larger ones. I was frankly pretty scared. I tried to keep my mind focused and figured of course, before I do anything I should put on some shoes, possibly even some steel toed boots. As I head inside to put something on my feet however, I think that maybe I could start trying to scare the rats out of the hole. So I take the garden hose and I cautiously put the tip over the edge of the hole and turn on the water, hoping to flood them out. I can just tell that this isn’t going to end well but just at that moment, I wake up.
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Nightmare #104 – Purge by Fire
(Male, 30) I was in a living room with my brother-in-law. There was a large stone fireplace, similar to the fireplace in my own house but this wasn’t my house. There was a roaring fire in the fireplace that my brother-in-law had started. He was busy doing something with the fire. I moved close to see what he was doing. He had just finished burning a large collection of my belongings and he was now moving on to burn the belongings of my daughter. Just that moment in fact, he was stuffing a huge gnome hat into the fire. (?) I was furious with him but I couldn’t stop him. My stuff was already all gone!
…I was furious with him but I couldn’t stop him…
I think I know what is going on a little bit with the dream. The most recent time I’d seen my brother-in-law was around his birthday. He’s not very into things but he had received a large number of gifts. He was trying to find people to take away some of this stuff. The idea might have come up as a dream because my wife and I are considering selling the house where we live, which means we’ll have to pack and move all the stuff we have, including all the new stuff we’ve gotten since we’ve had our toddler. Moving: now THAT’S a REAL-LIFE nightmare!
(Male) It started out small. My partner and I were moving into an apartment and we were busy doing all the things necessary to make the space our own. I was fixing the frame on a mirror that would hang above the bed and my partner was meeting the neighbors who were a nice bi-racial lesbian couple. I could hear them talking through the open window. It was late spring and there was that lovely sunshine and smell of growth in the air.
The neighbors came over for a drink and I realized that the apartment also had access to a rather large first floor. In this part of the dream, in fact, it felt more like we were living in a sprawling old style farmhouse. Gradually more and more people were there, people who I only vaguely knew: the partner of a work associate, someone I think I might have gone to college with… Someone was expecting a baby so we took up a collection of spare change to buy camp pie makers from the dollar store, some thing we all thought would be a perfect gift for some reason. There was food, beer and even a couple folks off in the corner smoking marijuana, I think. The guests were all wearing somewhat shabby bohemian style clothing. This was turning into a party and I suppose I was the host.
…Then I realized that I must be the owner of the cursed mansion…
The next thing I knew, it was night. The house was now immense and very fancy. The entry way for instance had carved wood columns and carpeted steps like a movie theatre lobby. There was a huge crowd and everyone now was wearing flamboyant if not extreme evening wear, that in some cases verged on Hallow’en costumes. There was a guy there dressed like Marilyn Manson, for instance, sort of like the cover to “Mechanical Animals” but he also wore a tape measure that had been modified to indicate that he was 7’23” tall. I asked him why and he said because that’s the day that Kennedy was shot. The food and drink had also become MUCH fancier. In an alcove, someone I used to work with several years ago was acting as bartender. He gave me a roundish glass of extremely fine Scotch. I can still remember the aroma of it as I write this. The unusual shape of the glass intensified the smell. I happened across my partner who was now dressed in evening wear as well and talking to a friend who had moved down South a few months ago. I offered a taste of my scotch which I was enjoying immensely but when I got the glass back it was nearly empty. I was furious but when I looked up from the glass, I couldn’t find my partner.
I searched the mansion. Down a steep stone corridor there was a rec room that had a ceiling maybe 30 feet high. There were leather couches with brass upholstery tacks, a sumptuous red carpet, interesting stone work on the walls. There were people lolling in here as well. My partner and friend were sitting at a fancy wooden table, each eating a huge bag of potato chips. My partner tried to hide inside the bag to avoid confronting me. I yelled a bit and then stormed off.
Then I realized where I was. I was in the family crypt of a haunted mansion. In the dream, I recalled seeing a home improvement show about how the grave stones had been covered with carpeting and how the whole crypt had been converted into useable living space. I felt very uncomfortable standing on top of what I knew were hidden bodies. I ran up the stone corridor to the main house. Then I realized that I must be the owner of the cursed mansion. The curse involved some monster from beyond the grave that claimed the owner on the first night of occupation. That would be tonight at midnight. All these crowds of people must have shown up to watch me get torn apart by the monster.
I decided to outsmart the monster. I found someone I work with, a timid secretary who at least in the dream was extremely poor. I offered to give her the entire mansion. She couldn’t believe I was making a real offer. We stepped outside. The front of the mansion was covered in ivy and there were many long black cars parked up and along the driveway which was cobblestone. The only paper I could find was the back of a handbill and the only thing I could find to write with was a black crayon. I wrote up the contract and signed it. While I was waiting for the secretary to make up her mind, I doodled on the paper and sketched this angry Aztec demon or something that for some reason I knew would be the monster that would be coming for me. She couldn’t decide. The moon started to rise, bright and full, over the trees. I knew it was too late.
(Male, 30’s) I woke heart racing and all I could think was, “Finally, something to send to the Grim Gnome!”
In an earlier thread of the dream I’d developed an unseemly crush on a Japanese lady I’d just met. This had just come to a close and I was feeling rather proud of myself for ceasing the flirtation as I wandered along some quasi-Boston streets that gave off a Venice vibe. The classic brownstones and familiar streets ran into what should’ve been the Charles River, sometimes neatly with sun-dappled willows lining unexpected parkways, other times the pavement and sidewalk terminating abruptly and requiring backtracking to equally unexpected bridges that crossed and recrossed the brown water.
My memory is fading somewhat but it was on this bit of walk that I began chatting with some college girl also walking there. My age hits me a bit; I’m not old, but she’s young enough to be right out as far as flirtation goes. The chatter is very much on the up and up end of small talk and so when we get to her house there’s nothing to read into her invitation for me to come in and meet her family. That being said, I’m constantly pushing to the back of my mind entirely inappropriate thoughts about how hot she is. Hawt. Very. Mm.
And something feels wrong, but I chalk it up to the inappropriate feelings. Still, crossing the threshold into her house, it’s hard to shake, this sense of wrongness. She’s talking about how she wants me to meet her grandmother, her parents, her brother. Something is out of place. The mood has inexplicably shifted.
I’m not kept in suspense long. We walk down the a tastefully appointed hallway and come to a bizarre room. The floor drops off to the right as though partially demolished and one can see the room below. To the left, opening directly onto the hallway are two rooms. As we approach, the contents of the nearest one remain obscured but the further one holds a woman. She’s sitting in a chair, wearing a white shift and as we draw nearer I can see that she’s an aged woman,
starved, with wirey grey and black hair tangled over a seamed face and eyes so sunken in their sockets as to almost be pits. In my shock I realize the girl who’s brought me here has stopped talking. She had been going a mile-a-minute practically since I met her, and now nothing. Am I looking at her grandmother? The horrible sense of wrongness comes over me again.
There’s a sort of noise from the storey below and I look down into the room and see a siamese twin, male and female, connected at the shoulder and torso. Both appear to be imbeciles but in good health – an impossibility given that one of the torsos ends in a twist of vertebrae. The sight is almost comic, like a really bad horror movie prop, but for some reason I know this set of twins is the girl’s parents. There’s something I don’t quite recall about her brother, who I saw next, a memory of something spiderish that’s swept aside as I realize I’ve come far enough to turn around and see the contents of the last room. There, scant feet from me is a creature that (now that I’m awake) I can only assume was inspired by Mattheson’s White Silk. It sat in a Victorian wheelchair, unable to rise. The hands were large, mis-shapen, pocked and clawed. The face was spider-eyed; there were no lips, no cheeks, just long, flat teeth like rodent’s incisors running the whole rim of the upper jaw. This was Grandmother; the other old woman was food.
I fled in terror away from the freakish family, but I fled deeper into the house.
Naturally, I lost my shit. I fled in terror away from the freakish family, but I fled deeper into the house. I made it to a room in which there was a ridiculously small window through which I know I should have been able to make myself fit, but I spent to long considering its smallness. When I quantified it as eight inches by four I knew I’d doomed myself. That’s simply impossible to fit through. The girl came to the room, all wolfish arousal and I tried to get a grip on how I was going to get out of this. As I played along with her entendres my mind scrabbled at my predicament the same way my hands had crabbed at the shrinking window moments earlier. Even though she knew I knew about her family I was still alive, so there were rules to this, if not reason.
I realized I was in a fairy tale. A misbegotten offshoot the Grimm Brothers. Had I actually heard this one somewhere? What were the rules for this story? She was panting and the climax which would either result in my escape or my demise was fast approaching. What to do? Continue? Flee? I was the Jack of every fable and had to come up with the unexpected solution…
And I woke up. Helluva dream.
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Nightmare #79 – Hungry Ghosts
(Male) I’m embarrassed to try to explain this nightmare since it sounds so wiggy but I have to tell you that I woke up in the middle of the night too scared even to turn on the light! I was at my Grandmother’s house which still had to be straightened up and sold, which is a little strange because she’s been dead for 20 years now. The house was never in the greatest part of town and in the dream at least, it seems to have gotten worse over time.
…It was near midnight and we were also waiting for a friend of mine to arrive…
It was near midnight and we were also waiting for a friend of mine to arrive. He was passing through town and needed a place to stay just for that night. We wanted to keep the front door open so we could see him when he arrived but we didn’t want to leave it all unlocked. Around midnight a car pulled up across the street and this very tall man gets out and walks up to my grandmother’s porch. I say “Craig, I’m so glad you found the place. Sorry I forgot to leave the porch light on. Come on in.” The man enters and said something about “We knew right where to look.” I noticed that the car across the street hadn’t pulled away yet.
But that all became of second importance when I remembered that one of the reasons we hadn’t cleaned out my Grandmother’s house was that it was haunted. I didn’t want the ghost to embarrass me in front of my friend so I started to say a prayer — in my dream, the ghost was very pious and obeyed God — and in the middle of my prayer, the ghost started talking to me, trying to interrupt me. It even told me its name which it just said over and over and over (and which I have forgotten now that I’m awake.) I became immediately afraid for a daughter I had in the dream. I actually have a daughter who is much older but in the dream my daughter was only 9 years old and peacefully asleep in an upstairs room. I was afraid that the ghost would hurt her even more than I was afraid that the man I had let in the house wasn’t my friend at all. When I got upstairs, I discovered the place crawling with creatures who liked to eat human flesh. They were very calm about it. They strolled through the rooms looking at the furnishing like they were window shopping at a store while they casually talked about their favorite ways to cook people. They didn’t seem to recognize that I was a human yet so I thought I could slip amongst them and get to my daughter’s room. But as I passed close enough to a pair of them, the squirted some kind of poison in my mouth. As I collapsed, I heard them say “And you’re the kind we like to roast.”
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Movie Review – “A Tale of Two Sisters”
by Elsa L.
This weekend found me caught in the spell of the Korean horror film, A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, Hongryeon: 2003) The film stretches our American expectations of a horror film while conjuring an impressive sense of imminent and inexplicable danger as well as an effectively melancholy mood.
The story begins with the return of the two sisters to their family home after a stay in the hospital. When they are greeted frightening enthusiasm by their stepmom, we remember that underlying rule of horror films: things aren’t always what they seem. Could this parental figure possibly be as evil as she appears to be?
The family tensions play out further during the dinner scene: the cold and distant father, the out-of-control stepmom, the close bond between the teenage sisters. Bedtime finds us leaning forward in anticipation; we know something bad is going to happen or maybe already has. We just don’t yet know what.
The dark mood of the film is underscored by the large but darkly imposing house; the family is comfortable, maybe even wealthy, but still not safe. The camera convinces us that there is something frightening in the William Morris patterned wallpaper. We don’t know exactly what we are looking for, but we know that something scary lurks in this house.
Is there a ghost or something supernatural haunting the sisters or it is something more like rage and jealousy? I don’t want to reveal too much of the plot while at the same time acknowledging that the story is one that you’ll want to try to figure out. Many horror films offer a few “disposable characters” bumped off early in the film, but there are no such expendable victims here. We are drawn into caring about the sisters and their welfare. Like Su-Yuon, the older sister, we wait for the truth to be revealed. We depend on her to get to the bottom of matters.
Su-Yuon is our closest connection in the story but she proves to be an unreliable narrator– a device that catches me off-guard every time in movies or literature. I want to believe what I’m seeing and hearing, and to trust that the characters and the filmmaker are showing the true story to me. The film offers a lesson in trust to the characters and views both.
A horror film or a foreign film asks the viewer to puzzle out meaning. A foreign horror film challenges us twice as much perhaps. A Tale of Two Sisters crosses the cultural divide in ways that will fascinate, mystify and haunt you after the film is over.
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Nightmare #53 – Stalked… by Bigfoot
(Male, 30’s) I remember one nightmare I had as a kid. It was a fever dream and fever dreams are especially vivid and realistic so it almost feels like a memory. I had noticed a large paw print in the dust on top of my dresser — though this was of course impossible because I would have been so short at the time that I couldn’t even SEE the top of my dresser. Then I had the feeling I was being watched. I looked over at the window of my bedroom and there was this huge hairy creature looking in at me. I wouldn’t have known the word for it then but clearly it was Bigfoot! I didn’t want him to get me. So I ran out of my bedroom and into the hallway. There was window at the end of the hall that usually had a curtain in front of it but in the dream there was no curtain. This allowed Bigfoot to look right in at me again. Then I ran into my sister’s room. She was disturbed by my running around but she was disturbed even more by Bigfoot staring in her window too. Finally both of us ran and hid in the closet which was the only place it seemed like we’d be save. To this day, I think we did hide in the closet!
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Nightmare #37 – Imposter’s Picnic
(Male, middle-aged) The first part of the dream involved a picnic I was having with some people who were supposed to be my family. There was a “wife” and two “children” though these people in my dream really aren’t my actual family. We were having a picnic in the backyard of our house, which again doesn’t resemble the house I live in at all. This house was a ranch style house in a large subdivision of ranch style houses. We were having our picnic back by the very edge of our property line were there were some trees and bushes — otherwise the yard was just plain, boring green grass. The picnic was taking place at dusk if not evening.
…I didn’t belong here…
We remembered something had been left inside in the kitchen so I volunteered to get it. I wasn’t able to reach the back door –which was a sliding glass door– I wasn’t able to reach it because two immense dogs were in the way. They were white with coarse black hairs in their coats like huskies though their shoulders were probably 4 feet off the ground. They were guard dogs protecting the house from intruders and they were the only things in the dream that realized that I didn’t belong here.
(Male, 44) I had this dream just last night so it’s still fresh in my mind. I’m still trying to get over it. I hope it’s not too extreme.
…I hope it’s not too extreme…
The situation is that there was sort of a Manson family sort of group holed up in this house. Except it was a real family, like they had kids too but they were also murderers who would invade someone’s house and butcher them. I saw the dream from several different perspectives, all pretty much at the same time, which was also weird.
From one perspective I’m one of the SWAT team who shows up to bring this group down. There are probably a dozen of us, each with a rifle and a site — a sniper’s set up — but what’s strange is that we’re right up by the porch of the house, probably 4 feet away from the family who’s just on the other side of some windows. It seems pretty clear to me at least that we are way too close to this situation for the weapons we’re carrying. In the dream this was my first time out as a SWAT member and I was crouching low, trying to get a good clear shot but there was too much reflection off the glass for me to risk anything.
Another perspective I had was inside the room with the mother and father and their kids. They had at least two kids, a boy and a girl, both probably 5 or 6. The place was a mess. They had ransacked the whole house and brought anything that looking interesting down to the living room and put it in a big pile. Also in that pile were bloody, lifeless arms and hands of the people they killed, thoughtlessly, casually. The mother and father knew that their bloody spree was up so the each pulled out a huge hunting knife. The father killed the son, just sliced into his throat so deeply he almost cut it off. Blood went everywhere. And almost immediately, the father threw up, a bright green vomit. (Did I mention this was pretty extreme?) And almost immediately, the mother did the exact thing to the daughter and then vomited as well. Somehow the vomiting meant that the parents loved their kids and regretted having to kill them.
And the third perspective was that I was a little kid, probably 5 or 6. I don’t think I was a member of the killer family; I think I was a member of the family whose house the killer family invaded. I was hiding. I had been hiding throughout most of what was happening. At the end, I found a telephone pole in the backyard and wrapped my arms and legs around it and sort of inchwormed my way to the very top so nobody would see me and I wouldn’t get killed accidentally or on purpose by anyone. I looked out over the neighborhood. The trees were a mass of leafless twigs sort of like steel wool. The house looked much bigger than it did on the ground. I just held onto the pole and waited. Eventually everything turned brown like in an old, sepia toned photograph which somehow meant that all the killing was over and that it was time for me to come down. It was time for the funeral for my family. Someone handed me a small silver tray that had six items on it. They were supposed to represent the other members of my family who I had lost. I started crying in the dream and the items started falling off the tray. When I woke up, I was still crying.
(Female, 40’s) I was driving around my hometown, showing a visiting friend where I grew up. I realized that we were just a block away from the house my grandmother lived in when I was a child so I turned to go down her street. The houses were all in terrible shape, however, and I became disoriented. My grandmother’s house was just like the two on either side of it and 2 down from the only two-story house on the street. That was how I figured out which one was her former house because it looked nothing like it was supposed to.
…The house was even worse inside….
Even though the lots were not large, all of the houses has been “remodeled” but had since fallen into a state of disrepair. The walls were grey and crooked, like a western ghost town might look, but people were living there. I stood outside the house and looked, with my mouth agape. I walked up to the door and tried to look inside.
The family who lived in the house saw me and, when I explained my connection to the house, the mother invited me to come in. The house was even worse inside. There were boards leaning up against half finished walls. The house had been made larger; you could see from the rubble on the floor where the original walls had stood. My grandma’s simple 4 room house was gigantic. The new bathroom alone was half as big as the old house. But it was all so ugly and rotten looking.
When I left, my hand got caught on the door. The broken window glass tore a hole in my palm. Pressing my hand over the dripping cut, I ran outside to my car where my friend was waiting for me.
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Nightmare #4 – Fire Cleaning
(Female, mid-teens) Dad was cleaning up in the kitchen but he wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing. It was like he was thinking hard about something else. He cleared the counter top basically by putting everything from the counter into the dishwasher.
….flames started shooting out…
One of the things he put in the dishwasher was the little blowtorch we have for making creme brulee. When he turned on the dishwasher, somehow the blowtorch turned itself on. It burned a hole in the door of the dishwasher and flames started shooting out. Dad didn’t seem to notice this until I started yelling. He reached in and took out the blowtorch and started to carry it outside. But he wasn’t very careful about how he held the torch and he basically lit the whole kitchen on fire as he walked out the back door. Then he closed the door and left me alone in a burning house.