Quote:
Originally posted by
Elen
So now you know why I don't watch horror movies...to me eating insects is so not unrelated...but the same experience in a roundabout way. :hiding:
Well, I don't watch horror movies anymore either — I don't even have cable TV anymore. ;) But there's a difference between the horror movies of yesteryear and those of today. The old ones were often billed as horror when they weren't all that horrifying. They were often more like thrillers, with only an occasional bit of blood, but they were usually billed as horror because they contained either a scifi- or a fantasy-related theme. In those days, the "horror" label was used more in relationship to the scare factor of the movie, as opposed to anything gory — although there were some of those too already, of course.
An example would for instance be "The Prophecy", which was billed as horror, but which is more of a thriller. It's a movie about a war in Heaven between the angels of Michael and those of Gabriel, and the war somehow finds itself a way to Earth when both sides come looking for the soul of a recently deceased psychotic colonel from the Korean War.
Simon (Eric Stoltz), one of the angels who stayed loyal to God, wants to find the soul in order to hide it from the other side, while Gabriel (Christopher Walken) — and one of his lieutenants before him — wants to find it before Lucifer (Viggo Mortensen) can lay claim on it and take it to Hell, so that this evil colonel would be able to fight for Gabriel and break the stalemate in Heaven. And in the midst of it all is the LAPD detective Thomas Dagget (Elias Koteas), who at one point in the past was about to be ordained as a Catholic priest, but who then suddenly got a vision in which he saw angels killing each other, after which he turned his back on religion and became a cop.
I have that movie on VHS — purchased — and I've already watched it so many times (since 1995) that I know all of the dialogs by heart. ;) The movie starts with a voice-over from Simon, who is seen standing near what appear to be the scorched remains of an angel in the middle of the desert. The voice-over goes something like this...
"I remember the first war...
The way the sky burned...
The faces of angels... destroyed...
I saw one third of Heaven's Legion vanish,
and the creation of Hell.
I stood with my brothers and watched Lucifer fall.
But now, my brothers are not brothers,
and we have come here, where we are mortal,
to steal the dark soul not yet Lucifer's,
to serve our cause.
I have always obeyed...
But I never thought
the war would happen again..."
The trailer is a bit misleading on account of the sequence of the scenes. The angel bursting into birds — ravens or crows? — at the end is not Gabriel (Christopher Walken) but Lucifer (Viggo Mortensen), and that scene has nothing to do with the gunshot fired by Katherine Henley (Virginia Madsen). ;)