It’s a Horror to Know You: Daniela of nowhere on the internet because I don’t have a website.

1. What is the first film that ever scared you?

I really don’t recall much stuff that reaches so far back as to be dubbed childhood, not in terms of movies anyways. But I do remember the first movie that should have freaked me out, but failed epically to ever scare me: Mom + Dad were working in the garden one Sunday afternoon, Jaws (1975) was on TV (translated to The White Shark in my native Germany), and shivering with excitement about doing something forbidden, six-year-old me watched it – and watched – and nothing in any way shark-related happened in the scenes I caught, and a while later my parents walked in and frantically stopped the show. I had seen zilch of interest, and to this day, by now having grudgingly digested the full length of the movie, I still don’t care for Jaws. I’ve never forgiven it. It’s always been, and will ever remain, an anti-climactic movie for me.

2. What is the last film that scared you?

Tales Of The Black Freighter (2009): I saw this short only last week, and boy, was I shocked and disgusted… I’m usually highly unqueasy, but this artfully animated companion piece to Watchmen really got to me – physically and psychologically intense.

3. Name three Horror movies that you believe are underrated.

1) Martyrs (2008): Of all the supposed New French Extremism (which especially many French directors deny as an existing genre), I liked some (À L’Intérieur: wow, yes! Haute Tension: pretty decent) and despised others (Frontière(s): enervating and pointless). But rarely has a movie blown my mind, my retinas even, as profoundly as Martyrs. It almost never happens that I sit open-mouthed facing an empty screen minutes after the movie is finished as I did with this one. I believe this movie is smart and thought-provoking yet heartrending and bittersweet and so many other praising adjectives that I can’t think of right now. It might also be the only extreme horror movie that made me cry with its sad, violent, disturbing beauty.

2) YellowBrickRoad (2010): As with such great nîche movies as Triangle, The Woman, Frayed, Død Snø, Perkins’ 14 and Maléfique, I must have discovered this beautiful(ly) low-budget gem here at Kindertrauma. YellowBrickRoad was a terrific viewing experience – I had avoided any potential spoilers, had no clue what to expect, and it blew me away! It could have been cheap, badly acted and sloppily executed crap (and maybe it is?), but to me it completely worked on so many levels – a deep, creepy, existential piece of underground horror. Plus the ending truly scared me shitless, which rarely happens to me these jaded days since I’m probably as jaded as all you jaded lot.

3) The Ring (2002) / Silent Hill (2006): Equal shares go to these two – both of whom address with compassion and terror the theme of abused and neglected children, whose darker versions become manifest on a haunting tour de vengeance in a sad, hopeless, twistedly atmospheric, white/gray/black netherworld. In Silent Hill, the maze of BDSM nuns, the barbed-wire janitor and mighty Pyramid Head did it for me. The Ring freaked me out with the horse going overboard and with the frosty detachment between mother and son – and fresh-up-from-the-well-through-your-TV Samara is the topos I envision to creep up on me, staccato-style, in a dark corridor.

4. Name three horror movies that you enjoy against your better judgment.

1) Tokyo Zankoku Keisatsu (2008): So totally fucked up, typically grotesque and way-out extreme J-bodyhorror gore splatter exploitation thingy… um, what? The fist cannon! The katana-limbed cybergoth amputee! The huge nozzle-funnel-whatever mutant dick! I mean… wait… I don’t know what to mean about this movie! It’s just so frigging irreverent, self-ironically wallowing in its own sexo-socio-political depravity and bucketful of transgressive ideas and… wait… let me simply call it cooool.

2) Shakma (1990): Stupid in a lovely way. During a nightly LARP session at the lab, a bunch of students are hunted down by a fluffy, red-assed baboon. Said baboon is very angry, innocent people die, and at one point, the splendid dorks attempt to save their lives by throwing cutlery through the shutters out of a window. Featuring an intrinsically incompetent Christopher Atkins and a deliciously odd Roddy McDowall. Oh, and not to forget: Chris Atkins’ hair is in this, too, even if it’s uncredited (and unpermed). [It has about the same effect as a miniature Kristin Chenoweth tap-dancing in front of histrionic Shakma. And if this last sentence makes sense to you, you're just the person who should go see this movie!]

3) Deep Rising (1998): I love it! I don’t know why! I say it needs some love! Okay, this is as guilty a pleasure as guilty pleasures come. I’m well aware of the deserved hating done to this movie, and sure, it’s pretty mediocre and flawed, objectively speaking. But whatever it is that made this movie (whose German title translates as Octalus – Death From Down Below – cough) stick with me, I could watch it once a week and not grow bored. Maybe I just love the ocean, exotic scenery, a clumsily designed CGI creature producing heaps of human gore for the heroes to slip and slide through, luxury cruises, Famke Janssen? Could it be that simple?

3½) Honorable mention goes to Troma Entertainment’s cult-fest Poultrygeist – Night Of The Chicken Dead (2006): I judge this movie better than my own judgment of it, which is that it’s one sloppy hell of a sleazy fun ride.

5. Send us to five places on the Internet!

I don’t follow any blogs or hypertextual internet tone poems (aside from Kindertrauma, yey!), so unless you’re dying to be forwarded to IMDB, Youtube, Ryanair and the German versions of Amazon and Ebay, this is the only site link I have for you:

Explosm.net. Totally haha webcomic; style: male college humor; degree of colitical porrectness: zero. I love it.