Hello All I remeber a very strange incident after watching Dario Argentos "Suspria" I had finished watching the film and making silly wise cracks about the 1st 15 mins saying If I was Pat Hingle I would have thrown a bucket of boiled water at the yellow glassy eyes that stared at her before she was attacked and I was walking out to get a glass of water and I heard a slight noise in the laundry room there was a small window with a yellow street light going over the glass like a yellow lamp she held to the window but this was shinig out going in and saw two yellow glassy eyes looking in at me just like the film. I seriously thought "Im in danger and im going to be murdered like her" my heart went nutz and my whole body went stiff as a tree branch I could not move, breath and fear trapped me on the spot unable to move I only stood there frightened for my safety till I heard the reason why they were there. I heard a "miaow" and suddnely realised it was only a cat on my windowsill and not the mother of sighs. After that I never looked out a darkened window ever again and this was years ago. I was wondering has anything like this or with any other film thats happened to any of you after seeing it. I cant be the only one. Lloyd
When I was in high school I wanted to be an astronaut. We all did. Sputnik had just gone into orbit and for a few wonderful years science majors got more dates than football players. My proudest possession was a toy space helmet, more or less life-size, that I probably got for free by sending in box tops from breakfast cereal packages. It was prominently placed on the top shelf of my book rack where I could see it from bed as I dreamed of following the vapor trails of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, and Buzz Corey, Commander in Chief of the Space Patrol. Then my family went to see a movie about space flight. It was a docudrama, intending to educate us about the realities of vacuums, meteors, weightlessness, etc., while keeping us entertained with what we could only imagine to be the white-knuckle adventures of the first astronauts, who had not yet been launched. In one particularly sensationalistic scene, an astronaut in what we now call EVA lost his tether to his craft and went drifting off into space with no way to return. The camera zoomed in on his doomed, panicked face through the visor in his helmet as both his oxygen and the power for his suit heater began to run down. Later on between subsequent scenes it came back for a gratuitous cameo of his now lifeless, frozen eyes through the frosted visor. That was one hell of a scene. For a couple of weeks afterward I had great difficulty sleeping. Teenagers in those days had absolutely no worries about gangs, college, sex, cars, jobs, clothes, drugs, or any of the stuff that plagues them today. We generally slept like babies so this was a remarkable problem. Eventually I realized that that space helmet was staring at me as I lay in bed, and that I was doing what we now call "blocking it out," literally not seeing it consciously. The eyes of the dead astronaut haunted me every night. I put it in the closet and started sleeping just fine. I also gave up all thoughts of being an astronaut and concentrated on math, a career that can be pursued in a nice safe earthbound office. Interestingly, six or seven years later when motorcycles began to be respectable and my college buddies started riding, I rode around on the back of theirs with no thought about headgear, even though they all wore the primitive half-shell helmets of the day. When I got my own first bike I sensibly got my own half-shell, even though they were now wearing the better-engineered football-style helmets that are now universal although then they were regarded as racing gear. Eventually they all graduated to the 360-degree wrap-around bullet-shaped helmets with faceplates, but I stayed a generation behind them with the football style. I didn't think about it at the time, but something in me refused to revisit my astronaut days, especially never wearing one of those helmets. When I had my second accident in thirteen years--hardly a bad safety record for a guy who covered more than a quarter million miles on two wheels on two continents--I took one last ride over my favorite mountain road, sold my last motorcycle, got a sports car, and never had any regrets. My wife has always been mystified by this. She misses our motorcycle jaunts even though she spent a couple of months with her foot in a cast after our final accident. I think deep down inside I'm glad to never have had to put on a helmet again.
