It's amazing how wonderfully subjective horror is...I'm not surprised that some people didn't find this movie scary, but I'm not too proud to say that I was stressed and nervous from almost the beginning to the end of this film. For hours after the movie, I was still clinging to my boyfriend's hand, having him walk me around the apartment to do stupidly simple tasks like getting a glass of water or answering the phone. At one point in the middle of the night he got up to go to the bathroom and when he walked back into the room stiffly and groggily, I screamed and retreated to the other side of the bedroom, legitimately terrified.

All of this, I might add, is wildly out of character for me; horror movies and thrillers rarely even get a mild rise out of me. I have spent hundreds of hours of my life watching "scary" movies and my boyfriend and I watch at least one horror movie a week (our favorite genre). See, I'm not particular scared of demons or ghosts or monsters or murderous psychopaths---- especially when they are well explicated and their deeds are explicitly laid out onscreen. Events I see onscreen are only scary if I am able to ascribe them to my own real fears.

And this movie left enough to the imagination that my own deepest fears swelled to fill the gaps, and my mind took me on a wild ride. Through the combined effects of cinematography, sound track, and careful attention to set design, there was a pervasive sense of disjunction that was unsettling---perfectly analogous to the description of the movie as an "extended nightmare". The most frightening sequences of the movie for me were the ones that, in any other context, would seem almost benign: such as someone walking towards you, looking directly at you, barely visible in the distance. And, ironically, the only times that I didn't feel frightened were the times that were arguably designed to be more overtly scary, such as when the follower was actively attacking. At those moments the spell was broken.