AUDITION was one that I stumbled across probably 13-14 years ago. I had just returned from teaching in Taiwan for a year, and while channel-surfing one night, I saw that it was going to be on Bravo (if I'm remembering the channel correctly) later in the evening. I had just discovered RINGU (and had loved it) while living in Taiwan, so I figured that I'd better grab a blank tape and record AUDITION, as I now had a real jones for Asian horror. As I was watching it, I thought that it was pretty good, but when it shifted gears about 2/3 of the way through, I didn't shift with it, and ended up hating, hating, hating it.

Being the sadist that I am, I decided to take it to my best friend's house the next evening and make him watch it. Before starting, I warned his wife that she probably wouldn't like it very much, so she made herself scarce while we watched it. His reaction mirrored mine--he was really enjoying it up to the point where it started getting really disturbing, then he started disliking it. Right before the climactic scene started, he told me to turn it off--he didn't want to watch any more of it. This was a first. We'd been, at the point, friends for something like 25 years, and we usually had identical tastes in horror films. But I'd NEVER, in somewhere around 20 years of watching videos with him, ever seen him chicken out from finishing a horror film. So, after much name-calling and pleading with him to finish the film, he relented, and we watched the rest. When it was over, he hated it, just as I had done. I, on the other hand, had "gotten" it the second go-round, and I did a 180 on the film, deciding that I liked it very much indeed. Eventually, he watched it again and also discovered that it was a much better film than he'd originally given it credit for being.

One more quick story about the movie (and I think I've told this on the CHFB before, so forgive me if you've heard this one)--ten years ago, I worked with a guy who liked movies, and one day we got to talking and I asked if he'd ever seen AUDITION. He said that he and his wife had rented it from Blockbuster, and that it had freaked them out absolutely. After they finished watching it, she asked him to take it back that night, as she didn't even want the DVD in the house while she was asleep. He told her that he wasn't going to make a trip to Blockbuster just to drop it in the return slot that late, so she made him put it in a Zip-Lock bag and stick it in the freezer until they could take it back the next day!