True Horror

I just finished a book called The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which I will have to write a review of in another post.  However, in reading this book I was reminded of my true perception of horror.  I am a big fan of horror movies and have seen many, but there are very few that truly scare me to the core.  Among the ones that have really scared me and I consider some of the most amazing horror movies are The Shining, The Exorcist, and 28 Days Later.  The thing that I realized that makes two of these movies (The Shining and 28 Days Later...The Exorcist is scary purely because of it's raw evil) so scary is the simplicity of them.  The reason I can consistently watch them over and over again and get scared is the simple fact of being alone.  I'm not talking about staying at home alone or something, but the feeling of walking out of my apartment one day and there being no one on the street.  In the case of The Shining the fear comes from the same basic situation, but the characters are in a forced isolation as a result of the winter snowfall.  28 Days Later was the first movie I saw that really presented the idea of being in a big city completely by yourself was 28 Days Later and since then I have seen a few, but none has made me feel the way it did.  Walking out of the theater I could see myself entirely by myself in downtown Atlanta or San Francisco. 

The reason all this has come up again is because that is a main feeling I had while reading The Road.  There was plenty of haunting imagery throughout the book, but the idea of walking along a road in a post apocalyptic time left me envisioning myself doing that anytime I left the house.  I wonder whether other people feel this kind of fear after the read the same books or see the same movies.  Well there it is true horror is in large scale forced solitude.