[Doug Nelson]

No, I don't mean the scary kids books. I'm talking about those moments in movies, sometimes in otherwise bad movies, that simply make the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up. And the best of these moments happen every time, even when you've seen it a million times.

Perhaps I'm more bumpledy than the other hairy, macho he-man types out there, but lots of movie moments do it for me.

It can be poignant, like the dance scene in "the Fisher King", or powerful, like Keanu flexing his muscles and causing ripples in reality itself in "The Matrix". It can be dramatic good, like the home run in "The Natural", or dramatic sad, like the red dress in "Schindler's List".

My favorites are those that salvage otherwise forgettable movies, like when the baglady wows the crowd after her makeover in "Blow Dry", or actual footage of heaven, from "Brainstorm" (though that scene doesn't work on tv, in the theater the screen suddenly doubled in size and the 5.1 stereo kicked in for the first time).

So, what are your favorite goosebump moments from the movies?

[kathleen]

shameless cornball me

the austrian folk dance in the sound of music, where maria and the captain are besotted

[themanda]

I probably shouldn't admit to *any* of these, but here goes.

Two scenes in "The Color Purple". The first when all the white people are gathered around Oprah's character taunting her and slinging racial slurs, and the second when the two sisters are reunited at the end, old women running across fields of flowers crying each others' names. Give me a hitch in my throat every time. It's doing it now...

Scary moment has to be that scene in "Silence of the Lambs" when Clarice is in the home of the killer, in the dark, groping around with her free hand and holding the gun in her other. Eeewwww...

And, goofily enough, the beginning of the animated "Tarzan" tears me up each and everytime. I can't watch it. Fire, death, rebirth, mother love...it's just too intense for me.

And lastly (for now) the very end of "The Usual Suspects" when all the pieces are tied so neatly up while Kevin Spacey walks so calmly out of the police station, dropping a piece of his act with each step that he takes until the very end when he's the full embodiment of Kaiser Sosa, standing tall and proud and smugly evil. Love it!