Big Mouth Strikes Again

Years later, a passage from The Face in the Frost reminds a reader about wider-than-usual mouths.  Take heed, sir: Kuchisake Onna pops up The Tower at the End of the World. 

Glancing at an Amazon reader review of John Bellairs’s 1969 fantasy novel The Face in the Frost, I was struck by this quote from the book:

“In her slowly rising head were two black holes. Prospero saw in his mind a doll that had terrified him when he was a child. The eyes had rattled in the china skull. Now the woman’s voice, mechanical and heavy: “Why don’t you sleep? Go to sleep.” Her mouth opened wide, impossibly wide, and then the whole face stretched and writhed and yawned in the faint light.”

I’m reminded of nothing so much as the distorted, creepily out-of-proportion mouths so popular in modern horror movies. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of horror movies recently where significant scare or at least startle value arises from the way someone’s mouth just…keeps...opening.