We'll start with and easy one.
1. If you were alone in a house, (day or night), what would frighten you? What would it take to make you fill your britches?

2. Same question only you are alone on a path through the woods at night.

My answers:
1. A noise that doesn't belong there. B. Finding someONE had made the noise.

2. A noise in the underbrush. B. Having the wind blow so hard that I couldn't HEAR the noise in the underbrush.

So, when I'm home alone, it would have to be just turning out the light and going to bed. It's the quiet. Though when I had a dog, it was when the dog would suddenly run to the back door and growl inexplicably.

2a. Suffering a serious and immobilizing medical affliction--pulmonary edema, or getting shot in the chest or torso, or having a severed femoral artery, etc.
2b. 2a, when the scavengers start showing up.

For example, something (most likely clothes) in the corner of a room that begins to look like an aligator. I know it isn't but I can't figure out what it is and it looks like a damned sleeping aligator! Now if that non-algator started hissing or moved suddenly, I'd totally freak out even though the rational side of my brain would telling me how ludacris the whole thing was.

2 A&B
Outside, alone, in the dark doesn't usually bother me unless I'm in unfamilliar surroundings or if there is something gnawing in the back of my mind.

For example, when I was living on an island in B.C. a few years ago, I had a couple of friends and we liked to go for walks down to the ocean to talk and hang out. We went most evenings and had a special spot we liked to go to.

1A If I'm home alone that means hubby is out somewhere with the kids. So the most frightening thing that could happen would be for the phone to ring and have a police officer or an ER nurse on the other end of the line.
1B And if she said something along the lines of, "I'm sorry to have to tell you this..." Well, that's when I'd fill my britches.

For me, seeing someone in the house watching me would be pretty awful.

I've always conjured one of two images when I'm outside at night. The first is an upper torso crawling toward me on the ground, crunching leaves as it gets closer. The second is looking up to see blood soaked sheets wrapping corpses hung from the trees above me.

Which reminds me that I'm out of ketchup .

A stranger in my kid's room. Oh you said alone well finding some one I love or my pet hurt or murdered and secreted into the house without my knowledge. To say goto get popcorn and return to the den to find the body.

2. Same question only you are alone on a path through the woods at night.

Something to make me doubt my sanity. Something that makes me believe that what I'm seeing, hearing or thinking aren't real.

We'll start with and easy one.
1. If you were alone in a house, (day or night), what would frighten you? What would it take to make you fill your britches?

--For the first part, I think there isn't much, though opening your eyes at 3 am to see your toddler's shadowy face two inches from you own can give a person quite a start! As for the second part of that question, I'd say about three bowls of my award winning Chili, chased with a bottle of Dave's Total Insanity hot sause and a good gallon or so of water to wash it all down will probably do the job for just about anybody!

2. Same question only you are alone on a path through the woods at night.

In the woods? I dunno. Maybe a randy elk with that special "look" in his eye as it approaches while I'm stopped over the campfire....

Odd and inexplicable things usually make me more curious than scared, like odd noises that I can't identify coming from places that shouldn't be emmiting noise and stuff not the way you left it and so forth.

I'm not particularly prone to startle, though I'm not abnormally insensitive to sudden shocks. So things like those prank shockwave pages (the kind certain people will link) and scary scenes in movies and video games are among my "scariest" experiences. Real pranks too, but it is usually difficult for someone to take me totally by surprise with a feigned attack. You have to be willing to hide in garbage or something like that (not that my family members wouldn't go that far ).

I used to have a pretty normal "dread" response to clearly preternaturally evil things, but I've long since developed certain natural abilities to the point that I can employ them without conscious thought (or with conscious thought, which is nice). And I don't know if dread of preternatural evil is really "fright" as such.

2: In the woods? The sound of someone else tripping and falling, followed by their friends searching for them. Maye a a car accident on a nearby road or a light airplane with engine trouble crashing nearby. Real people getting hurt somehow -- without the invincibility and/or melodrama that usually shield fictional characters in these kinds of situations.

Anxiety is a different matter. I don't think that anxiety really counts as fright, terms like "stagefright" notwithstanding. I could be wrong about that. Some people do really act frightened when put on the spot.

1a) I'd be frightened (at least a little) by about anything. I hate empty houses, and even creaking noises bother me slightly. (That darn furnace is the most terrifying thing on earth).
1b) Now, to scare me THAT much would be harder. I think that first the lights would flicker and then go dark. Every window in the house would explode inwards, sending shards of glass everywhere. And then, despite the electricity being off, all TVs and computer monitors turn on, and I see... An eye staring at me. Then I hear singing.... "Daisy, daisy..."

If the event is happening to you, it can be pretty damn scarey. If you're watching it happen to someone else and are safely removed from the effects, it might be funny. I guess that is why some people enjoy perpetrating practical jokes.

How the "fright effect" is executed will affect how your audience responds.

I want more movies like the Sixth Sense and the original Haunting. I'm scared of something behind me vanishing when I turn around. I'm NOT scared of something making obscene phone calls and crawling towards me from a TV as slow as humanly possible.

I think the thing that scares me the most when I'm alone is my own mind. I start imagining "what if I saw something weird right now".
I guess the unnatural or unexplainable scares me more than something like someone breaking into the house. I already have a plan for that, and they would not feel so good afterwards.

Still, I gotta admit, I keep an eye on the door (which must be shut) when I'm in the shower. Psycho related I guess.

When we first moved into this new house, I got a little scared because every time I let my dog in, he would run upstairs and bark at a particular spot on the wall. Of course I was imagining that he saw some specter I couldn't see. In fact it turned out to be some bats in the attic (no literally, real bats). I put up a bat house outside and now they and my dog are happier.

When I was about ten years old, my father took me to see Twilight Zone the movie. I was cool with everything except the airplane scene. When we got home that night, I had to feed the dog.

The Zeller dog was a massive mammal and as such was always kept on a leash in the backyard (with a clifford sized doghouse and about 100 feet of chain -- not rope, he'd break rope too easily -- to roam on).

We lived in the country, so it was a very dark, long trek from the house to the dog. I was a understandably leary of going out in the dark alone after seeing that movie.

But that's not what really did me in. What really got me was when my father said, "just remember, if a monster drops out of the sky and waves its finger at you, you know you've done something wrong..." Then he laughed and went inside.

Thanks dad.

As for other horror films, I didn't mind The Ring. Not great but not terrible to me. WHat I thought really stunk up the joint was Event Horizon. It was marketed as a Science Fiction tale that promised to be inventive and explorative; instead it just turned out to be a horror film. The ship went to hell and back, yay....

sorry.

riiiiight...

That must mean Caves of Steal sucks because it's a mystery, and categorized as sf.

Futurist Utopian literature (such as Star Trek) is defined by setting, just like "Post-Apocalyptic" and "Galactic Empire" stories. But none of these, nor all of them together, even come close to comprising the whole of SF. The only setting that comes close to grabbing a majority share is "Contemporary America". If we could plausibly include all stories that take place in the present day (or very recent past/near future) as being part of the same "setting" (which we can't) that might actually be a majority of all SF stories, but it would be far from representative.

#2
Going in the wrong direction or missing the sidetrack I was supposed to take. BTW I have this thing about tripping, freaks me out, how dark is this path?

I say this, because a genre tells you what kind of story will take place, and a setting tells you a little bit about how it is going to take place.

Let's take our two previous examples. Caves of Steel is set in a science fiction setting. There are robots, massive cities that would be engineering marvels to us, etc. But these are not what make the story's genre. What makes the genre is what happens in this world. There is a murder, and a detective tries to solve it. That makes the genre a mystery.

In Event Horizon, the setting is also science fiction. It's not exactly the same place as Caves, but if you're using the Earth metaphor, they're on the same continent (the future). It has horrific imagery and is about a group of people being terrorized by evil spirits. This makes the genre horror.

The same combonation goes for Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, although it's on a different continent (possibilities of contemporary science), but it's still a horror story set in a science fiction world.

1.b
Being shot by a gun.

2.a
The aloness fed by the creeks and groans of trees and the following "loud" silence.