A couple of months ago, I met a guy that I thought was really cute. Hilarious sense of humor, smart, close to my age, not white- he seemed pretty cool. He also seemed kind of shy, so I thought I would take it upon myself to ask him out. We both went to a party and as we were standing by our cars about to leave, I said, "Hey, do you want to hang out sometime this week? There's this movie I want to see called 'Insidious' about a little boy that's posessed. It looks pretty good." He told me that he would like to hang out, but that he could not see that movie with me. I asked him why not, and he sang "Cause I'm a PUUUUUSSSSYYY!!!" which honestly, was such an awesome response, it caused me to go home and spend the evening naming our future children. Sadly however, this is not the story of how little Ash George Romero and Ray Peter Egon's father met their mother.
Aside from the time spent reflecting on the adorableness of self-deprecating nerd-boys, that I evening I took some time to really pull myself apart from my life in the last few years and reflect upon the time when I too, would bow out of a movie invitation to a scary flick despite the relative attractiveness of the person doing the inviting. There was a time when scary movies were the bane of my existence, and for good reason . . .
We decided to watch a scary movie. Since it was 1994, the world did not yet know the ultimatums of Jigsaw, and the words "human" and "centipede" had only a passing acquaintance with one another on evolutionary diagrams found in banned textbooks, so we turned to the man that authored the nightmares of our generation: Stephen King.
One of my favorite things about the early 90s was the proliferation of TV miniseries adaptations of Stephen King's bookstop horror stories. They were all TERRIBLE- "The Langoliers", "The Tommyknockers"- even "The Stand", a book I read just two years ago and now count among my top twenty books of all time- all of them suffered at the hands of ABC Entertainment. Every one of them featured cheesy music, poor editing, washed-up actors, and endings that should have been stuck in the barbecue by James Caan along with the text for "Misery's Baby". What made them so appealing for kids my age though, was that since there was no rating (TV did not yet have the little box in the corner of the screen for people to ignore before watching "Two and a Half Men" with their six-year old), 8-12 year old kids could easily convince their parents that the stories depicted in these six-hour jaunts into terror were "not too grown up" for them, meanwhile blaming the dog for the puddle of piss that was found on the living room floor during the commercial break just following the scene where all of the dolls in the toy store turn their heads just sliiiightly to the left.
After consuming an inhuman amount of candy and caffeine, we sat down in Tina's room to watch "IT" on the 13" TV/VCR combo that her mother had purchased for Tina's birthday. In case you are the one person on earth that is not familiar with the iconic image of Tim Curry wearing makeup that is NOT accompanied by a pair of fuck-me heels, I can summarize the story of "IT" in three words: Clowns are evil. Okay, if you need more- they tear the arms off of little boys, cause pictures to come alive and wink at you (AUGH!!!), come up through the shower drain in the locker room after gym class, cause blood to flow out of your bathroom sink, and elicit really creepy recitations of passages of the boy scout handbook from kids with asthma. Apparently there are just so many balloon animals that you can make before you snap and start bitch-slapping baby Seth Green.
Heightening the terror however, was the fact that I watched this movie for the first time with nine other twelve-year old girls. We were huddled on Tina's bed in a sort of pre-teen version of a rat king- our arms and legs entwined with one another, becoming more so each time a new horror met our eyes and we scrambled around trying to get away from all that WRONG. We lived and breathed for the 3 hours as one entity. A screaming, weeping, eye-covering entity that was terrified to take a pee break.
Speaking of pee breaks: The resultant consequence of Tina's slumber party was the re-tooling of my bathroom habits. No- this has nothing to do with the regularity of my bowels, although they are fine, thanks for asking- I mean the actual actions that one performs while in the bathroom. See, in the movie, Pennywise the Clown got to most places/affected the largest cross-section of the populous via sewer drains, and so the bathroom became my own personal portal to hell, with its three drains and innumerable horrific possibilities.
As already mentioned, the clown came up through the shower drain in one scene, and because I was 12 years old and did not yet have the ability to tell my brain to LIGHTEN UP, I was convinced that if I did not keep vigilant watch on my shower drain while showering, this would happen to me- so I faced the head of the shower the entire time I was in there. For a year. An admirable feat, considering the need to eventually rinse one's crack. Additionally, the blood faucet scene meant that if I closed my eyes while washing my face before bed, I would open them again to find my face covered in O+. Finally, there was a scene where Pennywise pulls the neighborhood bully into a sewer pipe by folding him completely in half. I am not sure why this translated to me that the toilet is my enemy and sitting upon it will result in immediate death in a like manner, but I spent most of 1995 hovering my way through every evacuation. My poor parents had no idea what was going on, and I am sure that upon observing my hair to be greasy in the back, my bloodshot eyes suffering soap damage, and the constant evidence of my having gone pee and "missed", they must have been convinced that I was on drugs. If only.
To repeat: This is only the SECOND most scared I have ever been by a movie.
The top honor in the Laurie-Loses-It-at-a-Movie-and-Blames-Her-Nervous-Gas-on-the-Guy-Sitting-to-her-Right Awards goes to the 2002, re-made-for-American-audiences-because-we- apparently-don't-like-it-when-people-"talk funny", horror classic "The Ring".
I know what you are thinking, "Seriously? THAT movie? It's so LAME. With the overplayed creepy-little-girl concept, the hollow-eyed kid that speaks doom, and the cabin in the woods. YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED." To this, I invite everyone to remember that in the moment, a lot of movies seemed a lot more impactful than they actually are. I mean, really people, "Titanic" was the #1 monkey-making movie for like forever, and now it's "Avatar" which I have not seen, but I assume to be "Titanic" with a little kink thrown in (I mean they are blue, and have sex with their hair. What else am I supposed to garner from that information?) All I am saying is that it may seem dopey now, but at the time, "The Ring" was insanely scary, and my first viewing of it was more scarring than the time I accidentally saw my father naked. (AUGH!!!! I JUST REMEMBERED THAT HAPPENED! MY EYES!!!)
I was 20, in college, and for the first time people were "getting" my sense of humor enough to want to keep me around, so I had a group of friends that traveled in a pack of about 14 people at any given time. Most of us were too young to believably talk our way into bars, and too lazy to play capture-the-flag again, so more often than not, we spent our Saturday nights at the movies. Yup, Eugene, Oregon is a lot less thrilling when you don't smoke pot.
One evening we decided to go see the new horror movie that had come out. I was trepidacious. Despite having once again become my own master of rooms containing three or more drains, I still remembered the nerve-shattering horror of my experience watching "IT" and amazingly, had avoided watching any scary movies since that time. (This does not include Lifetime Original Movies, but those are scary for a completely different reason having to do with certain actors' post-"90210" career decisions . . . )
I went to the movie under the auspice of it being an opportunity to sit next to a cute guy whose name and face I no longer remember- for funsies, let's call him "Burt Reynolds" and give him a mustache. I was already skilled in the art of the unrequited crush, and Burt Reynolds had shown no interest in me at that point, so when the movie- which was in its second week of release- turned out to be nearly full about 20 minutes before it began, most of our group was split up, including me and my mustachioed lover. Sadly that meant that any and all "Smokey and the Bandit" sexual fantasies were out the window for that evening as well. I was, as you can probably guess, understandably grumpy.
It fell upon me to sit with a girl that was more of a friend-of-a-friend- a pretty girl with big teeth unironically named Joy. Joy had revealed to me at dinner that she had gotten her first cell phone that day, and was still figuring out some of the more minute aspects of its operation. As was the case with most phones in 2002, it was clunky, had a dot matrix screen, and since the ringtone revolution had not yet set the nations ears ableed, had a pretty standard ringer for the time period. Being a girl that was still taking her messages from her home answering machine however, I thought this was pretty tight and asked to use it to play "Pong" while we waited for our blooming onion appetizer to arrive.
Being split off from the rest of the group at a horror movie, I turned to Joy after sitting down and said, "I'll admit, I am not great with horror movies." I hoped for her response to be something along the lines of, "Oh don't worry- if you listen to the music, you can tell when something insane is about to happen and cover your eyes." or "Really? I think they are kind of funny." thus easing my anxiety. Instead Joy said something akin to, "If I get scared enough, I may cry." Lights down.
The movie began. The PTSD that resulted from that evening has thankfully wiped my memory of most of the details of this film, so I only remember the following terrifying highlights:
- There is a VHS tape (w00t! Technology!) with some weird performance art-type stuff on it that if you watch it, someone calls your phone and whispers "SEVEN DAYS" and then you die in seven days with your face looking all messed up.
- There is a long-haired little girl that they kept in a barn until her mother threw her in the well to kill her. "The Ring" is the ring of light that she saw when looking up from the bottom of the well.
- At one point, an old man kills himself in a bathtub using equestrian accoutrements and it is really weird.
- At the end of the movie the dead little girl crawls out of the TV to kill people, and you want to crawl inside your own bumhole to get away from the image.
Also- remember Joy's new phone? Turns out the features that she had not yet figured out were the "off" button, and the "silent" setting on her ringer. A poorly timed need of her mother's to get a hold of Joy regarding a strudel recipe meant that Joy's phone went off about 12 times right in the middle of the movie. The first time people laughed- we all jumped six feet in the air, and someone whispered "SEVEN DAYS", while Joy furiously hung up on her caller in embarrassment. By the fifth time though, people were starting to get upset- in the context of the movie it was terrifying each time the phone rang, and since this was during the time period when cell phones were still a luxury, people whose cell phones infringed on the interests of the public good were nominated to be the centerpieces in Salem-style stake barbecues. Poor Joy, too terrified to leave the theater by herself, and suffering from the peer pressure that comes from jerks around you saying, "TURN OFF YOUR F---ING PHONE!", was near tears in her desperation to remedy the situation. Always one to run like a ninny from these types of situations, I leaned to the opposite side of my seat from Joy and pretended not to know her by refusing to look her in the eye or answer her terrified entreaties of "DO YOU KNOW HOW TO WORK THIS THING?"
The movie ended, and I was one kind-of friend less than when it started. I met up with my best friend, Tammy, aka that evening's Smokey (lucky bitch), and informed her that I would not be able to sleep alone that night. She kind of laughed until she realized that I was serious, and that my statement meant that I was coming over to her place to platonically share her bed for the evening. I know Tammy probably thought that me wanting to share the bed with her was because of some misplaced rationale I had that she would protect me if anything bad happened, but I was more going with the idea that to most movie serial killers, my fat thighs and persistent post-teenage acne would make me the second choice for a moonlight virgin-in-her-nightgown chase. Believe me, if you and I are ever in a situation where we are running for our lives, I am not fast, so I am going to trip you. My (non-itinerant) uncle Machiavelli taught me that.
So I went to Tammy's house with her. We crawled into bed, me on the side with the window because Tammy is even worse than me at sacrificing her friends to the monsters- if the two of us were being chased, I am pretty sure she would trip me and then throw the damn thing a bottle of A-1 and a bib. I spent the evening with my eyes wide open staring out the semi-closed blinds at the foggy night air, and her family's giant trampoline, which, from far away looks like a well. Worst of all was that at the time, Tammy had a terrible snore, and the noise was absolutely, and in all ways, terrifying in a way that made me have to pee really badly. My bladder finally won against my will to survive around 4:51 AM, and I cried my way through a pee in the dark. It was several nights after that that I was unable to sleep really well and with (most of) the lights off. Compounding the fear was the fact that, with long brown hair and the pale skin that accompanies being a nerd, I looked like that little girl whenever I got out of the shower, thus making the bathroom once again a terrifying place to be. Of course.
Spoiler alert: this story has a happy ending.
I moved to Portland in 2006, and continued to nurse my fear of horror movies for about another year before . . . one day it just stopped and I realized that they are, in fact, awesome.
No particular movie sparked this new appreciation- I think it just came down to the fact that most horror movies feature lots of blood, families with ISS-UES, teenage sex with ill-advised partners, and steady employment for people who played in the string and horn sections of middle-school band. All of these terrible elements come together to make them FABULOUS in a way that is hilarious, surprising, and most-often groan-inducing. Also? I started watching "Supernatural" and Dean and Sam Winchester may have caused my libido to suffer a Pavlovian sexual response to demons and monsters. But I digress . . .
As I have become more of an appreciator of horror movies, my ability to be legitimately scared by them has waned because I have learned the formulas:
- What I said about the music before was correct- if you pay attention to the crescendo, there is a half beat of "fake-out" and then BAM- knife through the door- cue screaming 20-year old Jamie Lee Curtis.
- The killer is never the psycho-looking mute janitor, innkeeper, stagehand, orderly, or mime, or the person close to the main character that suddenly has their motive for killing become clear 5 minutes into the third act, or anyone logical really. In fact, the truest indication of whether or not someone is a killer in most horror movies seems to be that they have shilled skin-care products at some point in their previous acting life.
- Monsters and human killers both have to be killed AT LEAST TWICE, and even then, it is unlikely that it will stick if there is likely to be a franchise option coming out of the movie.
- In a horror movie, your own reality is never as it seems. I promise. For realsies, guys. The reality you suspect about halfway through the movie that you MIGHT be living- wrong too. Just get used to not really getting what is going on, and move on with your short life.
The trailer for "Paranormal Activity 3" came out recently and depicts two little girls playing Bloody Mary in, you guessed it, the bathroom. I am excited though. Bring on Halloween, cabins in the woods, mental institutions with questionable building security, ghost children, crazy fathers quoting Ed McMahon while wielding an ax, and all those people that do not realize they are dead.
Oh, and that puddle on the floor? . . . That was the dog.
