Tuesday, November 1, 2011

I hate scary movies...I'm scared

I hate scary movies.  I get scared looking at my backyard with the porch light off.  I get scared when AC kicks on suddenly after its been quiet for a few minutes. I can scare myself, I really don't need my movies help with that.  I can scare  myself to sleeplessness just thinking about scary movies I haven't even seen.  I'm a wimp, I know it and I'm fine with it.

When I was a kid my dad really liked scary movies and would often watch them in the bedroom where I would casually walk in and get an eye full of Chucky (From Child's Play) burning in a fire and then coming back to life with a glowing red eye.  I would then procede to run screaming from the bedroom and out the front door of the house all together.  In later years I would running screaming from the room when daddy watched Predator, Alien, the Omen, or Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  So it's only fitting that my father would take me to see scary movies in theaters when I got old enough.  It's not just horror films, busy scary Sci-Fi really gets me too.  With my father I saw Jurassic Park (ran and hid outside of the theatre during the Raptor scenes), Blair Witch Project, Event Horizon and Signs.  He really should have known better, after the Blair Witch Project I slept with the light on for weeks.  We saw Jurassic Park in the theater 6 times and every time I ended up in the theater lobby waiting for the man in the outhouse to get eaten by the T-Rex and the kids to be safe from the Raptors in the kitchen.

There were some scary movies I could deal with, I never found Poltergeist too traumatizing, I'm not one of those peoples who finds clowns scary.  I could watch Carrie and the Shining no problem.  In high school I thought I was getting better, I wanted to be brave and thought maybe I had outgrown my fear.  My senior year I saw the Ring with some friends and remembering clawing my escort through his leather jacket so hard his harm was bruised afterwards.  My friends had extra fun teasing me a few weeks later when at a lock-in at the Magic Children's Theatre they pointed out a cabinet that had what looked like the Ring tree etched into it.  One of them hid inside it to jump out at me while I screamed my head off to their laughter.  Apparently I didn't learn my lesson that time cause at the end of my senior year I went to the movies with the same group to see 28 Days Later and slept with my lights on till I left for college that August.

Throughout college I successfully avoided scary movies till my last semester, unless you consider Harry Potter scary, which sometimes it totally is.  I took a group of residents when I was an RA to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and one girl told me when a scary part was coming and I still managed to scream and startle the half of the theatre that didn't find the final maze particularly creepy.  My last semester at TLU I decided to take a Film Studies class just for fun.  It ended up being a difficult class but what was worse was I saw on the syllabus later in the semester one of our in class viewings was going to be Alien.  OMG are you serious? I was going to have to watch Alien in class with my professor and peers.  I warned my professor that I tend to scream during scary movies and then rush out of the room quickly so I don't die.  He told me that I could scream all I want but that I had to stay and watch the whole movie.  I tried to surround myself with students who had seen it before and asked them to warn me of the scary parts.  But apparently they were all taking notes when the scary things happened and I ended up screaming every 20 minutes whether things were scary or not.

A few years later again wishing I had outgrown the scary I saw I Am Legend on a date.  Horrible, horrible idea.  At the time I lived by myself on the third floor in my apartment complex.  I liked it cause it was quiet, well that was why I usually liked it, but after watching that movie I was convinced the scary vampire zombies were going to skip the bottom floors and break down my door to eat me.  Lights stayed on in the entire apartment for a week.

When I started dating Bruce a few years later to my inner-chicken's nightmare he turned out to like scary movies.  Although he had some serious delusions on what actually was scary versus what was really scary. Zombieland is not funny, it is scary and you will suffer for making me watch it.  Sean of the Dead is NOT funny, it's scary and I will sleep with the lights on cause you made me watch it.  No I will not see Paranormal Activity 1, 2, or 3 with you cause they are scary.  I don't care how campy the scary movie may be, or if it's a parody of other scary movies, I don't do Zombies and if scary things happen in Space I will probably die, while I can appreciate that Event Horizon  was a cool movie, it still scares me and the fact that Sam Neil was also in Jurassic Park means that he'll forever be uber scary to me. I think by now Bruce has come to terms with the fact that I don't do scary movies and I like to think that it is one of the last things I can blame on my dad.  Maybe if I hadn't seen Chucky rise out of the ashes of that fireplace with a knife as a 5 year old all would have been fine.

What made me think of this the day after Halloween? I've seen a surprising amount of these movies on io9's list.