We'll valiantly face the terrors we've been lucky to avoid
Carve your pumpkins and don your trashiest costumes! It's the season of vampires and witches, of demons and werewolves, of haunted houses and walking corpses. It's the season when a strange impulse leads otherwise reasonable people to willingly pay for a ticket so they can sit in a dark room full of strangers to watch two hours of entrails being ripped and/or slashed and/or devoured. Come and make yourself comfortable. The dead will rise, blood will spurt like a fire hose, heads will roll.
A few months ago, Nerds of a Feather ran the First Contact series, where our team caught up with a few of the prominent classics that for whatever reason we hadn't had a chance to get to know. This time, we're repeating the experiment, but with Halloween classics: those ugly, scary, big bad monsters with which we've so far had the good fortune of not crossing paths.
Even as I prepare to push play on this rich history of frightening stories, I keep wondering why I'm doing this to myself. I'm a complete chicken when it comes to horror. To this day I still tremble at the memory of that puppet cyclops bird from the 1986 remake of Babes in Toyland, and that scene in V where the alien ate a whole mouse left permanent scars. My generation spent its budget of screams on Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers; I simply have no stomach for whatever happens in Saw or The Conjuring. In theory, I ought to be the last person to want to go through a crash course in horror.
In pragmatic terms, my main reason for doing the First Scare series is the same reason why I did First Contact: the desire to broaden my knowledge of what is out there. But also, my lifelong aversion to horror could use some challenging. Of course, I'll be doing it under controlled conditions, in the safety of my living room, preferably not at midnight. The popularity of horror has always been a mystery to me, so maybe it's time to test for myself what draws people to want to experience fear for fun.
What with taste being subjective and all, it's a possible outcome that I don't succeed at learning why so many enjoy the self-torture of watching expertly filmed stabbings and slashings and curses and exorcisms. It may very well be the case that there's a certain incommunicable something that naturally gifts you with a high tolerance for the sight of blood and rotting guts. Or the taste may be an acquired one. Hoping that it's the latter, I'm going to start at a prudent pace. I don't want to regret the experiment. The family member who without warning introduced me to Cannibal Holocaust certainly didn't have my sensibilities in mind.
Instead, I'll be watching selections from among the early classics, those that form the baseline education of the average horror fan. My fellow reviewers at Nerds of a Feather will surely be at other positions in that ladder, so they're choosing their own starting points. This is also part of the learning process; I expect horror directors to have very different things to say on the same topic before versus after the Satanic Panic, for example.
I'll also be paying attention to which specific elements of the horror aesthetic are those that frighten us. I love the Doctor Who episode "Blink," but I don't find it particularly spooky. Many years ago, I attended a public showing of a slasher movie at a community center. I went with a blind friend, and as I was narrating the movie to him, I realized how boring it was. "The killer runs after her. She runs away. She falls. She stands up. The killer runs after her. She runs away. She falls. She stands up. The killer runs after her..." On the other hand, I have a friend who tells me that the absolute most terrifying movie I've ever shown him was Idiocracy.
So... who knows. This is the rare kind of experiment where the interesting result is the one that's not replicable. As a kid, I had lots of fun with The Twilight Zone, but one episode of The Pink Panther gave me nightmares, and I waited until adulthood to watch Aliens. Now, from here to Halloween, we'll be subjecting ourselves to all forms of monstrosity and evil. I literally don't know what I'm getting into or what I should expect or what the risks are. I suppose that's the right mood for an innocent newcomer entering the horror realm.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.