My Favorite Scary Movie Memories
And why I can't really watch them anymore (plus a defense of screen time)
When you’re a parent, you come across a lot of anti-screen time stuff. I follow an Instagram account about the importance of getting children outside, which I believe in, but sometimes it veers into “all screens are bad, all the time” territory. And that’s how so much of the weird, online parenting culture is (I know you’re thinking…Kerry, could you maybe just stop reading this stuff that makes you mad? The answer is no, unfortunately!). “Why watch TV with your kid when you can watch the sunset? The sky is nature’s television!” or “No one ever talks about their favorite day of watching TV.”
But I call bullshit on this because…I have a lot of favorite days of watching TV! This also comes up a lot if you read stuff about the attention economy/breaking up with your phone/reducing screen time as an adult. Through this lens, TV is viewed as simply another screen. Watching TV is uniformly referred to as “binging Netflix.” There’s never an understanding of film and television as a mediums that can be artistic or ways of bonding with friends and family.
This is all my way of saying a) I clearly need to stop consuming so much anti-screen time stuff because I don’t even believe in it and b) I have so many wonderful memories of watching movies with my favorite people. In fact, many of my most vivid memories involve movies in some way! Specifically, for today’s purposes, horror films.
As an avid rom-com fan and a generally anxious person, I might not seem like a horror fan. But as Stephen King put it in Danse Macabre, “We take refuge in make-believe terror so the real ones don’t overwhelm us, freezing us in place and making it impossible for us to function in our day-to-day lives. We go into the darkness of the movie theatre hoping to dream badly, because the world of our normal lives looks ever so much better when the bad dream ends.” There’s some part of my always-anxious brain that craves seeing nightmares play out on screen, as if watching them could help me process them.
Or, at least, that’s how it used to be. I stopped being able to tolerate horror films when I became pregnant. Just like how tomatoes suddenly gave me heartburn, horror films were just too much. This continued after my son was born, when isolation, sleep-deprivation, and my lifelong anxiety swirled into some potent combination of postpartum anxiety and depression. I certainly wasn’t going to add fuel to my freak outs by watching a horror film.
But I missed them. I missed them so much. So much that, on my long, long nights of holding my sleeping child because he wouldn’t sleep in his crib, I would read the plots of horror films on Wikipedia. Sure, I was too scared to watch them, but reading about them sort of scratched the itch.
Now my son is six and I can no longer reasonably refer to myself as “postpartum” (I mean, sometimes I do, but I shouldn’t). The urge to watch horror films has crept back in, much like a killer might pop back up for one last jump scare after you think they’re dead. I pretty much always ignore the urge, however, because I know that now there are some things I just can’t watch. Anything bad happening to a child and home invasions are two topics I can’t stomach, and there are plenty of other things I really shouldn’t watch either. As mentioned in a previous newsletter, I almost had a genuine panic attack watching Yellowjackets because that damn plane crash was shown in such horrific, gratuitous detail (crashes are another can’t-watch for me)! I will never watch the Saw films or anything in that vein. I can’t watch anything that’s actually disturbing on a psychological level (sorry to Hereditary and Midsommar, which I will never see).
But there will always be a part of me that longs to sit down in front of a scary movie and cathartically freak out for an hour and a half. Probably because some of my most cherished memories come from watching horror films with my friends and family. Here are just a few:
-In late elementary school, my friend Lauren’s house became our spot to watch scary movies…probably because she had a TV and VCR in her room. This is where I watched both Scream and The Blair Witch Project. Scream is, obviously, iconic. And do you even remember what a thrill it was to watch Blair Witch when it first came out? The internet barely existed! People genuinely thought it was real! There was actual debate over this topic! What a time. The closest we’ve gotten since was Joaquin Phoenix in I’m Still Here, but that whole situation just makes me feel bad (and involves Casey Affleck), so it’s not as much fun. We terrified ourselves watching these films and it felt amazing.
-Once at a sleepover in a friend’s basement, a big group of us fell asleep watching Tales from the Crypt, but I woke up and got scared and couldn’t figure out how to turn off the TV. I didn’t want to wake anyone up and be like, “Help, I’m scared of that skeleton dude!” but also…I was scared of that skeleton dude. So I just lay there, awake in my sleeping bag, haunted by his face. In my defense, he’s gross.
-For a few years when I was a kid, I had a tiny TV in my room. Honestly, those were some of my best years. I watched so many sitcom reruns. But also, there was one channel that only played a few, seemingly unrelated films over and over. One of them was Alice, Sweet Alice, a so-so horror film that was so garish and bright that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. My rural Ohio self had never seen anything like it! I tried watching it last year and it was aggressively unpleasant so I had to stop, but I still think it has some of the best horror imagery I’ve ever seen.
-In elementary school and junior high, we were all obsessed with Ouija boards. I have zero idea why, but we would use them any damn chance we got. I can clearly remember a sleepover (again, at Lauren’s house…why did everything scary happen there?) where we all yelled at each other for pushing the board. My mom refused to let me get one, and for years I thought it was a holdout from her religious childhood, but I just asked if she thought they were satanic and she said, “No. My mom and dad bought one for us. Everyone had one back then. I thought you would scare yourself.” So basically she just thought I was a wimp. Harsh! But also…not wrong.
Because of our illicit interest in Ouija, the movie Witchboard seemed adult and exciting, so Jessie and I watched it (where did we get it? Family Classic video? The library? Seems unlikely, because once we tried to check out Howard Stern’s autobiographical film Private Parts and her mom nixed it. At every turn, our attempts at watching grown-up films were thwarted!). The only thing I remember about it was that it was laughably bad, and yet when we camped out in the woods in Jessie’s yard, it was all I could think about.
-I never actually watched Slumber Party Massacre, but for some reason it was always on the shelf at Family Classic Video, our Bellville video store that has since become various other businesses. The cover haunts me and I always tried to get my friends to rent it…you know, as a joke…haha…but really I just wanted to watch it. I’ve been trying like crazy to get Hollis to watch it with me this spooky season because it’s on the Criterion Channel, but he won’t agree!
-My scary-movie-watching buddy for years was my brother Alex, because he loves horror and Hollis won’t watch anything even remotely scary. We saw several movies that Hollis would never watch with me in theatres, including Sinister, It Follows, and Paranormal Activity 3. I haven’t seen any of the other Paranormal Activity movies and I have no idea where most people rank this one in the series, but I was so scared that at one point I leaned over to Alex and said, “I think I’m going to cry.” I was just so tense and terrified! Anyway, I didn’t cry, but what if I had? What a weird memory that would’ve been.
-For a few years after college, I lived in an apartment in a converted Victorian home in Bellville. Because my parents were minutes away and Chase and Alex were often there, I’d go home a lot to have a family dinner or watch a movie (or American Idol during my darkest, Adam Lambert influenced year). When Alex was home on college breaks, we often watched something scary and then I’d have to drive home (in the dark) and go into my apartment alone (in the dark) and climb the creaky stairs of my Victorian apartment building (IN THE DARK) and I truly thought I was going to die the entire time. The two movies I remember terrifying me were The Shining (I would just sit in my apartment and think about Redrum and freak myself out) and The House of the Devil, which I fully believe is one of the best modern horror films and also I will never watch it again. It’s so well-made and I wish I could watch more Ti West but…I can’t! I rewatched the trailer and it’s very funny to me that her apartment costs $300 in the 1980s because I think I was paying $350 in Bellville in 2009. On the one hand, a great deal. On the other hand, the walls were so thin I could hear the guy next door fart.
-Alex had a couple of DVD box sets of low budget horror films. I think they must’ve all been in the public domain and that’s why it cost, like, $5 at Wal-Mart to get twenty movies on DVD. We loved to watch these because it was such gamble. You never knew if you were going to get the most boring movie ever or a hidden hilarious gem. This is where we watched The Satanic Rites of Dracula, a movie I don’t remember a single thing about other than this opening credit sequence, which lives rent-free in my mind (even cheaper than my 2009 Bellville apartment!). The Dracula shadow just keeps getting bigger!
We also watched a movie I actually love called Pieces. The trailer makes me nostalgic and I wasn’t even alive when this movie came out.
It’s all about a killer who chops up his victims into pieces (get it?), but it’s the perfect mix of bonkers acting, over-the-top kills, and memorably unique scenes. The IMDB trivia page is like nothing I’ve ever read (and you can read all about how someone actually pees their pants on screen and they just…kept it in! Why not!). This movie is very fun to watch with someone and I would highly recommend it. It’s gross but I don’t remember being scared.
-As previously mentioned, Hollis doesn’t watch scary movies, specifically ones about real-life stuff (so human killers are out, but witches/ghosts are a maybe). This doesn’t stop me from constantly trying to convince him to watch horror films with me! Once he watched Black Christmas with us at my parents’ house, and we thought he’d fallen asleep until he grabbed my ankle during a jump scare. He’d feigned sleep for the express purpose of scaring me! It was what I deserved, probably. And once I convinced him to watch Creep with me by being like, “Come on, it’s Mark Duplass, you love him!” but afterward he was like, “That was the exact kind of movie I don’t like watching.” Ultimately, the joke was on me because I still think about a few scary scenes from that movie sometimes at night. I can’t even begin to think about it when I’m alone. Also, you may remember that many newsletters ago I posed the question Is Mark Duplass hot? I received a unanimous yes, but this is the movie that makes me question things.
-You know I couldn’t let a newsletter go by without mentioning beautiful angel Dakota Johnson. Last year, I overcame my fear of scary movies and watched the Suspiria remake she stars in with Tilda Swinton. I watched this on the treadmill, and as I was walking along while people’s entrails were ripped out, I thought…you know, this is a weird thing to do. That being said, I love a lot of stuff about this movie. It’s dark and weird and nothing like the original.
I’m sure I have other horror film memories, but those are the ones that rise to the top. One thing I’m really looking forward to is watching scary movies with my son when he gets older. He’s always loved all things spooky, although I did inadvertently traumatize him by showing him the animated film Monster House two years ago. He still brings it up often, and as recently as yesterday he told me, “I’m never watching that movie ever again in my life.” Whoops! Maybe all the anti-screen time zealots were right after all.
Happy Halloween! I hope you’re all eating lots of candy today and dressing up if the spirit (Halloween) moves you. I might wear a giant banana costume for trick or treat, but I’m just not sure. It’s seen better days. Until next week, stay spooky.