Halloween is finally over and I say thank goodness. Not because I don’t like the holiday or enjoy overdosing on novelty candy, believe me I do. But I’m finally through another season of marathon-watching scary movies.
I watch my fair share of horror flicks throughout the year, mostly the artsy kind where the real monster was your inner feeling of self-doubt and existential dread all along. I fancy myself a connoisseur of horror, but that’s just a lie I tell people to seem edgy and not like a boring 44-year-old woman who has to cover her eyes during intense parts of Murder She Wrote. Mostly I hate to love horror. Gore freaks me out, serial killer movies give me nightmares for weeks on end, and demon/ghost possession movies send me into paranoid tantrums in the middle of the night, convinced that ghosts are hiding under my bed.
Actually come to think of it, I’d mostly be embarrassed by that last one because underneath my bed is not very tidy. This is where we shove random dog toys and laundry we wish to disown, not somewhere I want strange apparitions hanging out and silently judging my cleaning habits.
My fiance prefers horror films that seem like they were made by 6-year-old boys who were given a can of Play-Doh, a box of crayons, and $7 million to make their ideal scary movie.
Everything he likes centers on sharks, often robotic or mutated with other ancient animals like dinosaurs. In the past few years of our soon-to-be wedded bliss, I have endured the following films, all in the name of true love: Sharktopus, Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus (for crying out loud), 2-Headed Shark Attack, Ghost Shark, Shark Night, and of course obviously 3-Headed Shark Attack.
I am always given strong impassioned lectures on par with something one might hear on the floor of the Senate defending the rights of orphaned babies with typhoid fever to convince me to watch these works of cinematic art. “It is so important and vital that we watch and support Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus! It’s the moral and just thing to do.”
I end up wasting almost two hours of my life watching a collection of idiots pretend that splashing around in open waters recently polluted with radiation/alien space rays/Carmen Electra is a good idea.
So it was in the interest of being a good sport that I agreed to jump headfirst into October scare-a-thons in the interest of keeping my relationship strong. Our scariest month is a time when all the classic horror films are featured and often on sale/available for rent at a lower price. It’s a time of year to dust off everything from The Exorcist to House of a Thousand Corpses.
It’s not like we have to look that far for said material either. My fiance has a box of horror movies and I don’t know why (“No, everything is not ‘already online,’ Rebecca. Show me Horror Shark Clown from Hell? Is that on Hulu? OK then.”). When we moved he suggested keeping a box set of all the Nightmare on Elm Street DVDs in favor of a box with my christening gown and irreplaceable photos of my childhood.
So once again all the scary movies are boxed away, not to be looked at for another year, until I’m ready to pretend that I’m not scared to death of ghosts living in my attic. The shark movies, however, I’ll have to continue to deal with year round.
Rebecca Rose is somewhere cowering in fear. Contact her at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 1-7, 2018.
