Scare me — but not too much
Remember when Halloween was all about scary things? Like zombies, bodysnatchers, and poltergeists. And things that go bump in the night and make your skin crawl.
Somewhere around the time we became grownups with small children, Halloween became all about cute costumes and bite-size candy. Today, the biggest fright my husband faces is that I’ll get crappy candy to give out that he can’t eat when the doorbell stops ringing.
Halloween is now officially a cuddly holiday, but part of me misses the dark, scary, unknown parts of it. There’s a kind of a thrill that comes with truly being frightened when you know you’re actually safe. It’s that fear of the unknown, of the macabre, of graveyards and black cats (which now I’m afraid of because I'm terribly allergic)
When I was little, there was a dilapidated house in our neighborhood. We called it “the witch’s house.” It was so decrepit we assumed a real witch must live there. We would walk the long way to school to avoid passing it, imagining “she” could look out the window and cast a spell on us.
Now that I’m a homeowner myself, I realize it was probably just a house in foreclosure, which is truly scary to anyone living through it. The house is now renovated—way renovated, so it’s scary big for the lot size.
I know it’s not rational, but while I miss Halloween scares, I still can’t handle scary movies. It’s gotten so bad that, when a trailer for one comes on, I turn off the sound, change the channel and sometimes leave the room. I’m a scary-movie scaredy-cat.
This makes no sense because most scary movies are often so badly written, acted, and produced, with ridiculous premises. That whole series of scary movie send-ups, Scary Movie, isn’t so far off from the ridiculousness of the real scary movies.
I’m not sure when my problem with these movies began. Perhaps it was the guy in high school who took me to see the Texas Chainsaw Massacre in hopes I would hide my face in his shoulder and clutch his hand throughout the ordeal. It wasn’t actually scary, though, just bloody and disgusting. Yet I still found myself turning on all the lights when I walked back into my house.
Or maybe it was Poltergeist, which has the look of a bright, shiny family movie but was actually terrifying. I couldn’t watch television late at night without thinking of that little girl turning from her TV and saying, “They’re here” so sweetly. It haunts me to this day, especially when we moved into our suburban tract situated right near a graveyard.
And to this day, the shape of my upper lip is permanently altered because I was so scared watching The Haunting that I began sucking furiously on a bottle of Fanta Orange soda and my lip got stuck.
Now I know there are a lot of truly scary things in the world today. Violently scary things that are rocking our world both near and far. But in those “real” scary things, I can often find something about the resilience of humanity and our ability to overcome that can make me hopeful.
So you will find me doing what some people consider scary—like traveling to places in the world considered dangerous—but you won’t ever find me at a scary movie or a local haunted house like Scream Works or Nightmare Manor. Have fun at them: I’ll be safe at home with the covers over my head.
The Suburban Outlaw is a recovering lawyer who helps people around the world present with passion through her company ShermanEDGE: Explore, Dream, Grow & Excite. She lives in Pittsford. Read her Saturday column in The Democrat and Chronicle and at herrochester.com; or visit www. suburbanoutlaw.com