My History with Horror
A brief rundown of why the scary soothes me.
INNOCENCE
Pictures this…
It’s sometime in the 90’s. You just crushed 2 slices of greasy, delicious cheese pizza from the go-to Pizzeria down the street.
You’re helping your mom clear the table as your dad turns up the volume on the new Sony big screen TV in the family room — and you hear it.
“Dun nu nu nu nu nu nu dun dun dun WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO”
You throw the paper plates in the garbage and sprint down the stairs as fast as you can, your body buzzing with excitement as the theme song hits your eardrums.
A flying saucer flashes through the sky.
A mysterious orb full of lights fills the screen.
A young David Duchovny stares knowingly into your soul.
And Gillian Anderson’s boss bitch glare stops you in your young tracks.
The Truth Is Out There, and you’re officially hooked.
The X-Files was my first ever favorite TV show.
I have memories of watching re-runs on my dad’s VHS tapes and during later seasons, gathering on the couch on Friday nights as a family, diving into the unseen and unexplained, my sister and I even had a dance to the intro.
Two curled headed kids goofily interpreting the walk of Aliens and the strange music our ears heard. So much innocence in front of the background of creepy, scary, way too mature content for our underage brains, but we loved it.
The episode The Jersey Devil (S1, EP5) resulted in me sleeping in my parents bed for multiple nights, the plot hitting way too close to home and engraining a fear in my under 10 year old heart for the fictional hometown character.
Then there was Darkness Falls (S1, EP20), an episode about a group of men who are attacked by a swarm of tiny insects that look like specks of dust and cocooned in webs of unknown particles. I was convinced, absolutely positive, that every piece of dust I saw in my 100 year old house was going to make me into a human cocoon.
A few years later, when I was diagnosed with cancer, I remember thinking about Scully, and not the episode where she actually got cancer, but the one where they find an implant in her neck (The Blessing Way S3, EP1). They way she reached her hand to the back of her neck to feel the unfamiliar bump under her skin became all too familiar.
My innocence as a kid lived within 60 minutes of a show about the unknown.
It’s funny what your memory conjures up when you’re digging into the files of ‘Remember When’. How much is true vs how much your imagination is just having a field day of delusion and ‘this would have been fun.’
I find myself a skeptic for what I believe in, questioning methodologies and running theories through a personal lie detector test. Every ounce of knowledge I learn, a string of questions pop up with it, forcing my already running mind to expand even wider.
Life is a cycle of learning and unlearning, placing your trust in a belief and taking a leap of faith that you’ll continue to align with it as you grow. The older I become, the more I realize why Scully was such a skeptic.
TRAUMA
The lights from the hallway snuck in under the opening of the door, giving the room a translucent glow - the universal sign for hospitals.
Machines lined the bed making a symphony of beeps and noises that became meditative after a few days of listening to the chorus.
On the TV, a young Haley Joel Osment as Cole Sear hugged the covers towards his chin, tears streaming down his cheeks, his eyes doe-eyed and wide begging for someone to take the fear away.
Here comes the spoiler alert…
The sheets were scratchy and uncomfortable as I laid in almost the exact position as the boy I watched on TV, waiting for the B I G surprise to take place in front of me, the climax of the scariest movie of the year being played out in my hospital room.
Unbeknownst to Cole and I, we were both facing the biggest challenge of our young lives.
Seeing dead people, fighting cancer. Same same, yet vastly different.
My mom sat in the uncomfortable chair next to my bed with her hands covering her face, enduring her biggest nightmare; watching a horror film as her child laid in a bed with a terminal illness.
God damn, I put her through the ringer, she was Toni Collette’s counter part as a worried mother with a sick kid.
There was something my little brain couldn’t comprehend about watching The Sixth Sense while laying in a hospital bed because my white blood cell count was way too low to be in society, that made the whole thing a little easier. 12 year old me would say it was because I loved scary movies, the Vanessa today would say it was my brains’ way of finding something relatable.
A little boy can see dead people, but doesn’t want to tell anyone because it makes him different.
A little girl fights cancer, but doesn’t want to talk about it because it makes her different.
Together, they battled their own ghosts, both terrified, but not wanting to get anyone else involved.
Sometime later in the movie, my machines and I would get up out of bed and make our way to the bathroom, their beeping and slight tug where they were connected to the port in my chest reminding me that they were ‘there to help.’ Like Cole being shown something that resulted in him having to tell Mr. Collins that his wife was the one who murdered his daughter, that trip to the bathroom would follow a parallel in my world. As I picked my head up from the pillow, chunks of hair remained, the tell tale sign of the most obvious chemo side effect beginning to take place.
I hoped my mom didn’t see it, knowing it would upset her even more - so I ignored it and pretended it wasn’t happening, pretended it was a ghost that only I could see.
The movie continued. The chemo continued. Cole and I eventually both made it out alive.
CONNECTIONS
My father is the last person on this planet who still gets DVD’s from Netflix.
Before the behemoth became the streaming service it is today, he’d browse through the catalog and strategically pick out which DVD would be delivered, most of the time, it was either horror or some type of crime.
“Is it violent?” My mother would as by default, already knowing the answer - probably.
“I can’t even listen to it without getting ageda.” She’d say about every movie he rented.
My father is the main reason why horror movies are my comfort meal.
One night when I was either in high school or college, I came home after a night of drinking. I sat on the couch next to my dad who was sleep-watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. All the lights off, the volume up louder than it should have been at 10pm (we would hear about it from my mom the next day), and me pretending that I wasn’t hammered sitting next to my dad on the couch.
Through all the screaming and bleeding and drooling that Leatherface provoked, my drunk brain produced two thoughts: Jessica Biel is fucking beautiful and this is corny as shit.
I couldn’t wrap my head around the bad acting, the somewhat shitty effects (it was 2003), and the sheer amount of how unrealistic and absurd the whole thing was, but that’s when my relationship with corny, ‘classic’, horror really began.
This type of horror classics feels like a cozy blanket to my brain because there’s something eerily comforting about being able to predict the outcome - a final girl, a family massacre, or a sequel in the making.
It’s 90’s horror that meets no match in my elder, millennial mind, though. The popular kid cast members, scream-queen leading ladies, sex driven side characters, but most of all, the misunderstood outliers who had it right the whole time.
Devan Sawa in the Final Destination series, Neve Campbell in Scream. They knew what to do from the beginning; get off the plane, don’t answer the phone, yet they were the ones ridiculed and disbelieved, but also being one of the few who made it out alive.
The unsung heroes of horror.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
There are other movies that remain locked in my brain as the memories.
The Shining, Hannibal, The Ring - these were all movies that impacted my thoughts after I watched them, made me think about my own sanity and eventual demise.
Hereditary, Men, Sinister - different genres evoke different emotions in their own, unique way.
Scenes run through my mind on a random Wednesday afternoon, unshakeable reminders about being a woman flashing across a screen for 120 minutes.
The older I get, the more fascinated I become with not only the moves themselves, but the makings behind the film. The emotional connections (or disconnection) of the cast to the way the scenes are shot, there’s something that makes the unimaginably and unseen profoundly human in the nuances of details.
Horror has been my self-care before caring for myself was even a thing.