Horror movies. No other genre can garner such fervent reactions from people. Emotions ranging from disgust, shock and revulsion, to amusement, joy and laughter. I've personally experienced the gambit of feelings over the 26 years that I've been watching horror movies, but no nightmare or terror or abhorrence can keep me from them. I've often wondered why people, and more to the point why I, love horror movies the way we do. I don't think anyone can challenge the protests of people who can't stomach them. But what is it that keeps horror audiences coming back for more? One theory is that people who watch horror movies are sensation seekers. They crave adventure, danger, a taste for something unusual, perverse and exhilarating. But given that most of us are normal people with average jobs and loving families, our real lives don't come anywhere close to being that thrilling. So we experience those emotions in the safety of our homes, vicariously, through the intensity of the horror movie. Another theory is that it shows us how we take lives for granted, and reminds us just how easy things can fall apart and how much we would fight for our own survival. They're life affirming, if you will.
It's hard to be objective when you've been watching horror movies for as long as I have. To me, horror movies are more about atmosphere, tone and experience, than they are pulse pounding methods of excitement. It's always a welcome surprise when I get scared from a horror movie but rarely does that happen anymore. Alas, I am desensitized. I can watch damn near anything now and, while sometimes still shocking or gross, I can stomach it all. From the head bashing and rape scenes in 2002's French thriller Irreversible, to the triple human abomination of 2009's Dutch horror The Human Centipede, to the full body skinning in 2008's French horror Martyrs.
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Once upon a time there was a young girl who believed in fairy tales. She believed that there was one man in the all world that her life was being drawn to, that eventually they would meet and fall in love and live happily ever after. Her Prince Charming. She understood this was implausible and ridiculous but she felt that she was right, in her very heart, that despite early love and heartache and disappointment, that it was all just a rehearsal for the time in her life when He and She would meet, at last. Her name was Doll. And she had no idea that her rehearsal would be over so soon at the tender age of twenty.
Gray skies, cold hands, damp earth - this is October in Portland. The air outside swirls with the scents of decaying leaves, brewing coffee and burning wood. The shrill cawing of crows and the hissing of tires on wet pavement are the soundscapes. People start planning for Halloween, decorating their yards and houses with skeletons and cobwebs, deciding on ridiculous costumes and candy, and the horror movie elbows its way into most homes, setting the mood for scary. It's no surprise that this is my favorite month of the year. The overcast skies, misting rain and early nightfall makes with the dark and the dreary, while corn mazes and haunted houses and silly costumes makes with the fun and the whimsical.
Back in 1999 when I met Adam he was living in New York City while I was still thrashing against my cage in Michigan. After our initial collision one life-altering evening in NY, I headed back to the Midwest with a sad goodbye and a sorrowful sigh, not sure if we would ever meet again. But 670 miles could not come between the spark that we had ignited, and the next five months pulsed with love letters, poetry, flowers and phone calls that lasted well into the night. On some of our late night phone calls Adam would read to me. He would read me poetry and passages from Shakespeare, and one night he read T.S. Eliot's, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I had never heard it before and I sat there, breathless, as he read me these words that sank within my soul and crashed around within me in echoes and whispers. I made him read it to me again immediately.
The day before I was to leave to fly back east to be with my family my mother called me with news that my grandfather had been moved to hospice care. I needed no explanation of what this meant, I knew that hospice care was the last stage and that his 85 years of life would be, at any time, coming to an end. I started to worry that I wouldn't make it in time. I had had to wait two days between deciding to go to Michigan and actually catching my flight there and I was hoping that those two days weren't going to cost me and my sense of urgency tripled.
