Fright Night

It's October again, which means I'll be spending the next month with Frankenstein, Dracula, the Ghostbusters, wolfmen, guys with knife-fingers and faces too gruesome to be seen in the light of day. Thirty-one glorious days of horror. Do I watch movies that really scare me? Sadly, there aren't that many that do anymore. When I was a kid, the scariest movies were Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a made-for-TV movie I saw about Jim Jones - Guyana, Cult of the Damned, I believe it was called.

My dad once told me, when I was maybe six or seven, that when he saw Jaws he had nightmares about being eaten by a shark. When I saw it, I dreamed I was the shark. I guess that kind of sums up how frightening movies are to me. Body Snatchers was scary because while we were watching it, all the lights were off in the house. My uncle had come by and had rung the doorbell, but we didn't hear it because we were so engrossed in the movie. He went around the back and came in the house through the garage. So we're sitting there, in the dark, watching a movie about pod people, and suddenly there's this silhouette that appears in the kitchen. I...was...terrified. For at least five seconds.

The Jim Jones movie was dramatized a bit, but I think it hits closer to home on what is really frightening. The truth is far scarier than fiction. Videos about North Korea are more frightening than It.

Although I will admit that there have been times when I was walking my dogs in the middle of the night and considered exactly what it would take to escape if I was being stalked by Michael Meyers.

Happy October!