Beware the porch decorations!
My algorithm fed me the funniest Reel the other day: Delivery drivers walking up to porches and getting the bejesus scared out of them by seasonal animatronic decorations.
What an age we live in. Of COURSE cameras are capturing the frightened workers and their reactions, airtime and mad dashes.
Was I not entertained? I was. Who doesn’t love slapstick comedy? I also empathized, though. I am easily startled and hate jump scares. Ask anyone who has snuck up — OK, approached — my desk when my back is to them, and I am focused on a task.
My wife has more than once startled me just by walking into the bathroom while I’m brushing my teeth.
You can imagine how well I do watching horror films. Have you ever been in a theater and seen that one person pop out of their seat with a startling height and ridiculous physicality, even though it was SO obvious a jump scare was impending?
That was I.
My complicated relationship with fright as entertainment dates back to 1976. My family was on a road trip in a borrowed RV. We had along a tiny B&W TV, and my parents let my sisters and me stay up and watch “Race with the Devil.”
The 1975 movie starred, among others, Peter Fonda and Loretta Swit. From the Wikipedia entry: “Its plot follows two couples on a road trip who are pursued by a satanic cult after witnessing a human sacrifice while camping in rural Texas.”
It had been edited for television, if not for developing brains belonging to children who attended private Catholic school. I was probably about 8 years old. My sisters were, and continue to be, 1.5 and 3.5 years older than I.
In those much simpler, more innocent times, we were not immersed in entertainment, much less violent entertainment, the way we are now. Grand Theft Auto was a crime, not a game. Darth Vader was two years away from heavily breathing into popular imagination. At that age, the harsh events of “Dumbo” constituted scary to me.
But being allowed to stay up late and finish this grown-up movie was forbidden fruit, an exotic land. As the movie rolled, the thrill gave way to what I’d call enthralled terror: The couples — traveling by RV, just like us, mind you — tried like heck to get murder evidence to Amarillo. Everywhere they went, satanists menaced them.
Satanism was big-time scary in the 1970s. Even in the early ’80s, when I jumped to public junior high, people talked of an overgrown, abandoned street, where, purportedly, devil worshippers practiced the occult.
(123rf)
My high school friend Greg lived closer to it and remembers the lore: “(It) was particularly spooky because it was where they claimed a classroom was burned to the ground by satanists with children inside. … There WAS a burned out little cottage out there. And kids used to go out there to do incantations and stuff.”
Growing up into a reader, I have probably read Stephen King more than any other author, especially in recent years, when books have to battle a million other options for attention. Beats me why I can handle it in prose form, but seeing it with my eyeballs gives me the heebie jeebies.
In messaging them about their memories, my sisters also said they were traumatized by “Race with the Devil,” and don’t watch horror films. It’s not gore I find objectionable. I love Quentin Tarantino’s films. I will sit through hours of his oeuvre thoroughly entertained, but put something like “A Quiet Place” on and I will step into the kitchen for a snack when things get too intense.
At my most defensive, I tell myself that no violence or tragedy has ever befallen those who love scary films. If any had, why would they seek out that sensation?
Then Greg shared a quote from Stephen King’s nonfiction book “Danse Macabre”: “Here is the final truth of horror movies: They do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life. They do not celebrate deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller (but never petty) joys of our own lives. They are the barber’s leeches of the psyche, drawing not bad blood but anxiety … for a little while, anyway.”
“I think (to quote King) those movies were like the barber’s leech for my soul — drawing out bad blood,” Greg said. “Reminding me that my life wasn’t as bad as it could be, and that everything was really OK and I was safe.”
Interesting, but I’m still avoiding jump scares.
However you celebrate Halloween, reader: Keep it safe, watch out for animatronic decorations, and if you do get frightened by any, send me the video.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source bendbulletin.com ’
