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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cDumbo\u201d constituted scary to me.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d call enthralled terror: The couples \u2014 traveling by RV, just like us, mind you \u2014 tried like heck to get murder evidence to Amarillo. Everywhere they went, satanists menaced them.<\/p>\n
Satanism was big-time scary in the 1970s. Even in the early \u201980s, when I jumped to public junior high, people talked of an overgrown, abandoned street, where, purportedly, devil worshippers practiced the occult.<\/p>\n
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My high school friend Greg lived closer to it and remembers the lore: \u201c(It) was particularly spooky because it was where they claimed a classroom was burned to the ground by satanists with children inside. \u2026 There WAS a burned out little cottage out there. And kids used to go out there to do incantations and stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In messaging them about their memories, my sisters also said they were traumatized by \u201cRace with the Devil,\u201d and don\u2019t watch horror films. It\u2019s not gore I find objectionable. I love Quentin Tarantino\u2019s films. I will sit through hours of his oeuvre thoroughly entertained, but put something like \u201cA Quiet Place\u201d on and I will step into the kitchen for a snack when things get too intense.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
Then Greg shared a quote from Stephen King\u2019s nonfiction book \u201cDanse Macabre\u201d: \u201cHere 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\u2019s leeches of the psyche, drawing not bad blood but anxiety \u2026 for a little while, anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think (to quote King) those movies were like the barber\u2019s leech for my soul \u2014 drawing out bad blood,\u201d Greg said. \u201cReminding me that my life wasn\u2019t as bad as it could be, and that everything was really OK and I was safe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Interesting, but I\u2019m still avoiding jump scares.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source bendbulletin.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2123923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[367026,319927,395598],"class_list":["post-2123922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-halloween","tag-horror-films","tag-jump-scares"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Halloween-column-Horror-movies-a-LOT-scarier-for-some-of.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2123922"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2123924,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123922\/revisions\/2123924"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2123923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2123922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2123922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2123922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}