Once again, a post inspired by MamaKat's writing prompts:
Name something that scared you when you were young....are you still scared?
The first time I remember being scared -- really scared, waking up from a nightmare shaking and covered in sweat -- was when I was 6 years old. I saw an advertisement on TV for 'Salem's Lot. The ad was on after my bedtime, and I was pulling the ol' peek-around-the-corner-of-my-bedroom-door-to-watch-some-forbidden-TV. Well, that certainly showed me to sneak out of bed after my bedtime!
The ad showed a vampire floating in the air, surrounded by fog in an eery bluish moonlight. Unlike other vampires I had seen on TV, this one was not a count: a cape wearing, old fashioned, almost cartoonish vampire complete with a medallion, an ascot, and a glittering blood-red ring. This vampire was a boy. A boy of about 12 years of age, skin ashen, eyes bloodshot, his curly hair disheveled (his mom not around to make him comb it), a bewildered expression on his face as he begged his friend to let him in the window, to help him understand what had happened to him. Yet, beneath it all was an evil glitter in his eyes; he knew exactly what had happened to him and he yearned to take his friend down with him.
The sight of a boy vampire shook me to my very core. Monsters were supposed to be old, dusty relics who appeared in black and white movies on the Creature Double Feature on Sunday afternoons. Not -- kids!
I had nightmares about the boy vampire for months.
Fast forward to today. You may think that the scare I got when I was six may have turned me off to horror movies. But you'd be wrong.
I love horror movies! I love scary horror movies, campy horror movies, funny horror movies, even really bad B-horror movies. In October, I scan the movie channels looking for good horror movies to watch. (You have to sit through an awful lot of bad ones to get to the good ones!) Every so often, I see one that is genuinely scary -- one that makes me consider keeping the lights on when I go to bed.
But never one that has scared me so throughly as the commercial I saw from around the doorjamb when I was six.
Maybe that's a good thing.
4 comments:
Funny! My sister and I saw part of Poltergeist and 28 years later we still get the shivers when remembering how scared we were! My daughter just tried to convince me to watch it, as it is "not scary at all" and a classic....
I can't!
that's funny, I once got scared by a guy dressed up in an Easter Bunny suit. I just thought he was so creepy. I cried whenever my mom said the Easter bunny was coming. Kelley at the road goes ever ever on
I must have had a similar experience when I was a kid, but it was one of those old, black and white dracula movies that freaked me out. As a young adult, I loved to watch the Freddy Krueger movies, Poltergeist, The Shining... Now as an older adult, I really can't watch horror movies anymore. A friend and I went to see the remake of Amityville Horror a few years ago. I screamed at one point! Out LOUD! I was embarrassed and she laughed at me. That was the last horror flick I watched.
I hated them then and I hate them now! Although I still insist on forcing myself to watch Dateline as often as possible. No idea why I choose real life horror over made up fairy tale horror.
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