Fear and Loathing in SLC

Still bringing old blogs over from Facebook. Today's entry was originally posted on 10.30.08. Guess what it's about?

Halloween may very well ranks as one of my favorite holidays, although the peace, harmony, and wanton avarice of a modern Christmas do provide stiff competition. Halloween is one of the few great “unchained holidays” – it’s the perfect opportunity for seriously awesome parties. Go ahead, hand out with all your friends until the early hours of the morning! Eat candy until sugar crystals form along the walls of your arteries! If you’re a man, wear eyeliner and women’s pants! No one will think you’re gay!

(Seriously, my emo-rock star costume is probably my favorite costume ever, followed closely by my Euro-trash getup and the year I went as Stupendous Man from Calvin and Hobbes).

So in honor of Halloween, I’d like to compile a list of my top scary movies. Unfortunately, I don’t really watch any scary movies. Case in point: I threw a Halloween party my sophomore year in high school. We had a blast with tons of good food and costumes. We even went to a haunted house some other kids in my neighborhood had put together. It was, if I may borrow a colloquialism, off the hizzook.

(We interrupt this note to inform our concerned public that Stephen Bradford has just had his right to borrow colloquialisms eternally and irreversibly revoked).

The party ran into a bit of a snag when it came time to show the scary movie at the end of the night. I choose the movie closest to a true horror that I could think of: The Mummy. That’s right, our big Halloween scare was watching Brendan Frasier try to act while fighting off badly-rendered CGI mummies. The horror, the horror.

Actually, one of the girls at the party went home that night and had a nightmare about being chased through the halls of a pyramid by a giant mummy. So I guess the movie did have an appropriate scare factor. Plus, I was in her dream, too, apparently, and was the only one smart enough to bring a friggin’ shotgun to fight off the mummy. Any event which leads to me looking like a hero, even if it is only in a dream, must be categorically defined as “awesome.”

So, yeah, don’t know much about the horror movie genre. After The Mummy, the only other horror movies I’ve ever seen are Young Frankenstein (which doesn’t really count because it’s actually a parody of the whole horror genre) and The Sixth Sense (which only counts because it convinced M. Night Shyamalan that he should make MORE movies).

Okay, there’s one legitimately scary horror movie that I’ve seen, and even this one might be a bit of a stretch. It’s an old silent picture called Nosferatu, and it was the first cinematic interpretation of Brahm Stoker’s Dracula. The director’s take on the vampire is a bit different from the glittery, effeminate, love-monkeys that we’re used to seeing these days (shame on you, Stephanie Meyer). Whatever else goes on in that movie, the vampire is actually scary. Even though, by today’s standards, a lot of the acting, the special effects, and, of course, the screens of text that interrupt the action are outright laughable, everyone will gasp in surprise and shock when Count Orlock first appears with his pointed ears and rat-teeth. It’s a truly frightening moment, and Hollywood should really try to return to the rodent-vampire thing.

Speaking of Brahm Stoker, I COULD take this moment to go over the most frightening books I’ve ever read. I mean, I got my undergraduate degree in English, so I should know a lot about books, right? Sadly, that’s not the case. I read Dracula in eighth grade, and I don’t really remember it being all that scary. Other than that, I can think of exactly three horror writers, and I’ve never really read any of them extensively. First, there’s Stephen King – whose work, to be honest, I’ve never actually read, but if they read anything like the movies based off them, I think I’ll pass. I’ve seen people who are actually afraid of clowns watch the movie It and be cured.

The biggest name in horror fiction may very well be Edgar Allen Poe. And I may have to turn in my English major badge after this, but I have to say I really don’t like Poe at all. Too wordy. Nineteenth-century American literature generally doesn’t age very well. I did once have a lot of fun recording a radio play of “The Telltale Heart” way back when I was in fifth grade. My classmates and I recorded it in the back room of the library. We made the sound of the heart beating by jumping up and down on the ground as loudly as we could. The librarian got mad at us and almost kicked us out. That’s a scary story, right?

The last horror author I have any kind of familiarity with (and I’m pretty embarrassed to admit this) is a fellow by the name of H. P. Lovecraft. This is the man that invented the Chthulhu mythos, if you know what that is. If you don’t know what that is, you’ve probably been on a date in the last month. Chthulhu is some type of ancient, tentacled, alien-God-creature that is so horrifying to look at that anyone who sees him is instantly struck with madness. Lovecraft INVENTED the cliché of the monster that’s too horrible for words to describe. Anyone else see the problem in telling a story about “monsters too horrible for words to describe” in a novel? Lovecraft, unfortunately, didn’t.

So the only genre I really know anything about after eliminating books and movies would be video games. And here I can come up with some scary titles. Like, for example, Resident Evil 4 (this time, it’s not Resident Evil 3). The first quarter of the game has the player running around a dilapidated Spanish village, avoiding villagers who may or may not want to eat your brains/cut your face off with a chainsaw. My money’s on “may.” There’s nothing quite like standing alone in a quiet street, suddenly starting as a maniac with a bag over his head fires up a chainsaw behind you, then watching in horror as he literally mows you down even after you emptied an entire clip from your handgun into his chest. Hopefully, I’ll only ever see that in a video game and never have to live through it in real life again.

The problem with Resident Evil 4 is that, after that first quarter, there’s nothing really that scary again. Sure, you run around a hedge maze while evil, bloodthirsty dogs howl at the mist-veiled moon. But the instant the dogs appear and sprout tentacles, all the fear leaves my body to be replaced by the bitter cynicism rooted in my heart. I mean, seriously, what were the game developers thinking?

“So we’ve got these dogs that chase you through the hedge maze. How do we make them scarier?”

“I know! Let’s have them grow tentacles out their backs!”

“Tentacle-dogs, I love it. Now, we’ve got this maniacal little man-child with Napoleonic delusions of grandeur…”

“Ooh, ooh! He turns into a giant tentacle monster!”

“Oookay, more tentacles. And lastly, we’ve got this mysterious supporting character who wants to help but winds up dying tragically after the cult leader stabs him in the back with a knife…”

“Not a knife! A tentacle!”

“Sit down, Jenkins, or I’ll take away your juice box!”

Who decided that tentacles are scary? Oh, right. Lovecraft. That hack.

My most recent “scary game” acquisition is Fatal Frame 2 (this time, it’s not Fatal Frame 1). I haven’t played very far in it because, truth be told, the game scares the CRAP out of me. The premise is pretty ridiculous – ghosts are attacking you, and the only way you can defeat them is to take their picture. It’s like Ghostbusters on safari.

But, actually, the game is pretty scary. You play as a teenage Japanese girl, dragging your crippled sister around a deserted town. Why exactly you’re in the town, I don’t know. You probably took a wrong turn playing hopscotch. Anyway, there are ghosts, and corpses hanging from the rafters, and yadda yadda yadda, then, “Boo!” – some horrifying beastie jumps out of nowhere and screams at you, and you have exactly two seconds to take its picture before it vanishes again. Or kills you.

Now, I’m a perfectionist, so when I play this game, I have to try to get a picture of every ghost. A transcript of me playing this game would look something like this:

Japanese girl takes a picture of the mystic, ghostly altar. The picture develops, and then transforms into the picture of a bleeding, screaming man. Suddenly, a ghostly man appears.

GHOSTLY MAN: DON’T LOOK AT ME!!!

STEPHEN: Holy crap! [Stephen drops the controller and screams. The ghost disappears.] Dang, that was scary. [Pause]. Aw, crap, I forgot to get the ghost’s picture. Gotta reset.

Again, Japanese girl takes a picture of the mystic, ghostly altar. The picture develops, and then transforms into the picture of a bleeding, screaming man. Suddenly, a ghostly man appears.

GHOSTLY MAN: DON’T LOOK AT ME!!!

STEPHEN: Geez, it did it again! [Stephen drops the controller again]. I think I’m getting goosebumps. [Pause]. Crap!

So, yeah, scary stuff. But I get the feeling that I still don’t have many of you scared yet. Maybe I’m just the kind of guy that should stick to the “fun” aspects of Halloween and leave the fear to the professionals and Captain Howdy. Or maybe I just haven’t unleashed the one demon that truly terrifies me every time I see it, the one that, no matter what I do, I can only stare at in mute, speechless fear:

A pretty, intelligent woman with a kind heart and a strong, confidant personality.

Anyone else scared? Just me? Man, I suck at this game!