Last week, when I sat down to write my review of Jason Zinoman's book Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror for this week's New York Observer, a childhood friend posted something on my Facebook wall: the trailer for the the upcoming Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a remake of the 1973 TV movie about nasty goblins that lurk behind a house’s walls. My friend commented, “Growing up I don’t think anything scared me more than this.”
In Stephen King’s book Danse Macabre, he describes seeing his first movie as a child: “My gut reaction to Creature of the Black Lagoon on that long-ago night was a kind of terrible, waking swoon. The nightmare was happening right in front of me; every hideous possibility that human flesh is heir to was being played out on that drive-in screen.” I was scarred for life at 11 by a dream sequence in An American Werewolf in London, when the young lead is forced to watch his whole family get machine-gunned by Nazi werewolves in their living room. Zinoman saves his trauma for his book's Acknowledgments section: he watched Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer when “I was about 12 in the basement of a friend’s house and still recall how its matter-of-fact staging of violence made my body tense up into an almost paralyzed state.”
Some people spend their lives trying to relive the joys of youth. Some of us seek out movies that scare the bejesus out of us, hoping to relive the terror. Got a problem with that?
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