Watered Down

I hate being scared. It is a feeling I do not enjoy. My wife, however, loves to be scared. When Halloween rolls around, I know there will be an onslaught of scary movies available for her viewing pleasure.

My wife is kind enough to not subject me to scary movies if I do not care to watch them with her. (I'm sure she wishes I would show her the same consideration when it comes to sports.) There are a few times a year when I feel brave and tell her that I could watch a scary movie. Thankfully, she rarely takes me up on the offer.

Yesterday, in the spirit of Halloween, I let her know that there were three scary movies premiering on television and it was her choice which one we watched. I started mentally preparing myself as soon as I got out of bed.

I have always been a bit of a cry-baby when it comes to horror. I once threw-up in a movie theater's bathroom sink after I heard Darth Vader's heavy breathing filtering through the closed doors of a movie that had yet to let out. I cried hysterically when Sammy Terry (I think that was his name,) a man with white make-up on his face, wearing a Dracula-style cape, came on the local cable channel to introduce that night's scary movie. Then came Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, The Brood, The Omen, Psycho, Poltergeist, all movies that scared me to the point of wishing I could take the watching of them back. But I had to watch them: I was saving face in front of my cousins.

My wife picked The Crazies. Okay. Sure. The Crazies. Decent cast. Tainted water supply. I can do this, I kept telling myself as the sun started to set and time drew nearer. I made sure I was finished eating. I snuggled into my wife's chest. The movie started. Oh, god...here we go. We watched. I started to relax. It wasn't scary. In fact, I wish my wife could turn back time and pick something else. She deserved better for her one pick.

What happened to making movies that inspire people like me to turn every light in the house on? To refuse to go outside when it is dark? To question every noise the house makes? Is it because I am older? (I really don't think so because I was well into adulthood when I visited my last haunted house--something I will never do again. The only way out of it was by going through it! My behavior was less than civilized as I yanked and pulled and screamed and let myself be blindly led by my girlfriend at the time.) Is it because the genre has been overdone and the same movies are being made over and over again with different casts and a small tweaking to the stories? Maybe. All I know is Halloween used to mean something. It used to mean climbing the steps to a house, all in the name of sugar, where there was  scary music playing through a stereo speaker, a casket by the door, and a moment that needed to be collected while pausing to figure out if the candy was worth it. Was there something in the casket, biding its time to pop out and give fright to a group of kids? Yes, of course there was.

Maybe it's been too long since I've been on the trick-or-treat circuit, but it seems like kids today don't have to work as hard for a handout. And movie makers don't have to try as hard to scare the pants off theater-goers. Maybe I should just shut up and thank god for small favors.