Movies and nightmares, past and present

It is October, time for the scary movies to be all over tv. I love scary movies, always have.  When I was a kid of 8 or so, I would watch The Night Gallery. The faces in the beginning frightened me and I would hide my eyes. The stories, however, intrigued me.  My mother and my aunt loved scary movies so I watched many with them. 

I remember my younger cousins and I were supposed to be sleeping in the back of my aunt’s truck when she and my mother went to see The Omen – the original one back in the 1970’s.  I was awake though, and watched the whole thing lying on my stomach, chin propped on my elbows and looking through the slider window of the cab.  Now this is a statement of what I dog lover I am. Even though the dogs in the movie were supposed to be evil, scary Rottweilers, it did not deter me one bit from getting a Rottweiler when I grew up. My mother of course would refer to it as the devil dog because of the movie, but she loved my Kimba as much as we did. Named after Kimba the white lion, one of my favorite cartoons as a kid!

Where am I going with this you ask?? Well…. tonight, I decided to watch a movie that actually DID scare me in jr. high. I saw it with a boy, and there were some scary parts that got me. The boy in return got nail marks where I gripped his arm. LOL.  I wonder now how a 13 yr old girl and 14 yr old boy got into that R rated movie because that was unusual back then.  The movie was Phantasm and the tall man was creepy as could be. He just kept showing up when the door was opened, behind the door when someone shut it, and the little scary things in the robes.  What got me about the little robed creatures was the scene when the young teenager was lying on his bed and he had a crocheted afghan that looked very much like the one that was on my bed at the time.  My best friend and I would talk on the phone at night, tell each other about our days as we went to different schools and lived about 10 miles apart. To amuse herself she would tell me not to look under the bed because those robed creatures were under there! Of course it was not hard for my active imagination to view myself lying there with the nearly same afghan afraid to look under the bed or even down.  To make it worse, I was an only child and home alone a lot. When she got the chance, she would tell me not to turn around because the “Tall Man” would be there if I did. She certainly got her mileage out of creeping me out!

   

When we grew up and were married and living in houses (now in different states) we still talked on the phone at least once a month. The ball was then in MY court because she moved into a house that not only had a basement, but had a boiler and that was where her washer and dryer were – in the basement!!!! So all those years later, to my advantage, I would always tell her Freddie Krueger would be waiting for her when she went to do the laundry!! HAHA  Karma is a bitch sometimes!  We are still good friends but do not talk nearly enough! Now we talk about our adult kids and their families. She would find it amusing, I am sure, to know I am re-watching that movie that once scared me so bad. 

Sadly I have seen such evil in the world when I worked for the coroner that I have now found this movie cheesy, and actually boring. Ironically, I am a little disappointed that once again, I am so battle scarred from the true evil and wrong in the world that it is hard for scary movies to do their job for me.  Now if I were to watch the news, I would be in tears and most likely have nightmares from that.  I miss the innocence of my childhood when I found the news boring and scary movies – scary!