The good news of last night was that the puppy, Belle, slept through the night accident and whining free in the laundry room. The bad news is that Grace woke me up at 2 am with a bad dream. She was scared and wanted to sleep with me. She settled for a quick book being read to her instead.
I asked her what her dream was about and she said it was about a bad man that if you said his name he would come and torture you. Okaaaaay. First of all I was impressed that she knew the word "torture" but a little horrified too. I don't know how she knew that word. I can't think of anytime we have ever used it. I also wonder how she came up with that scenario.
I know there has been a movie trailer on lately showing two little girls in the bathroom summoning Bloody Mary in the mirror. As far as I know she has not seen that trailer, but I hate how they show stuff like that on regular television as early as 7 pm sometimes.
As an adult, I dig horror but there's a fine line anymore as to what I will and won't watch. In high school, I watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween (most of them), Friday the 13th, Freddy Krueger (particularly scary with knife hands AND bad dreams) and most all of the regular horror fare. Children of the Corn and Pet Cemetery were really terrifying. It was fun to be scared by those movies.
Now, not so much.
Now I dig the monsters much more than the evil vengeful killers of teenagers having sex in cars in the dark. I like more run of the mill supernatural monsters; vampires, werewolves etc. I've never watched any of the Saw movies or the like and I don't even like to watch the trailers because of course they pick the most awful and gratuitous scenes to entice people.
Bryon and I watched the new show American Horror Story last week. The first episode was shocking. I was compelled and repulsed all at the same time. Bryon said he wasn't going to watch any more of it. I watched again this week and it was a little less shocking but it still crosses back and forth over the line in my mind of what I can and can not tolerate in horror. The jury is still out for next week's episode.
Bryon and I have seen every episode of the CW series Supernatural and it is pretty much the perfect scary show for me. It's scary, has lots of weird monsters but still has a campy quality to it that lightens things up. True Blood is the same way for me.
I used to read a lot of horror. I collected lots and lots of books always searching for the next scarier thing. Then one day I found Brian Lumley and Clive Barker and decided that was the line I wasn't willing to cross. It was too much. I was done with horror. I sold all of my horror library and took a long, long break from it.
This summer I got back into it a little by reading Salem's Lot. Salem's Lot reminded me of why I close the blinds at night and don't look outside ... a vampire might be floating outside of it asking to be let in. I also bought H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction so I could read The Call of Cthulhu.
The bad thing about watching or reading scary stuff is that once it's in your brain, it tends to latch on and make itself at home there. Just waiting for an opportunity to replay itself. You can't suck it back out once it's stuck like a tick in your psyche. Two movies I wish I could suck back out of my brain are 8MM and Sin City. But no, they are stuck there and occasionally replay some of the most disturbing scenes.
As far as I know Grace hasn't seen anything really scary other than Harry Potter. I suspect the kids at school must be telling her stories. That's where all of the urban legends and ghost stories start anyway right ... school and elementary sleepovers?
It's fun to be a little scared.
Just not at night. In bed. Alone.
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