I have never been able to watch scary movies.
My mother will remind you (if she gets the chance) that I can’t even watch embarrassing television programs, which is, frankly, embarrassing. I would watch that terrible moment when Lucy was about to get caught doing something embarrassing by her employer, Mr. Mooney, on “The Lucy Show” reruns, and I would have to leave the room in a hurry—making excuses about how I suddenly needed to help set the table. The truth was, I just couldn’t stand to watch Lucy get caught.
Scary movies, of course, are much worse. If getting caught by Mr. Mooney was bad, imagine getting caught by a maniacal murderer or flocks of birds or a shark. As a result, I’ve never seen the scary movies everyone else has seen. I’ve seen photos from the movies, and I know the general plotlines, but when it comes to sitting down and watching the shark attack someone, I haven’t been able to do it. Until recently.
Recently, I’ve seen a few scary movies, and it’s not because I’ve become any braver. It’s because my husband, Peter, has started signing out DVDs from the library with what is called “optional commentary.” The movie plays but, while all the scary stuff is happening, the director—and sometimes an actor who was in the movie, or an historian or a film editor—jabbers away on top of the dialogue and the music, explaining how all the effects in the movie were made.
You might think this would be very annoying—particularly if I hadn’t seen the movie without all the jabbering beforehand. Instead, I find it enormously comforting.
I watch the movie, miss some of the dialogue (but not too much), and the scary music is covered up by cheerful folks talking about how they made it so scary. I love hearing how all those terrifying birds were enticed into flying after the children in “The Birds” (they put snacks in the children’s hair!) I am delighted to hear the mechanical shark in “Jaws” was named Bruce, purportedly after Steven Spielberg’s lawyer, and he broke down all the time and caused so much trouble that Spielberg feared that his career might be over. I even enjoyed hearing how the shower scene in “Psycho” was made and how the film, made in black and white, used chocolate syrup for the blood that circled down the drain after the murder—a murder that is never actually even seen, but seems so real with that terribly scary music playing.
I’ve been able to sit through all of this, almost like a normal person, just because I am reassured every minute that Janet Leigh was safe, no children were pecked by birds, and that terrible shark was, in fact, a very troublesome mechanical device named for a lawyer.
The whole experience makes me feel like I’m about six, and I wonder why I require so much reassurance. But I suspect I’ve always felt a little too responsible for the fate of others, even if (especially if) there is nothing I can do to change the outcome.
It’s good for me to see, in every case, it’s just ordinary people doing an extraordinarily good job of tapping into these primal fears of things that fly down from the sky and swim up from the depths and come after us when we least expect. It helps me to understand that I do the same thing in my own life, artfully fabricating fears of unlikely things, and doing an excellent job of scaring myself.
Till next time,
Carrie
