Scary Movies

English: A screenshot from The Mummy Italiano: Uno screensht da La mummia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At one time in my life I loved to be frightened.  Books and movies with ghosts, evil spirits, poltergeist, devils, werewolves, witches, and of course Vampires, thrilled me. My heart raced and I loved when something jumped out of a closet causing me to scream my bloody head off. Boris Karloff as the mummy, wrapped in yards of what looked like toilet paper, dragging his foot with arms extended toward his long-lost queen, was a heart thumping moment.  It never gave me cause to wonder how any creature who moved so slowly was capable of traveling miles, such great distances, and was still able to capture and abscond with his lady-love.

Fear was the ultimate thrill. Different than the thrill of roller coasters and rides that dropped you from great heights, only to catch you just a few feet above where your body was destined to meet the bone crushing floor. The fear of bodily harm is quite understandable and very real.  But this fear can be easily controlled.  Just don’t go on those adrenalin pumping rides.  If it’s not your thing, don’t do it.  You have to pay to go on the tilt a whirl, don’t pay.

One might say, it’s the same for scary movies.  Don’t watch them and that is the end of that.  Oooh but I love some of them.

Now I am older and no longer watch any thing that depicts home invasions, kidnappings, anything where one’s safety and well-being is wrested from them by cold-blooded, insane, individuals, who commit horrible acts, just because the opportunity presents itself.  Movies where a happy family goes on vacation and stumbles into a pack of unconscionable madmen and women.  (The Hills Have Eyes).  These are not an exciting, happy, few moments, but ones that fill me with cold dread that such things can happen.  Mass shootings are another dramatization I don’t want to see.  If my heart needs a kick-start with true horror I’ll just watch the news.

Give me my hair-raising entertainment in the form of Ghosts, Goblins, Witches, and of course Vampires (I love Vampires,  Not for their taste for blood, but the thought of long life and not aging.  Who needs Oil of Olay?)  Give me fantasy is the form of Dinosaurs, Dragons and Cyclops, I can close my eyes when Godzilla is chomping on my fellow humans.

But keep man’s inhumanity to man off my screen.  It’s just too scary.