Viewing entries tagged
The Shining

THE FEAR

THE FEAR

For someone who is such a lover of horror films and enjoys watching episodes of 48 Hours about real life murder mysteries almost on a loop and who literally has every single book written about the Manson Family and their blood-drenched killing spree back in the summer of ’69 spread across my bookshelves, I happen to have a very low tolerance for the things that really freak me out, the stuff that has managed to slip into my subconscious and has remained there, taunting me almost, for decades.

The things that terrify me?  They’re maybe not of the typical variety.  I can’t say that I enjoy clowns, but I’m not petrified of them either.  I never lie in my bed in the quiet shadows of the night and mull over the possibility that either Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees is coming to get me – and I have never been at all frightened by Chucky, because, well, he’s a doll and a redheaded doll at that, and butcher-knife-wielding or not, he is like three feet tall and he always has on the kind of ugly striped shirt worn by an unfortunate tween with bad acne.  Just last week, I finally read the book The Shining about a zillion years after it was published, and I told my mother that I was in the middle of it and I could hear her as she took a deep breath over the phone and she sounded genuinely horrified and very serious when she tried to caution me not to read it if I was alone in my house and I thought that was very cute of her, but it was also entirely unnecessary.  

JOLT

JOLT

“Do you love me?” he whispered.

It was always his whisper that got me.

Stroll back in time with me.  I’m newly seventeen and it’s late – probably eleven at night – and I know that I should go to sleep because I have school tomorrow and a Math test to take and a Psychology presentation on projection to do, but I can’t make myself utter any kinds of words that might end this conversation.  My bedroom is completely dark.  The only lights are from the periodic cars that pass down my suburban street and I can sometimes hear tires hissing through the snow that always begins to fall around the time of my birthday.