Halloween

Do you have your Halloween costume yet?

True, the month just started but I tend to start thinking about Halloween by Mid-September. It and Christmas battle for the title of favorite holiday. I don’t have a specific reason why I enjoy Halloween so much. I don’t have that one childhood memory that drives so much of my adult enjoyment. It’s just fun. Happy kids, bad monster movies, and otherwise conservative ladies dressing up like cheerleaders equals fun. I enjoy the holiday so much that I plan to write about it all month long. (Of course I also planned to update this sucker on a weekly basis so we’ll see how this goes.)

To start things off I have another question for you. What’s the scariest movie you’ve ever seen? Note that I didn’t say favorite. I’m talking about the movie that kept you up at night out of fear that your soul was in danger. The movie that you can’t watch again unless you’re with a group of people. That one.

Now if you ask my sister to answer this question about me she’d laugh and say Ghostbusters 2. What? That one didn’t make your list?
When I was a pre-teen the family and I went to see this flick. You know the scene where the Ghostbusters are in that dark tunnel and a bunch of ghoulish faces pop up? Well that had me closing my eyes and turning away. Which, to my everlasting shame, my sister witnessed. She reminds me of my cowardice as often as she can and rightly so. What can I say? Disfigured faces scare the shit out of me. I can watch vampires and blood shed without flinching but show me a nose falling off and I’ll freak. Which brings me to the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.

Have you seen The Ring?

Now, I’m not much for modern horror flicks. The type of “scary” movies I enjoy usually have names like Roger Corman, Vincent Price, and Godzilla in the credits. But shortly after graduating college I was working a crappy second shift job. I’d get home around Midnight and be way to wound up to sleep. For some reason there was a copy of The Ring in the DVD player so I fired it up. I figured there’d be some Jason style psycho and some teens that I could yell at for being stupid. I’ve been know to yell things like “Kick him in the face!” or “Stop falling down you moron!” at these sort of flicks.

So I started watching The Ring.

Alone.

At Midnight.

(Spoiler alert on people)

I should have stopped the flick after the first ten minutes. When they found the dead girl in the closet with the screwed up face. Instead I got drawn into the story. The videotape, the phone calls, the girl in the well. All creepy and all captivating. I was pretty freaked out as the movie was coming to its close but I was ok. They solved the mystery of murdered girl and I was already thinking about turning in. But then…

THE BITCH CRAWLED OUT OF THE TV!!!!

There’s no defense for that, people! You can’t stab a magical dead girl! Can’t set a trap and run out of the house. Plus the TV was my friend, my comfort on bad days. How could it betray me like this? Bitch crawled out of the TV and I recoiled in my chair.

Two hours latter I was still wide awake. I had tried to sleep but the fact that I had a television at the foot of my bed wasn’t helping matters. If the phone had rang I would have wet the bed.

I haven’t seen the movie since and I have no desire to.

--Schoonaert.