Notes from the Void: Life, Death, Nightmares and Haley’s Comet, Part 1: or How Horror Movies Saved My Sanity

  I wrote a brief piece a few years ago about my love for horror. I wanted to flesh it out a little more. I started writing it, but then wasn’t sure how to end it. The last couple years have taken so much from us, and the hits seem to keep coming. I wanted to discuss that, too, but I didn’t want it to be depressing. Like anthropologists note—people act differently if they are being watched…and when one is writing with the hopes of being read, well, let’s just say that I started considering whether my audience would like what I was writing. So I put this aside for a few weeks. But now I’m putting it out there. This is about me and where my fixation from horror came from. Part two will be about a couple friends I lost recently. And if you look carefully, you will also see my struggle with the “double space”.

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It’s strange, isn’t it? How we go through life every day, just carrying on in spite of the losses hurled at us over the years. Pain subsides, or just numbs, allowing us to function. We persevere. Generally we aren’t so overcome by grief that we cannot go on.

It isn’t like we have a choice. We have to adapt or we too will not survive. Although even that reminds me of a line from the original Blade Runner: “Too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?”

The first person I ever knew that died was my octogenarian next door neighbor. I was only six and I don’t remember much about him. Apparently he worked with Calvin Coolidge in his law office. He was town lawyer in my home town for a while as well. I think he was born in 1897. I only knew him as a very old man who was always sitting in his chair with a newspaper.  I cried when I found out he had died. I didn’t really know what death was, just that we wouldn’t see him again. But my mom said that as long as you remember someone, they are never truly dead, so I was able to move on from the event. but I didn’t stop thinking about it.  

Trying to wrap my six year old brain around the concept of death was not easy. Is it ever, really? What do we really know about death, or what comes after? My child self could only relate it to things she already knew about—which really is all we do when we are older—relate it to things we already know about—but we have more experiences to pull from to try to formulate some kind of understanding. As a six year old, I wondered if death was like nap time where you had to lay down on those blue mats because it was your time to be still.  Did you just have to lay down for all eternity because your time was done? I remember asking my parents if you dreamed when you were dead. I’ve always been inquisitive. Acquisitive as well, but that is a conversation for a different day.

That is where my questions on death ended—at least for the time being. About two years later, though, things were different. By that time, a best friend of mine had died. I can still see her in my mind’s eye, although I can’t for the life of me remember her last name. She was visiting her father’s family for the weekend and there was a fire. From what I remember, she was the only one who did not make it out of the house. I was told by my parents that she had decided to live with her father’s family, and that she wouldn’t be back. The kids at school told me a different story. She was a year ahead of me in school, so it was older kids in her class that approached me on the playground: “Aren’t you happy she’s dead?”  Kids can be cruel.  When I confronted my mother about the lie, she said she didn’t know how to tell me.  I guess I can understand that.  How do you tell an eight year old child that her nine year old friend is dead? Maybe she thought that because this girl was not in my class at school that I wouldn’t hear about it.

And then there was Haley’s Comet. Haley’s Comet is one of those outer space phenomena that have been tracked for centuries. It comes through our solar system approximately every 75 years. This means that it is possible for a human being to be alive for two trips.  Being 9 at the time of its original passing through our solar system starting in 1985 meant that it is theoretically possible that I could be around to see Haley’s comet come back the next time it comes through around 2060.  (Aaahhh, how time trudges on. I recently rewatched the episode of the X-Files entitled “Squeeze” where Mulder and Scully mention that if they don’t get Tooms now, they won’t have another chance for 30 years, in 2023…which is next year…) 

But having this thought also sparked another one—that even though I had a chance of still being alive in 2060 my parents probably did not. And that is when I felt the full Press-Your-Luck Whammy punch—not only the idea of death, but also the vastness of eternity as well. I felt like I was falling off the face of the earth, falling faster and faster into a void that had no bottom and just continued on and on and on. I guess the closest way I can describe it as what the Total Perspective Vortex in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was supposed to do—make you feel infinitely small, lost in space and time. I got a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, and an image in my mind’s eye and feeling of falling and falling and falling.  I started gasping for breath. Now this didn’t just happen once. It would happen when I started thinking about death and eternity. This is when I developed very strong fear of dying.  

But who doesn’t, right? Dorothy Parker said once “I know this will come as a shock to you…but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.” So what makes me special that I have the luxury of allowing myself to break down over it? And yes, this is the internal conversation I was having with myself at about 9 years old. I think I have pretty much always been a cynical 30+ woman…

And of course being Gen X means that my life wasn’t exactly fecund with people I could talk to about this kind of thing and yeah, no way therapy.  “Don’t think about it” is what I was told. How do you not think about it? How do you shut off your mind from thinking about something? What I did was throw up a brick wall.  In my head—you know like in The Emperor’s New Groove when Kronk says about Isma “There’s a wall there”.  Anyone who says that about me is 100% correct.  There is a wall.  I literally would picture a brick wall, build one in my mind’s eye and dam up the thoughts like what was done to Fortunado in “The Cask of Amontillado”. And every time I had to throw up that wall, I was afraid that time it wouldn’t work.  That at some point my wall would fail me, spring a leak and then the wave of thoughts would attack and I would be in a fetal position in the corner drooling, catatonic.

So naturally I started practicing some heavy avoidance. The less I have to throw up that brick wall, the less likely it is to fall down, right? But it wasn’t all death that induced panic attacks. Big ones were a movie that focused on the life and death of someone—maybe like Beaches—a movie that makes you cry because it’s so sad and traumatic?  Not cathartic. Not. At. All.  

Another might be a location. Because I only lived one mile from the library, we used to walk there for books for the summer reading program.  But the walk took us past an old cemetery.  You know the kind—with the old limestone markers, people who passed back in maybe 1784.  I would try to walk past without looking into the cemetery.  Because wow, look, that guy who was only 34 when he died, has been dead for over 200 years!  But you know, he’s only just begun being dead.  He’s got an infinite time to go…

So a big NO on horror movies, right?  The only one I remembered as a child (seven to be exact) was Poltergeist, and that meat full of maggots on the counter is a big reason why I am not particularly a huge fan of steak. Horror movies were on my no fly list. Not that I explained any of this to anyone. One day (in 1995 I believe) one of my best friends wanted to go see a movie and a couple people were going to be meeting us there.  She was quite ingenious with getting me to go out on a blind date as a double date without me realizing that is what it was (I’m looking at you, Bonnie).  I probably wouldn’t have gone if I had known the full situation. I’ve always hated being set up. But anyway, the guys wanted to see the new Halloween movie and, clearly, I did not. How do you tell people that no, you’re not afraid of horror movies, you’re afraid of winding up in a fetal position in a corner drooling and catatonic?  Anyway, the guys told me I wouldn’t think the movie was scary, probably just laughable.

And you know what? They were right. The special effects weren’t all that impressive, the plot had holes big enough to drive a Mac truck through, and the biggest part? I wasn’t triggered at all. No brick walls needed. I was shocked—and it totally changed the way I approached horror. I found myself instead fixated with horror. They became a game of “can you?” Can you make it through the movie without needing to put up the brick wall, without that weird Outer Limits or Twilight Zone intro fall into darkness feeling? The more horror I watched, the more I had to try. And then the first Scream came out. 

That I was just becoming a connoisseur of horror when Scream came out was fortuitous. Scream is one of my favorite franchises of all time. I love finding out snippets of trivia on the franchise—like the struggle Craven had with not having the original Scream rated NC-17. The whole series is very well done, and even though he has passed, I do love what they did with the fifth one. But, unpopular opinion, the second one may be my favorite Scream movie. I say that and then instantly remember scenes in all of the other four Scream movies that make me start to rethink it—but I will stick with Scream 2 and I have a great reason—pertinent here—for this decision.

In the second one there is one scene where Sydney has decided she needed to quit the play they were producing (I think about two days before opening—the director/producer side of me is cringing), Cassandra. The director talks her out of quitting by going into an accounting of art and using our pain in that framework. “Cassandra saw it all coming…it was her destiny and she embraced it. None of us can avoid our fate, but as an artist, we can face it—and fight it.” (Sydney: “You’re good.”  Director: I don’t have an understudy—I’m desperate”).

And that is when I finally understood it—why horror movies resonated with me. They are a way for us to face the inevitable. The gratuitous nature of the death is an attempt to desensitize ourselves to our fate. Horror movies also provide us with rules—the rules to help us survive a horror movie are actually ways that provide for greater longevity in life. In Scream, Randy calls it the “sin factor”, but really it is more than that (or maybe not—doesn’t it make sense that early religion made “sins” of things that put our bodies in danger? Parents have been doing that since the dawning of time. Don’t drive too fast—not because I am denying you the exhilaration of driving fast, but because you drive fast, you lose control and you wrap yourself around a tree and die). In horror movies, the people who party, drink, have sex, are usually killed. But if you take this back into its most basic form, in the short term, alcohol weakens your reasoning making you do things like drink and drive that can kill you, and others, in an accident. Also alcohol poisoning—in the long term, alcohol can lead to cirrhosis of the liver and many other health problems. Drugs can lead to overdoses, health problems. Sex, too can lead to sexual diseases, unwanted pregnancies, etc. Staying “pure” keeps you from a slew of ways that can mean you “check out” early.  In horror movies, usually some personification of death goes around killing these people, and “death” can only be defeated by the young—Because the only way we defeat death is through creating more of us.

But starting to see horror movies in this way helped me to realize that I was most likely not the only person on the earth with a crippling fear of death. Maybe horror movies are a way people work through their issues. I read once where Wes Craven had nightmares, and on top of the fact that pretty much there is a dream/nightmare sequence in most movies even associated with him, Freddy Krueger is his brainchild. There are discussions in the most recent Scream about smart horror, and I can see the draw in the psychological thrillers, but all horror looks for what Stephen King has called the “fear bone” and has a story to tell. And of all the horror series, the one I want to do a story with is Nightmare on Elm Street, so now that I’ve sent that energy out there, let’s see what Freddy conjures up…