By Quin
I must admit, when it was decided that we would be doing a series of special features dedicated to our own childhood terrors, I felt a bit perplexed and the anxiety came flooding in. Not because I didn’t want to revisit all of the things that scared me as a kid. I’m perfectly fine with delving into my dark side and looking around; I also don’t mind sharing personal stories. The thing that made me nervous was the fact that I have included stories about my introduction to horror in almost every retrospective I’ve done here at Brutal As Hell. I talked about how I lost sleep after watching Pet Sematary because every time I closed my eyes I saw Zelda. I mentioned that I saw An American Werewolf in London at a very young age, thanks to a clueless babysitter. I talked about how important seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street was for me – in fact it felt like a rite of passage. It’s pretty clear to me that personal stories are my angle. It’s my main goal as a critic to explain the best I can, what my experience is like with any given film, and I guess giving some personal history helps all of that happen. Later this year, I’ll be writing a 40 year retrospective on Jaws. I’ve never even been in the ocean and I’ve always lived within walking distance of it. But, Jaws freaked me out probably more than anything else I’ve ever seen. I’ll tell you why this summer.
So, hopefully you can see my dilemma. I’ve already written this essay and I don’t think I should repeat myself too much. There are other films I could talk about. I remember being scared to death of the 1983 Disney film Something Wicked This Way Comes based on the Ray Bradbury book. This one’s kind of strange, but I was also frightened of the 1976 version of The Blue Bird directed by George Cukor. I think that was the first thing that scared me, but I watched it anyway. My family had a VHS copy of it and I watched it way too many times. I saw it again recently and I can’t figure out why I was so scared or why I was so drawn to it as a kid.
In all of my anxiety over what to write, I almost didn’t write anything. The voice in my head told me to just sit this one out – no one will notice anyway – and then a few days ago something amazing happened. My nephew who is 3 walked up to me, looked right at me and said, “Quin, do you like horror movies?” Holy crap, was my mind blown. It was exactly the last thing I expected to ever hear out of that kid’s mouth. My eyes widened and I felt sort of dizzy. I smiled and said, “Yeah!” I said it the way you might when someone you haven’t seen in ten years asks, “Hey are you, so-and-so?” Like I said, he’s 3, so that was about the extent of the conversation. But my eyes immediately shifted to his mother – my sister. She was grinning just like she did when we were kids. It was that I know something you don’t know grin. I’ve seen that grin a lot. She told me that for about the past month, there has been a billboard by their house advertising The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death. She said that my nephew looks right at it every day and seems drawn to it, but she thinks it also makes him a little uncomfortable too. She’s a great parent, so they’ve had conversations about it and apparently this is where she told him to ask me about it. Am I glad that he did. Even knowing how his question came about, I’m still amazed and more than a little touched.
So there you have it – my contribution to the childhood terrors series. As much as I enjoyed the first Woman in Black film, I had no intention of seeing the sequel. But now I feel like I have to. I’m still going to wait until I can rent it from Netflix. I mean, I’m not paying to see that. But I think it’s unavoidable – that film is always going to be important because it’s the first time I ever heard my nephew talk about horror. It certainly made my fricken millennium. I’ll let you know when he sees his first scary movie, but I won’t be the one to show it to him.