REELING IN THE YEARS:

CHAPTER THREE EXCERPTS

THE HORROR, THE HORROR!

My partner Drew has been afraid of spiders since he was a little kid. One day at school, the story goes, he stumbled upon a Weekly Reader story about a woman who paid the ultimate price for never washing her hair. A family of spiders took refuge in her dirty doo, and ate her brains in return for free lodging.
Drew freaked out. Like an obsessive-compulsive who can’t go to sleep at night without checking the stove burners five times, he washed his hair several times a day. At bedtime he fashioned turbans out of blankets to ward off eight-legged scalp-hunters.
His mother, Bonnie, must have thought he was some beauty school refugee when she kissed him goodnight. She removed the blanket from his head, only to come back in the morning to find that he had reoutfitted his skull during the night.
Drew couldn’t deal with spiders, and he still turns into a scream queen if he sees one on the kitchen counter or, even worse, on the ceiling above our bed. For other kids, fear comes in the shape of a flesh-eating monster who just might come out of the closet for a midnight snack. But most of my childhood fears came from watching horror movies that I was way too young to be seeing in the first place.
I did have some defenses against these movies, mind you. I got so scared during a commercial for Jaws that I ran to the living room, where joined my family for a viewing of Animal House. So I liked to think that I knew my limits, that I was smart enough to flee when confronted with the stuff of nightmares.
This little theory first failed me during a TV broadcast of The Shining one night with my mother and my sister. Why my mother was letting us check into the Overlook Hotel is beyond me, but there I was, glued to the set. I was so petrified that I couldn’t even move when the blood poured out of the elevator, or when the ax-wielding Jack Nicholson character chased his son, Danny, into a snowy hedge maze.
On Friday nights ABC showed horror movies. I was only in second or third grade, but I stayed up and watched them. My parents never gave outright permission, but I’d sneak in to watch them with my sister and her sleepover pals.
The Shining was harrowing for me. Apart from the obvious things - like Jack Nicholson running around with an ax, or the deluge of blood cascading from elevators- nothing frightened me more than the twins. By “twins” I mean the two young girls dressed identically with bows in their hair. They first appear to Danny early on when he’s throwing darts in the recreation room at the hotel. He turns around and they’re standing there holding hands. It’s such an eerie image because their skin is pasty white. They look like they’ve been dug out of a Victorian wax museum. Their expressions are sour, with no hint of glee or childhood joy.
I hoped that this would be the last time I’d see them, but lo and behold Danny comes across these girls in the hallway. One time they toss him a ball, other times they just stand there and utter the dreaded words “Come play with us Danny. Forever, and ever, and ever.” Their voices are eerily harmonious, accentuated by the music. They’re very still, almost as if they’re dead and being held upright. Danny attempts to cover his eyes so he won’t have to see the girls, especially when he saw bloody carnage visions of the girls after they’d been axed to death by their father, who went crazy.
The girls are in pieces, in puddles of blood on the hallway floor. I could never shake this image. The movie itself teemed with horrible images, particularly Jack Nicholson chasing after Danny with an ax and trying to kill him in the hedge maze. These things disturbed me, but no where near as much as these girls. They had the power to appear wherever, whenever. There’s no way to determine when they’ll “arrive.” At the time I had the fear that these girls would appear to me when I least expected it. If they did, it would obviously be a bad sign – a signal of my impending death or something.
There was an event from my early childhood that instilled a lot of fear in me. It was an indicator that I spooked easily. I lived in my first house till I was five. When I was about five there was a kidnapping in my community. The police advised parents to advise their kids not to go with strangers or to walk alone. My father matter of factly broke the news to me one morning over breakfast. He told me not to trust or join anyone I didn’t know.
This little newsflash had major consequences for me. It clung to me till I was 13 or 14. When I was in bed at night I imagined someone would put a ladder up to the house and climb up to my bedroom window. They’d whisk me away. So no matter how careful I was in my day to day life, no matter how many times I avoided dark alleyways or walking in the woods alone, I could still be fetched by a kidnapper. Beyond being stolen I’m not sure if I was scared of anything else. I didn’t imagine myself being tortured. Just the concept of being “taken away” really frightened me. I sensed that I would never come back home if I were taken away. I wouldn’t necessarily die, but I’d never return to life as I knew it.

I’m going to shift to a TV movie called Don’t Go to Sleep. There was a link to this movie and my fear of being abducted from my own bedroom when I was supposedly safely sleeping. Nighttime became a time to stay awake for fear that something awful could happen at any second.
Regularly my sister’s friends slept over on weekend nights. At the time I was in second or third grade, so my sister was in middle school. She’d invite friends from her sports teams, or friends from the neighborhood. On one night she had Betsy Andersen over. She was a loud, tall athletic girl known for being boisterous and for consuming vast amounts of candy from the neighborhood Cumberland Farms.
Her parents let her see R-rated movies, something my sister and I didn’t have access to yet. We were limited to PG movies. Betsy lorded it above us that she’d seen Stripes. She was a firsthand witness to the naughtiness. Patty and I had seen movies like Animal House on TV, but those were edited and it would be awhile before we’d actually see the original version complete with boobs and glimpses of supple male asses in the fraternity house.
Betsy came over. My folks went to bed fairly early, and I was supposed to go to bed too. Once my parents went to bed all bets were off. And Patty and Betsy didn’t particularly care if I got scared to death.
I was in my pajamas. The movie du jour was Don’t Go To Sleep. It was a TV movie with Valerie Harper of Rhoda fame and Dennis Weaver and Ruth Gordon. I hadn’t seen Harold and Maude or Rosemary’s Baby yet, so I didn’t know that with Ruth I was in the presence of a goddess.
I remember being let out from school that day, and I really looked forward to the movie. Most of my friends said they wouldn’t be allowed to watch it. So I felt like bragging because I’d be watching a program that was off limits to everyone else. To my parents’ credit, I’d watched quite a few spooky movies that hadn’t done a number on me. I don’t think there was any reason for them to suspect that this particular movie would demolish me. And I was so stubborn and proud that I didn’t talk about my anxieties after I had seen the movie.

Don’t Go To Sleep is a spectacle of schlock about a family that suffers big time in the wake of a terrible tragedy. They lose their teenage daughter in a car accident, and we don’t find out the details of the accident till later.
They key event that we learn about at some point in this movie is that the family went on a road trip. The two youngest kids (boy and girl) are in the backseat, sitting on either side of their older sister. As a prank they tie up her shoelaces and tie her shoes together so she’s immobile. Everyone else vacates the car after the car crashes and starts burning. When the car explodes, the girl’s still in the car.
Ruth Gordon plays the grandmother who lives with the family. The dead girl comes back as a ghost starts killing off each member of her family. She wastes her father with an electrical device in the bathtub, and throws her brother off the roof so his head splits open like a Hermiston watermelon on the Fourth of July.
One member of the family, the younger sister, becomes something of a confidante to the ghost. She has a nice big bed and discovers that Ghosty lives underneath the bed, coming out for periodic visits to haunt her. The whole movie freaked me way out, but it wasn’t until the very end that I realized that I was truly traumatized.
After she kills the father, she goes after Valerie. The chase involves a pizza cutter and, of course, a car that won’t start for Valerie. But she eventually gets out. All of this happens. And at the very end most of the family members are dead. Valerie has experienced this major trauma but she goes home and gets in bed. In the very last scene of the movie she discovers that the murderess daughter ghost is in the room with her. There’s NOTHING this family can do to make amends for the tragedy. The ghosty girl looks pleased as punch.
There were some moments that were so scary that I had to leave the room. Betsy stayed in the room and watched all of this with no difficulty. I’d duck out to avoid the really scary scenes, and my sister joined me. All of this avoidance was useless because I still saw the final scene, which scared me more than everything else combined.
I didn’t have to mull over this movie for it to become scary for me. It immediately scared the hell out of me. I went up to my bedroom, wishing I could go sleep in my parent’s bed instead. Patty and Betsy slept downstairs, so I would be alone at my end of the hallway upstairs, except for the ghost who I was convinced now lived underneath my bed. I got into bed, wide awake with fear. I thought something would grab my foot or that I’d see a presence at the bottom of the bed. If I saw that I thought I’d just die right on the spot. I specifically pictured the bitch from the movie. It would be like being so scared that my hair would turn white, except I’d be too dead to notice.
I started to carry my fears into the daylight hours. If I were the last person to leave the house in the morning I’d hear chilling noises and leave the house extra early to escape a confrontation with someone or something from beyond. If I was home alone in the afternoon or evening, I’d watch TV and place a steak knife next to me on the couch.