I’m not a believer in ‘The Other Realm’, which makes me the absolute worst person to bring to horror films about ghosts and demons. The Conjuring, Paranormal Activity, The Babadook – none of them got under my skin.
However, much like having a metre-long penis, being unafraid of these horror films is not a part of me I brag about. Sure, it may seem über masculine on the surface, but trying to get any enjoyment from it is highly impractical.
Even as a gullible kid, I found it difficult to really become convinced of an on-screen threat I didn’t hold an ounce of belief in. Finding out Santa and the tooth fairy weren’t real paved the rest of my existence with pessimistic scepticism.
You know what movie monsters DO scare me? Psychos with knives. Now that’s a threat I can believe in.
I must have been eight or nine years old when I first saw Scream on VHS with my older brother and cousins. At the time, I had no idea it was a meta-parody (or what a ‘meta-parody’ was). But what I DID know is that I really didn’t want to get stabbed.
I was probably way too young to see that film. In saying that, the only long-term effect it seems to have had on me was an irrational (or perhaps rational) aversion to being stabbed with a knife. As a 26-year-old human who is currently stab-less, I think that fear has served me pretty well, and I have come to understand that there really aren’t that many stabby psychos where I live. But as an eight-or-nine-year-old stab-less child, my imagination had no subtlety or rationale.
Instead of being afraid of a monster under my bed, I was afraid of an angst-y teenage asshole in a Ghostface mask bursting through my front door with a butcher’s blade.
This specific fear was tapped into again with I Know What You Did Last Summer. No, that movie doesn’t hold up in the eyes of 26-year-old Liam with no stab wounds. However, child Liam with no stab wounds saw it as another terrifying psycho-with-a-knife film. But instead of a knife, the psycho had a meat hook. And I did not want to be on the other end of that human fishing line.
My mind went crazy with the idea of being murderered (that’s how I said it as a kid) with a knife, but it’s a pretty limited murderering weapon. You could stab and slice, but that’s basically it. A hook, however, could do far more. It could drag, it could rip, it could raise a cadaver up off the ground, and it could make the most horrifying scratching sound when you put it to a solid surface.
That very sound made me wonder what else a meat hook was capable of…
Why did I continue to watch horrors about psychos with sharp objects? They clearly terrified me, and yet, it seemed to be the only type of horror that was able to horrify me. There’s an undeniable thrill in it; being exposed to your own brand on adrenaline-filled dread for the very first time has the strangest, most unique allure. In a way, I feel that first exposure to a-dread-aline plays a significant role in how one develops their taste and enjoyment in horror later on.
It would certainly explain my horror-watching habits in my teenage years. By that stage, I knew it was all fun and games.
