October brings with it more than an inspiring array of colors beneath a brilliant sky; more than cooler temperatures and shorter days. It brings with it the desire to instill fear with stories of the unknown, the bizarre and the downright creepy. Classic Horror movies are all over the television, haunted houses are around every corner and haunted corn mazes (i can’t even imaging partaking in such a thing) are in darkened, remote fields here and about. I’ve seen snippets of horror movies down through the years because I happened to walk through the same room they were playing. Just hearing the music associated with Michael Myers or Jason makes my skin crawl.
Along the same vein, though somewhat more benign, are ghost stories. I hate them. I especially hate it them when they are proceeded with the information that the events in the story are not fiction. There is some kind of anomaly in my brain that inhibits me from disassociating reality from fantasy when it comes to things that paralyze me with fear. Funnily enough, when people learn this about me, the first thing they want to do is tell me a “true” ghost story. What? I didn’t make my point when I put my fingers in my ears and started singing “la la la” to drown out the words?
Reading Horror doesn’t present as much of a problem unless, of course, it has in bold letters “based on a true story”. I don’t even give those a passing glance. When reading the words, my mind can build the image of the story to fit within the limits that keep me (mostly) within my comfort zone; watching the images in a movie puts someone else’s imagination in my head, rendering my own thought control powerless. It’s not that I don’t realize that the fear I have is irrational, I just can’t seem to control it. It is at this point that I usually start to sing Matchbox Twenty’s “Unwell” because it doesn’t make any sense to me either.
I guess it comes down to one simple truth; I don’t like scary stuff because it scares me.
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