Fear, as I have been told, is the strongest of all human emotions. My personal list of things that scare me is updated often and stored safely on my laptop: “accidentally being put on the US ‘No Fly’ list,” “aneurysms,” “a power outage while taking a shower” and “people with limited to no teeth” are some of the more memorable entries. Gory scenes, both real and computer-generated, affect me physically. If you heard rumors of a student fainting during the heart health video in Anatomy class, the mystery is over. It was me.
It’s my last year of state-mandated education and I’m preparing to embark on some of life’s biggest adventures: college, law school and then real life. All are exhilaratingly scary, and I felt grossly unprepared to conquer those fears. The last film that had genuinely horrified me was The Polar Express. Back in second grade, I was inexplicably terrified that those poor pajama-clad children wouldn’t make it back home alive.
Horror films, then, were my last frontier. And with the help of a few brave friends and copious amounts of Sour Patch Kids gummies, I set out to screen my first horror movies.
After much deliberation, I settled on two films: The House at the End of the Street, starring the apparently multi-talented Jennifer Lawrence of Hunger Games fame, and Psycho, a well-known 1960s film headed up by the formidable Alfred Hitchcock. I figured if J-Law could make it out of the Hunger Games unscathed, I could rely on her for a lesser body count. And Psycho? Easy. Black and white cinematography makes everything seem above-board. I could handle that, no problem.
Or so I thought. Psycho’s infamous “shower scene” sent my heart pounding and drove me close to shutting the project down. But I stuck it out only to be rewarded with the final chilling moments of the film. No spoilers, but think shriveled-up raisin corpse, stabbings and taxidermy crows. Frightening Norman Bates and his mother Norma, my friends and I decided, were anything but normal.
The House at the End of the Street (2012) is classified as a “thriller” instead of “horror.” But I was more horrified than thrilled. There are a plethora of jump scares and locked doors down long, dank hallways. One scene is of darkness being intermittently broken by a weak flashlight beam, which—you guessed it—eventually illuminated the creepiest character of the film. He was wielding a knife, by the way. With that, I discovered why I had steered clear of these films during my first 17 years on earth.
Interestingly enough, the fear I experienced during movie night dissipated soon after the credits rolled. I was uncomfortably frightened at first, but the feeling of having “survived” such a spine-chilling experience was euphoric: think of a runner’s high but with more popcorn. Will I ever watch one of these films again? Quite possibly, but only with first-rate friends and food: the great mood-boosters in any intimidating situation.
The world outside my window is chock full of scares: diseases, murders, war, genocide, global warming… the list goes on. It may seem nonsensical to say that my first experience with scary films altered the way I view such problems. All I know is that now I feel just a bit more equipped to jump headlong into my unstable world and face those problems head-on. And I think Alfred Hitchcock would be proud.
– By Adrianne Cleven
You can watch a video of Adrianne’s reactions here.