In continuing a list of traumatic things that have recently happened to me at the KAC, I am going to disclose a realization of one of my deepest fears that occurred only recently while on the elliptical.
I was a good quarter of the way into my workout, watching a bad crime drama on one of the many televisions in front of the KAC’s cardio machines. Then, as if out of nowhere, a fellow KAC patron approached the elliptical in front of me and changed the station to SyFy. Now, I’m not exactly particular about what I watch when I’m on the elliptical; I just want something that can adequately distract me from the amount of minutes left in my workout. But as the station ended its commercial break, I was faced with a sight that I know all too well: the actress Isabelle Fuhrman, aka Esther, the orphan of the 2009 horror film of the same name.
Now, in 2009, I was thirteen years old. Not an adult, but definitely not a little kid. But when I first saw a trailer for the film “Orphan”, I was so terrified that the face of Esther haunted my dreams for a few subsequent days.
I was stuck on that elliptical. I didn’t want to look down, because I would just focus on the slow-moving numbers tracking every calorie I was burning. I tried my hardest to avert my eyes from the movie, but the next thing I knew, Esther was killing a nun with a switchblade and dragging her body across a deserted highway. Yes, it sounds ridiculous taken out of context, but in that moment, I was both terrified out of my mind at that creepy little girl and grossed out by the large amount of gore on the screen.
I have never in my life seen a horror movie, and I never plan on doing so. No matter how much you tell me that films such as “Silence of the Lambs” or “The Ring” are modern classics, or that films such as “Jennifer’s Body” are so bad they’re good, I won’t watch any of them. I won’t even watch horror movie parodies like “Shawn of the Dead” or “Scary Movie”. My fear of horror movies is twofold: I hate the psychological thrill of the creepy music and scenery, but I am also extremely sensitive to gore. Just one note of the stereotypical horror movie score, or one drop of blood, and I am covering my eyes or fleeing the scene.
But this sensitivity to gore does not just extend to horror movies. In my ninth grade Latin class, we watched “Gladiator” at the end of the year. I spent most of the class period with my head bowed down, staring intently at my desk, not even willing to listen to the screams of terror that I knew were accompanying the violence on screen.
Being scared of horror movies (or gore in general) does not make me a baby or soft. Everybody has some sort of fear, and there are always people who find that fear completely benign. Though we have passed Halloween season, the long nights of the coming winter months may seem like the perfect time to pull up a scary movie on Netflix. If you do, just don’t plan on inviting me.
Image courtesy of fanpop.com