I started watching horror movies when I was in elementary school. I didn't really like watching them, but I went along because my friends liked them and I wanted to be one of the dudes. I also liked proving to myself that I could stand to see them from start to finish, kind of like the exercise of sniffing the pickled herring my mom kept in the refrigerator; just to see how long I could stand the exposure before having to retreat. I've never seen a scary movie on a date. I used to be extraordinarily sensitive to horror movies, even though I forced myself to sit through them all the time. I remember staying up a whole entire night after seeing "Poltergeist 3" in the theaters. I kept hearing a scratching against my bedroom wall and I actually went outside at 3AM in total exasperation to prove to myself that it was just the wind pushing the branches of the rose bush along the side of the house and not some demon spawn trapped in the insulation.
Seeing scary movies is supposed to be a cheap gimmick to get your date to squirm and inch closer to you so you can cop a snuggle without having to risk extending yourself too much. At least according to high school lore. I don't know how much truth there is to that, but I just saw "Quarantine" and I think I'm thankful I didn't see it with a date. My early exposure to the old 80's slasher movies left me feeling like I had a decent stomach for filmic scares. "Quarantine" has convinced me that I am a quivering coward when it comes down to it.
Half way through the movie I noticed that my entire body was rigid and flexed in repulsion and anxiety. I had consumed a small plastic tub worth of cola, my veins were dilated with caffeine, my heart rate was erratic, my palms were clammy, my fingers were clenched, and my bladder was overfull. Watching the shaky camera pan around the horrifically rotted neo-gothic Hollywood apartment building, erratically unmasking shreds of darkness with the harsh on-board light, waiting for the next pale-faced zombie to shriek forwards with gnashing hunger, I legitimately thought I might piss myself.
How would you explain to your date that you had peed in your pants during a movie? Would that be a deal breaker? After the movie I went out for dinner with the friends I had survived through the zombie apocalypse with. I kept wondering if the aftertaste of tofu and Thai gravy was similar to the fleshy lure that would drive a rabid zombie to tear through an apartment complex like some kind of perverse buffet. Everyone else seemed to be in good spirits, but an hour and a half later in a brightly lit restaurant, I was still peering under the tablecloth looking for ghouls. "Doesn't it make you feel alive?" a friend asked.
I thought about that question when I came back home, thoroughly checking my closet for zombies. As a kid my favorite parts of horror movies were always the end. I quickly picked up on the fact that you could fast-forward most of the middle of the movies as they were just a bunch of repetitive killing sequences. The end, however, offered valuable information on how Freddy, Jason, or the devil itself could be defeated (just use a mirror and make it look at its own reflection!).
Since "The Blair Witch Project" decentralized the whole concept of horror films, making them tragic encounters with defeat rather than plucky journeys to vindication for the morally upright teen, it seems that there can't be any heroes left alive at the end anymore. Old horror movies used to be about survival. The new school horror movies are about failure. There is no magical algorithm at the end to undo the monster. "Quarantine," like "Cloverfield" and "Blair Witch" are about being fundamentally vulnerable and helplessly overwhelmed, all the way to the bitter end.
The closing minutes of "Quarantine" are nauseating, cruel, and pornographic. I wanted to laugh, cry, and pee my pants all at the same time. Now, just a few hours later, I'm sitting alone in my apartment with all the lights on, the blinds wide open at midnight, the closet and bathroom thoroughly inspected for signs of zombie incursion. I'm thirty-one years old and I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be awake most of the night, tossing restlessly, opening my eyes intermittently, imagining the pile of clothes in the corner is actually some salivating albino come to eat my blanket-warmed flesh.
I remember the last night I had to crawl into my parents' bed because I couldn't sleep the night through. I was eleven and had watched some preposterous movie called "Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2" at my friend's house. I tried for two hours to just fall asleep, to turn off all the cheap special effects, and belabored camera angles looping through my brain, but I couldn't do it. After a day spent cussing and watching horror movies with my friends, it was humiliating to have to admit that I was still such an infantile coward.
I look at my empty bed now and wish I weren't alone. Underneath all the achievement, money, science, history, and evolution, we are still such tiny helpless creatures. But somehow having a hand to hold makes the prospect of going down before a horde of mutated cannibals less senseless. Almost doable.
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