The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
It’s October, which means: there’s a crisp in the air, the days are getting shorter, and there are an abundance of horror movies to watch on tv.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not waiting for the month of October to arrive in order to partake in any horror viewings, that’s something I’ll do all year round. But when October hits, it just feels more correct, the vibes are right, how I’m feeling on the inside matches how the world feels on the outside.
As someone with pretty much lifelong anxiety, some people might question why I would love and continue to watch the horror genre, and I don’t think I can succinctly answer that. Though I can say it started young, one of the first scary movies I remember watching was Final Destination.
The early 2000s franchise was a harbinger of my movie-watching habits to come.
I was at a sleepover in elementary school with two other girls when somebody, likely the host, decided that we should watch the original Final Destination. Despite apparently being rated 18+ (which I just looked up) the parents didn’t protest our choice of entertainment.
If you’re unfamiliar with the movie, the premise is basically that a teen has a vision of dying with his friends in a plane crash (this was released pre-9/11 btw, which is maybe a bit of an eerie afterthought) so he does everything he can to outrun death and prevent his friends from dying, though death hunts them down anyway.
The scene I remember us all being most scared of goes as follows: one guy is in the bathroom about to get into the shower and there is water leaking across the floor, which he somehow doesn’t notice, he is removing clothes from a retractable clothesline when he slips, falls, and the wire releases and swings around his neck, asphyxiating him to death.
Only today did I realize that for close to two decades I thought he got strangled by a shower hose. Maybe I didn’t know it was a close line at the time? Maybe I wasn’t wearing glasses yet? Either way I was still afraid to go into the bathroom after the show was over. In fact, we all refused to go into the bathroom alone, and stayed as far away from the bathtub as possible.
Afterward the host had the bright idea that we should now pull an all-nighter. This did not make me happy, as even back then I deeply valued my sleep. But since I was still feeling the after effects of Final Destination, I couldn’t simply remove myself from the situation by finding somewhere to sleep alone. Instead, we continued to watch cartoons, the other two continued to blab away, and at one point we snuck into their parents’ room where I accidentally stepped on the cat (cause duh it was dark) and it promptly scratched my shin. Thus followed several years of being scared of cats.
Sleepovers were already typically hard for me, after a certain amount of time I think I would get peopled-out, my social battery reaching zero, and I became overstimulated. How I managed to endure this particular one without phoning home, I am not quite sure.
The next morning we were eating breakfast, and waiting to be picked up, when the father asked the host how she was feeling, “Like a million dollars, all green and wrinkled,” she replied.
Once I was finally retrieved I was desperate to finally be able to close my eyes, instead I was driven to dance class. It was there, during that hour, where I perhaps experienced my first existential crisis as I fought off becoming unconscious, thinking over-and-over again “why am I here?”.
My parents say I got sick after that, what does that mean exactly, a cold? The flu? Idk. Maybe it was a short bout of childhood burnout. I can’t remember the sickness in the week after the all-nighter. But I do remember the juvenile feelings of fear and anxiety staying with me after watching Final Destination. Maybe I learned too many new ways to die at once. Things I didn’t even know I needed to be afraid of. My fear bubble widened, and it hasn’t stopped expanding since.