I’ve never been a horror fan and actually have some nightmarish memories from growing up. My brother was into them way before he should have been, and I spied on him and our cousin watching a Friday the 13th; I don’t know the number, but a guy killed another guy over a candy bar. That’s all I needed to see to send me scampering back up the stairs. When our aunt would babysit, her son, who was much older than us, would watch horror movies, anthologies, and shows while we were there. He thought it was quite funny to scare the bejesus out of us. My brother, as an adult, conveniently forgot that Child’s Play scared him so badly when he was little that his My Buddy doll kept winding up in my closet (my safety be damned). If I remember the story correctly, our cousin told Bub that My Buddy would come to life at night like Chucky. This cousin was kind of a jerk when he was younger.

One anthology I remember seeing at my aunt’s had a story about a ventriloquist dummy chasing a woman with a knife. When she ran into a room and closed the door, the dummy slid the knife under the door or stabbed through it (I can’t remember which as I was very young). I absolutely hated using the bathroom at church because of this episode. The church bathrooms were in the basement past the kitchen and were a bit secluded. Every time I had to go down there, I used the bathroom with both feet on the toilet seat so a dummy couldn’t cut my feet or legs. This lasted for years until they finally added a bathroom upstairs for the elderly and disabled. I also watched Arachnophobia and The Birds, probably at my aunt’s or dad’s, and have had a lifelong, paralyzing fear of spiders and birds.

Well, the bird thing could also be due to the fact that birds would somehow wiggle through some pipe in the back of the stove and get stuck in the kitchen, usually when I was home alone. They would panic, I would panic. I would call Mom at work and scream and cry to her each time. She was home one time and we used a mop, a broom, and a sheet to get the bird to leave. Just not fun. I would love to have a bird, like an African Grey or something, as long as it never flew at me.

I was in Pigeon Forge for a week with my aunt a few years ago. A bird made itself at home in the Me Tarzan, You Jane cabin, which has a huuuuge fake tree going from the main floor to the second floor. Not gonna lie, it’s super cool. I discovered the bird when I was on the second floor working right by the tree, and went nuts. Mom would have known how I would react and I would have run to her, but she was no longer here.

I enjoyed a lot of the same types of movies Mom liked, and she did well keeping me away from adult movies growing up (Bub, not so much). Considering fart, crap, and heck were curse words in our house, one can imagine what I wasn’t allowed to see until I was older. I remember that I couldn’t watch Scent of a Woman, Rudy, and Jerry MacGuire, the last of which I can’t remember if it was because of the content or because I was grounded at the time. She softened as she got older — after we moved, if that had anything to do with it — and watched some horrorish movies, but she wasn’t a fan of gore. I liked talking to her about movies I think she would like. When I was OTR (over the road) with my ex, we had a TV in the truck and could get cable at the truck stops. Mom and I would talk movies and music and shows. She absolutely refused to watch Harry Potter movies because they dealt with magic, but she watched several episodes of Charmed with me over the years, so I don’t know what that was all about. We talked about American Idol when I was able to watch it.

Since Mom died, I watch only horror movies and shows, and Disney movies. I bought the Pitch Perfect movies because they were on sale but I haven’t been able to watch them without her since Mom and I loved dancing and singing movies. She wanted to see that playbook movie with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, too, so I bought it but haven’t watched it. I made the huge mistake of watching The Fault in Our Stars a few months after her death and Willem Dafoe’s character infuriated me and I bawled through most of the movie. I hadn’t read the book. Likewise, I watched A Monster Calls without knowing anything about it except it sounded scary and had Liam Neeson in it. I cried so hard, Adam could hear me from the next room. I read the book after finding out there was a book and it had the same impact. The last story in that movie resonated with me so much that I got a tattoo inspired by it. I got three or four tattoos for Mom, which she would totally give me her License Look over. My multiple tattoos might be a post topic someday.

The odd thing is, nothing scares me anymore, movie, show, or book-wise. My worst fear has come true and that is scarier than anything people can come up with. I bought all the Friday the 13th movies for $20(!) in honor of my brother but haven’t made it through them. I missed the boat on the ’80s and ’90s cheesy, campy horror craze. I can’t tolerate A Nightmare on Elm Street, either, although I am a big Robert Englund fan. Halloween bores me to tears (I like Rob Zombie’s adaptation), as does The Shining (never cared for the book). The original Evil Dead was just a disappointment. To many horror buffs’ dismay, I like the Friday the 13th remake as well as the A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot. I loved the Evil Dead remake and liked the new sequel all right. I’m not into “elevated” horror, but totally not into the terrible “classics,” either. Sleepaway Camp might have been okay if not for the terrible quality of the reveal. Um, I don’t know if I like any old horror movies. Never liked Psycho. Not a Hitchcock fan at all, except for Strangers on a Train and Rope (is the latter even Hitchcock?). Well, as far as classics, I do like Jaws, The Exorcist, Carrie, Killer Klowns From Outer Space, Strait-jacket, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the last of which I watched with Mom.

Speaking of, the reason I watch only scary movies and Disney now is that I’ve seen the Disney movies enough to not want to talk to Mom about them, except the new ones, of course, and since she wasn’t a horror fan, I don’t want to tell her about them/she wouldn’t want to hear about them. That’s the same reason I won’t listen to Katy Perry and Rihanna anymore. My sweet, innocent, country-song-loving mother would come home singing Rude Boy and S&M a lot 🤣. I’m starting to see why my therapist diagnosed me with complex grief.