For about a decade I was literally fearless in the face of fiction.
Growing up I remember being scared by the same books and movies everyone else was. Scared of ghosts. Scared of monsters. Scared of the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. In particular I remember taking out the garbage and being terrified that a bunch of horse-riding skeletons were going to come wheeling around the corner and kill me (I think I got this image from a movie preview).
Some time after entering young adulthood, my fears of anything fictional temporarily disappeared. I was scared of the usual real life things, violent crime, disease, abandonment by loved ones. But I remember specifically not being scared by books or movies. At the time I attributed this to over-analysis. That, after a college degree emphasizing the narrative arts, I spent so much effort analyzing the stories that the fear fell away. Understanding the mechanics of the fear rendered the fear ineffective. I still think that’s probably the best explanation for that short period of fearlessness.
It didn’t last. Trauma killed my fearlessness.
My sister killed herself.
There was no one moment when I realized books and movies could scare me again (it’s still difficult for a book to scare me). But I recall watching The Ring at home with my wife, maybe a year later, and being absolutely terrified (I also recall annoying her because I talked through large chunks of the movie, trying to dissipate my fears. It didn’t work.)
For several years after that I was very easily scared by movies. When we watched The Conjuring as a family, I had to leave the room because I got too scared, even as my brave tweener daughters watched the whole thing to little effect. I couldn’t finish the movie for years.
The next transition was the result of something much more mundane than a traumatic death. I grew jaded. As my two tweener daughters delved deeper and deeper into horror, I watched the movies with them, and gradually because desensitized. There was a period of several years where the Generic Scary Things in movies moved in jerky, stop-action like motions. It scared me until I grew to recognize it, then it lost its power. Same a few years later, when Generic Scary Things with distended black mouths and big black eyes became the rage. I was terrified the first few times, then not so much, once I understood the effect. A few years later, when the Generic Scary Things began making cracking noises when they moved (my wife and I call these “Cracky Girls”). It worked until it didn’t.
I don’t know what the next big fad in horror will be. I assume it will be effective for awhile, until the mechanics of the scare become too obvious.
I’m happy being able to be scared again. I’m even happy realizing that my levels of fear are not a fixed thing. There was a time where almost nothing scared me. There was a time where nearly everything scared me. I like that I’m stuck in the middle with everyone else now. I can be scared, but these days they have to earn the scare.
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Nothing new to push. It’s been a bit of a dry spell for selling stories, mostly because I stopped writing short stories to write a novel. But I’m back on the horse again.
In the meantime, I have a story I am very fond of (Clickbait) in Amazing Monster Tales #4, put out by the wonderful publishing team of DeAnna Knippling and Jamie Ferguson.