Welcome to Scare the Children Theatre

I loved horror movies as a kid. Loved 'em. When I was a kid and we lived in the dorms at Mississippi State, every summer Friday night I'd walk down the hall to the communal TV and catch "Friday Night Frights." I'd spend my Scholastic book ordering money on monster books, so I knew all the monster's backstories.

Consequently, while I was scared of a lot of things in life (little yappy dogs, teenagers, lightning, etc.), horror movies didn't really scare me too much, mostly because I knew that they were made up, and that the chances of me running into a vampire or Frankenstein in Starkeville, Mississippi were pretty rare. My parents did take some archaeology classes, though, which freaked me out; everyone knows archaeology is all full of vengeful mummies and curses that can turn your kid into an orphan.

However, there were a few movies/TV shows that scared the crap out of me.

Sesame Street
The Count always sort of freaked me out. No, not because he was a little plush Bela Lugosi, but the fact that he had to count everything really rubbed me the wrong way. "Why? I know he's a Dracula, and they do weird stuff, but why can't he just stop counting?"

The Swarm
Saw this when I was about 8 with a friend in the theater. It's about killer bees coming up from Mexico and biting the hell out of people. The thing that really got me is the shot of a schoolyard (I think, I haven't watched it in years) where they show a dead little kid's hand clutching one of those big lollipops while bees walked over the sweet, sweet candy. That night my friend and I lost a lot of sleep due to the air conditioner's bee-like buzzing. I think we might have sealed up the windows and doors with towels just as a precaution.

SSSSSSS
So in this movie, Face from "The A Team" gets turned into a snake by a mad scientist. I'm not really sure why the scientist wanted to turn people into snakes, that's just the sort of thing you do, I suppose. The most horrifying part is the rejected man/snake hybrid:


I recently re-watched this, and yeah, it's still pretty creepy. But what was even more terriying than the creepy snake-man was the fact that my friend's mom was chain smoking while we were watching the movie. My mom had drummed into me the horrors of second-hand smoke and I was sure I was slowly dying of lung cancer as I watched a man turn into a snake.

The Legend of Lizzie Borden
So I watched this when I was probably 13 or so, much too old to be scared by anything on TV. It started the woman from "Bewitched" as the parent killing Lizzie Borden, and was a made for TV movie. How bad could it be?
Well, there's all this stuff about how the dad had a funeral home in the basement and it was sort of implied there was some bad touching going on down there among the corpses. I seem to remember that Lizzie knocks out a blood tube from one of the bodies as well that goes all over the place squirting blood. Later in the movie, Lizzie strips down so she won't get blood on her clothes while hacking up her parents. "Wow! Naked Bewitched lady," I think. "Now we're talking. Ahhhh! She's chopping up her parents!" The whole arousal/fear thing overloaded my teenage brain and freaked me out for days afterwards.

Dr. Livingston, I Presume?

Say I commissioned you to create a portrait of a creepy guy. Give him a scraggly beard, greasy hair, a weirdly rumpled assortment of clothing and a knack for ignoring personal boundries. Then you'd have an idea of the guy that came up to the desk last week. He was looking for some sort of information I can't recall right now, something about middle school locations, where to buy used vans and Miley Cyrus tour dates. After a while he stops and says, "Yeah. Yeah! That's it!"

I'm used to exclamations like this from the public, so I let it slide.

"That's who you look like! Did you ever see Sex in the City? You look like that one guy," he shouts.

"No, never really watched it," I said.

"Oh you know, he was in the movie The Office, what's his name?"

"Uh...heh...sorry, don't know."

"Yeah, see, you do that same smirk! Just like that guy!"

Guy wanders off somewhere and comes back with the IMDB profile of Ron Livingston, along with a handsome head shot.

"There, see! Looks just like you!"

I don't really get it, but at least it's not John Candy or something. I've also gotten Bill Murray and that guy who played Mr. Bean before. Nope, don't see any of them.

The Sting

I decided to take Thursday off. I had some errands to run and hadn't been able to get out on the trail in a long time, and besides, I just needed a little time off. Hey, get off my back, it was a long week. Jeez, what are you, my boss?

Say, you don't suppose my boss is reading this and realizes that I didn't have extra deadly swine flu Thursday, do you?

So I must have had my mouth open when I was riding down the trail. I've been perfecting my mouthbreather Halloween costume. All of a sudden I feel a bug fly into my mouth.

"Hey," I think to myself. "That was a really big bug." The thing is all tangled up in my mouth between my lower lip and teeth and I'm trying to spit it out while trying not to veer off the road. I'm also noticing my lip feels like I got slapped, but I figure that was just the impact.

The bug doesn't want to leave my inviting mouth. After a couple spits I finally get him out of there, but not before I start feeling sort of funny. "Must have been where he hit me," I'm thinking. "I mean, right there in the inner lip, of course that's gonna sting for a while."

So I've got about 6-7 miles to go and I can feel my lip swelling up. Again, I'm thinking that it's just the impact, since we were both going pretty fast and that's a sort of sensitve area.

By the time I get off the trail my lower lip has swollen to Popeye proportions. I get home and call the doctor for an appointment and sound like a stroke victim over the phone. Never one to let a gross medical condition go to waste (maybe I can squeeze some sympathy out of it, or at least post gross pictures of it on the internet) I try to take some photos of my swollen lip but nothing comes out.

Of course by the time the doctor can finally see me most of the swelling has gone down and he can't find any stinger or anything in me. He writes me a prescription for some steroid pills and sends me out into the world, wondering why I came into his office with such a made-up story. Later on I notice that doc's steroids haven't made my arms any bigger either so I'm thinking of just buying them from that dude that hangs out at the gym from now on.

So my relaxing no work day ended up full of bee venom and doctor tedium. To make matters worse, there was a retirement party that day so I missed deviled eggs. I have learned my lesson and will never play hooky again.

Overheard in the Publix Parking Lot

"He done spent 20 dollars on fuckin' Mountain Dew in two days."

The Horrors of the Antique Store, Part Two

What better way to kick off a month of horror than with a trip to the antique store? As everyone knows, while placid on the outside, these places contain dolls that will wake up in the middle of the night to steal your soul, cursed Native American relics and artifacts that will hypnotize your family into committing unspeakable acts of horror. It was only at great personal risk to my very soul that I was able to take the following crappy phone pictures to share with you, the reading public:



Wow. that lobster/Georgia O'Keefe flower ashtray is making me feel a little funny. Is it hot in here?



I think Tricky Dick's eyes are following me.




Nothing bad can happen to us in here if we just concentrate on the beautiful, delicious ham.



RUN! JUST RUN!

Turning an Epic into a Short Subject

I've been re-watching Lord of the Rings lately. While it's as awesome as ever, the whole Gandalf summoning the birds at the end always seemed like a huge cheat, especially after I found the following early draft of the script. I don't want to say that your life will be in danger after reading this top-secret leaked script, but I have heard that Peter Jackson's people can be quite ruthless. Enjoy, but don't tell anyone where you read it.

Scene One. interior, Frodo's house
Gandalf: "Frodo, this cursed ring's power is mighty and horrible. You must destroy it. You have a choice. You can either walk for months, facing terrible monsters and going up against great odds. You will lose friends and the comforts of home, but you will also learn about friendship and have the satisfaction of doing the right thing. Or I can use my wizard stick to summon these huge eagles, we can hop on their backs, drop the ring in the lava and be back in like an hour or so. Your choice, really."

Frodo: "I think I'll take that second one. The one without the monsters."

Gandalf: "Good Choice."

Scene Two. Their task done, Gandalf and Frodo are eating magical ice cream from a constantly refilling bowl back at Frodo's house.

Frodo: "This ice cream is great. Magic is the best thing ever!"

Gandalf: "It sure is, my little friend. It sure is."

End

Scenes from the Class Struggle on the R5

You wait around a lot when you're poor.

I used to have to ride the bus home from work. It sucked. Although the schedule clearly said that a bus would arrive each half hour, it was not uncommon to wait an hour and a half for a bus if I happened to leave work late. So I'd wait there in the heat or the cold, listening to my MP3 player and trying to avoid eye contact with the other people waiting, because that would then be an invitation to talk or get stabbed.

Actually, the worst were two co-workers who shall not be named. Several times both of them would gang up on me, one on each side, talking to me while I turned my MP3 player up louder and brought my book up close enough to my face that Helen Keller could tell I wasn't listening. You'd think that they'd take the hint or realize that they could talk to each other without me standing there in the middle of their monologues like a totem pole, but they never seemed to catch on.

So after a while, the R5 might show up, and I'd get to sit down for the 30 minute ride home. Usually.

Sometimes the bus driver would stop in front of Publix, get off the still running bus and walk into the store. He'd be gone about 10 minutes while he bought his smokes and messed with my TV watching schedule.

I'd look around at the defeated bus riders. Didn't they realize that this guy just tacked another 10 minutes on to our ride? Were they just going to sit there and take it? Shouldn't we all be rising up? We were people, working people, not cattle. Was I going to have the balls to walk to the front of the bus and put it in drive? I'd get us all home in record time, and I wouldn't have to stop for my filthy habit.

Then the driver would trudge back on the bus, put it in gear and slowly drive away. My revolutionary fantasies would be put on hold. This time.