If you know anything about me, you know that I LOVE Autumn. Everything about it is a joy. The air finally gets a crisp tone, though that only happens at night here in the Sonoran desert. Getting a coffee at a cafe feels extra special when it is at least a bit cool out. And of course, the start of Autumn also means its spooky season, which I am a VERY big fan of. In fact, I am such a big fan of the horror genre, I spent last October watching at least one horror movie every day of the month. I am glad I did this once, but I never feel the need to do it again. When I tell people this, they assume that I scared the daylights out of myself to the point that I was over horror. To be honest, I was hardly scared at all! In fact the only movie that even unnerved me was Antrum. Actually, the real reason was that I just spent the whole month watching movies! I was so burned out on movies that I stopped looking forward to any of them by the end, and I think I watched maybe 2 movies in the next six months.
This post will not be a review of any of those movies or others, as much as I would love to talk about the schlocky masterpiece that is Dracula v. Frankenstein. What I really wanted to talk about today was an idea that I find interesting: there are things that can thoroughly frighten us when we are younger that no longer land when we are adults. While I can now watch the goriest, most jump-scare filled horror movies and not lose a wink of sleep, I once couldn’t sleep for hours if I even saw a commercial for one on television. I actually don’t say this to brag, and I really WISH I were easier to scare. Horror movies lose a lot of their bite when you’re hard to scare, and I tend to rate them very highly if they can put me on edge these days. Really, a part of me feels a bit sad that I can’t see a lot of them with fresh eyes and have the naive experience of feeling genuine terror at a cinematic monster.
The movie that I feel this the strongest about is actually the 1990’s TV miniseries for IT. Now this is something that I have quite the history with. I actually first remember hearing about it when I was in kindergarten. All I knew is that it was a movie about a monster that killed kids… and it was THE SCARIEST MOVIE EVER MADE. I think that people who were not growing up around this time would find it hard to believe, but that’s how the miniseries was marketed. Which truly, is genius word of mouth advertising. What kid wants to see the accessible horror movie that will ease them in? Not nearly as many as the ones that dare each other to watch THE SCARIEST MOVIE EVER MADE. By the way, in 1999-2000, ads featuring IT were everywhere. Even though the series aired on broadcast about 5 years before I was born, the home media release ensured that Tim Curry was lurking around every VHS store shelf during peak Halloween wearing the signature greasepaint.
I actually didn’t see it myself for another 4 or 5 years since I first heard about it. I remember distinctly that I saw it in bits and pieces on the SyFy channel, in day time no less. But that didn’t matter- there was now a part of my brain that told me that Pennywise was around every corner. That if I turned around, a predatory not-quite-human was liable to be looking back at me. That I should never under any circumstances have a conversation with someone in a storm drain. Oh and if I even heard anything that sounded like a horror movie on TV that’s all that I could think about when I lied in bed. And this kept up until my freshman year of undergrad, when I started a personal quest to give myself exposure therapy to the things I feared and loathed. I watched a good number of horror movies before I was ready to really enjoy them that year, but once I crossed that threshold too, I became a fan for life.
It wasn’t until years later that I actually got around to watching IT again. For all my love of horror movies, that one still held me in fear. But I took the plunge around 2021 and I could not believe how much the movie differed from the place I held it. For one, I was surprised to find it wasn’t really a movie and was originally made for TV. In fact, it was part of a run of Stephen King stories that were adapted for TV that included Salem’s Lot and the quite a bit schlockier Langoliers. But more to the point, I cannot believe I actually found this scary. I mean what a creative choice to make Pennywise sound like a longshoreman, but it was hard to take it seriously now. And is American Style Chinese food really that bad? Credit where credit is due: the gravedigging and balloon scenes are iconic and deserve praise.
But this was a poignant example of how my imagination of a horror movie reflected it as much more scary to me than it is in reality. Just recently however, I caught up with a friend at a conference that helped me see how this phenomenon translates across cultures. I had been to Singapore the previous Summer for a different conference, and I was letting her know about the details of my trip, as she had grown up there. I told her that one of my favorite places to visit was Haw Par Villa, and it was actually one of the first things I did in the country. I was really fascinated that the creators of Tiger Balm built such a lovely, if rococo, public landmark, and of course I had to see the Hell Museum, where guests are invited to ponder their mortality as they tour the layers of Hell that are believed to exist by the Buddhists of Singapore. I will actually sing the praises of the museum! Its rather fun to tour and see the statues and dioramas that are set up inside. While a few might look fearsome, the 1970s era look for the most part, well, derpy to my eyes. That was not how my friend remembered them when she was brought there by her parents in an effort to make her behave as a child. But we could only sit back and laugh as we flipped through some of the pictures I took. I found this to be a genuinely heartwarming experience.
Happy Halloween 2026!
RIP Tim Curry
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