The Curious Case of the Scaredy Cat
As horror looks you right between the eyes
You're paralyzed, 'Cause this is thriller, thriller night…
I recently was honored by having one of my scripts, a sitcom entitled “Leave It to Reaper,” on the Dead List, a list of 50 horror scripts the TV and film world should read. It’s a heartwarming tale about a house full of murderous ghosts and their attempts to figure out their afterlife with their found family. It’s unhinged, hilarious, and was a blast to write. Think of a 90s sitcom soaked in blood.
When I shared this accolade with my mom, she asked me, “A scaredy cat like you writing something scary?”
I mean, she wasn’t wrong.
I wasn’t always a horror fan. I was, indeed, a huge scaredy cat. I attribute this to witnessing the music video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller. as a kid. Seeing Michael Jackson, a face I knew, turning into a werewolf and chasing his girlfriend through the night was uncomfortable. Weird. TERRIFYING. Did everyone have a secret monster inside them who would transform in front of them and require you to pivot from trust to terror when you least expect it? If you couldn’t trust the Scarecrow from The Wiz, who could you trust?! Shortly after, when I was 6, I saw about five minutes of Children of the Corn before an adult noticed and turned it off. But it was too late. I saw kids slaughtering adults in a cornfield.
A singer turned werewolf and Malachi with a bloody scythe defined horror and fear for me for the next couple of decades of my life. Horror was fear that can’t be hidden; it was blood, it was pain. I avoided horror as much as I could. It felt like a trauma that I could feel but wasn’t ready to name.
Until it hit me square in the face.
I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety with rocket boosters of body dysmorphia, fear of dying alone, and aversion to failure for good measure. Like seeing the yellow eyes of Michael Jackson’s werewolf, I was hit by the realization that I didn’t know myself and the scares and shudders hiding just beneath my surface. Learning to live with mental spiciness is like ripping off your face and having to live with the pain of the open wound until you let it heal. The pain of not being able to trust the validity of my emotions and anxiety made it difficult to trust myself. Of course, therapy, supportive friends and family, and the right cocktail of meds help a whole lot. But the need to understand What Lies Beneath remains. Oh, and you still need to be healing and living a semi-normal life to not scare the people around you with your unpredictable brain.
Learning about horror was like learning about the different kinds of antidepressants. I had to figure out what kind of horror spoke to me. I found myself attracted to horror that wasn’t just about forced physical torture. I was drawn to scary stories that focused on what the pain represented - the anxiety and fear hiding in plain sight, just over your shoulder, and in your subconscious. I needed to see how the Big Scary Thing attacked and how people either defeated it or were consumed by it. I began to look forward to the jump scares and how they made me feel. I loved the monsters that represented the darkness in all of us. There’s nothing that Ghostface can do to me that my anxieties haven’t done. Jumping out of my skin felt like a strange relief and release.
So much about what we fear is compounded by the potential that others won’t see what you see or understand the ghosts you see in your mental closet are absolutely real to you. Anxiety is the realization that some things are out of your control. You become The Final Girl who sees and feels the terror before anyone else and spends the first two acts of the movie convincing people around her to see it too, even as they fall to the terror that they don’t accept. Horror started to feel like home to me, an unhinged comfort.
Writing my own horror tales has helped me explore how horror can work with my first (literary) love comedy. A creator I admire, Jordan Peele, says that horror and comedy are twins in that their use of pattern and increased tension and release force characters to confront their fear. He tells us that part of the human condition is being subconsciously in suspended animation in anticipation of what comes next. In Leave It to Reaper, I use the afterlife to explore the fear of having led a wasted life. One of my more vicious killers, Deirdre St. Chablis, died at the moment just before she became the Next Big Thing. She learns to let herself mourn what could have been, what she lost, and to enjoy what’s next, which, in this case, is stacking the most bodies in their annual Killtacular. You know, what every girl dreams about.
In some ways, I am still a scaredy cat. I still can’t listen to Thriller alone without getting the willies. I am still very uncomfortable not knowing what will happen next. But I’m learning to live in that space of suspended animation and to embrace that moment of tension, trusting that the release, the relief, and perhaps, the jump scare is around the corner. It could take me left or right, give me pleasure, or destroy me, but isn’t the anticipation delicious(ly terrifying)?
Oh, and I finally saw Children of the Corn. It was fine. Lots of driving through Nebraska.
