This past week I celebrated the end of Summer by staying in a small cabin in upstate New York. When not drinking beers on the porch and spraying each other with bug spray while looking for imaginary bears, or sharing a romantic tube down the river while screaming, we streamed scary movies on my laptop because, yeah, I brought my laptop to a getaway in the woods. What kind of opposite of a completely healthy person do you think I am?
The two movies we watched, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, and Snowtown made me pick up on a pattern, and that pattern is that basically every scary movie ever is more or less an outline of all our individual, but similarly terrifying lives. Here's how:
- Everything is fine, and so far you are mostly not possessed by the devil.
- You come across something weird at the (grocery store, porta-potty, Converse outlet, Taco Bell) and you put it in your bag to take home and put under your pillow, because your apartment is small and where else could you put it?
- The something weird you found is a (bug, bag of human fluids, mushy pod of some sort covered in dog hair). You are curious about it so you spend days Googling what it means. It could mean at least five things. You pick the worst one and go with that.
- You start to notice various smells that you have no control over in your home. Screams, animal noises, and nonsensical laughter is heard from the other side of your wall. You can do nothing to make it stop.
- You experience long stretches of unease.
- You are almost always what you would describe as "very tired."
- You wake up with bruises and marks all over your body and cannot remember where they came from.
- There's something on your face. You don't know what it is and it doesn't hurt really, so you ignore it.
- You are often filled with irrational anger that comes to a violent head one afternoon when you spit on the sidewalk after seeing a lady throw a candy bar wrapper on the ground outside of the Post Office. You mutter "why don't we all just shit on the ground too" under your breath and realize that you have lost full brain function capabilities.
- You are always sweaty and make a point to constantly tell people about it. No one else seems to be quite as sweaty as you are.
- You feel as though a select number of people are 100% out to get you. Mostly people from the internet, who speak to you in clues and song lyrics. You know it's about you.
- You have a voracious hunger for strange things like tortillas rolled up and dipped in peanut butter, and then again in a bag of loose nuts. You sometimes cry after having eaten these things because you feel like you can almost sense how odd it would look to someone peeping in your window at you eating these things.
- You are worried about unseen eyes "peeping in" at you from your window. You start to take on a different personality within your own home, doing things in ways you wouldn't normally do them under the certainty that someone can see you. You begin closing the bathroom door at odd times, like when you pee.
- You fear the degenerative frailty of your own body.
- When idle, you can feel the weight of your own immortal soul. You realize that your most spiritual beliefs are nothing more than fairy tales that help you feel as though there is "a reason" to all of this.
- Everyone you see is a hideous monster, but only you notice. It's as though you have the ability to see a person's TRUE self.
- Somedays you have no other choice but to go to bed at 9PM.
- You dissolve into a creature who spends large portions of their day standing at their window, looking at a tree and craving something sweet and cold that seems so so far away.
- You are lost. You no longer have the ability to "even." You cannot "even."
- Horror.
