(
Not totally sure where this is heading, but -like most of my posts- it's pretty steeped in the wicked and twisted stream-of-conscious thought that takes over my brain when I get an idea in my head and set about putting it down on paper...)
Last night, Junior Trosclair invited me back to his (what I consider - by my Broadmoor born-and-bred standards of living and breathing and making monthly payments) palatial three bedroom house in the Haven to watch
Paranormal Activity 2. I'd seen the first one on my laptop either last spring, or maybe over the summer, and I remember feeling generally unsettled for several days following the viewing. The feeling was comparable to three other media-based, monumentally life-altering experiences I had in my youth: watching the nuclear holocaust television event
The Day After, a Geraldo Rivera hosted special on famous mass murderers in America's history that included an interview with Charles Manson, and another Rivera special that detailed the prevalence of satanism in the zeitgeist of the 1980's and included his admonition to all viewers to "please, do not let your children watch this." This triad of factual horror would have a permanent impact on my psyche, but few fictional films would later have comparable ramifications on my impressionable (fragile?) brain; however,
Paranormal Activity (and now, its sequel) is an outlier to this otherwise consistent factotum.
Of course, being something of a horror film aficionado, I could (and have) easily list hundreds of movies that provided significant impact on my desire to create. The original
Halloween is, in its way, on par with
Citizen Kane.
Black Christmas (and its progenitor
Psycho) with
Birth of a Nation. Dario Argento's magnum opus
Suspiria is as close to cinematic perfection as terror films go.
Scream.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Let's Scare Jessica to Death.
Dementia-13.The list may actually be infinite, but few of these films (Tobe Hooper's exploitative cringe-fest being an obligatory exception) truly possess(ed) the power to really frighten me despite the true genius that resides in the depths of their celluloid. Perhaps it was real world horror, and my early exposure to the nightly world news, that did something to desensitize me to the suspension of disbelief and my ability to truly immerse myself in the idea of being well frightened by fiction. From a very early age, the media, in particular, early evening and prime time television, did more to scare the crap out of me. Impressions were made and correlations developed via post-toddler misinterpretation of the real world beyond my living room which was depicted on
20/20 and Peter Jennings's broadcasts.
I felt lingering effects from watching footage of the mysterious illness that medical experts had yet to name and the horrendous physical effects it had on the stricken. The connection I vividly remember making in my brain was between what appeared to be bruises all over the patients' arms and legs and the fact that, despite their otherwise gray understanding of the disease, scientists were certain that it was transmitted through sex and needles, which meant the blood. At one time, the news described the possibility that the infection (sometime between its diagnostic title as "GRID" and its eventual encasement as the more accurate and less homophobic "AIDS") could potentially be passed via mosquito bites. I remember hearing the news in the dead heat of summer, and I remember coming home every night after spending my days riding bikes and building forts and rolling around in the freshly mowed yards of every house in the neighborhood to the mandatory nightly baths that would sting my arms and my legs from their consistent exposure to chigger bites and whatever HYPER-allergenic toxins were present in the grassy hills of Broadmoor that brought such feverish itching and scratching and stinging to my shins and elbows, to my thighs and knees. I remember trembling in the wake of the warm and soapy water, the pale pink earplugs that I kept on the side of the tub and had to place every time I bathed or dove in a swimming pool to prevent any water from getting into my ears and causing further infection after the many rounds of tonsillitis (excised in my infancy, the surgeons had left just enough tissue for them to regenerate) and strep throat and PE tubes that effected my hearing and left me with a speech impediment that prevented me from the proper annunciation of several phonetics. I remember clenching my teeth and grinding my jaws as the sting on my skin slowly dissolved in the water, and I remember staring down at the bright red bug bites behind my knees and in the crooks of my hips where my legs connected to my torso and on the insides of my thighs and the terribly inflamed and purplish welps that screamed in the scratch fest on my scrotum (any male who has ever had the pleasure of alleviating such an itch in that very spot knows exactly what I mean) from the litany of outdoor interlopers that found their way inside my shorts and had made a smorgasbord of my obviously tasty flesh. Finally, I remember my horror when I noticed the colorful array of green and blue and gray bruises from my days of hard play in the wonderland of summer: I would count them, noticing which were fresh and which had been there for days, and I exhaustively tried to recount the exact causes of each and every one because these bruises terrified me in their simultaneous presence with the bug bites (although I now know that many were actually from the parasitic red bugs that littered the mounds of dirt we were always so fond of rolling around in, I assumed that every bug bite was a mosquito bite). There were always more the next night than there had been the night before, and hadn't I just seen something about this on the news at dinner? Was that new spot below my right knee really from my foot skidding off its driving perch on my bike and banging my shin on the still-revolving hard rubber of the pedal? Or were these bruises not from any of the daily forgotten injuries a little kid constantly inflicts on himself during games of tag and tug-of-war? Could it be that these bruises were like those that I'd seen on the pale, emaciated limbs of the dying, ravaged souls on
ABC's World News Tonight at five-thirty every Monday through Friday? Had one of the mosquitoes that had bitten me earlier bitten one of those men or women? Or some man or woman like them? Did I have AIDS? Or GRID? Or whatever it was that the reporters were calling in that week? Was I going to die?
I was far too scared to tell anyone (especially my medically phobic mother who had just enough bedside knowledge of the medical field from her home versions of the
MERCK Manual and a variety of other source books from which she could readily diagnose any and all maladies from the conglomeration of past and present symptom-ologies that befell us) because I knew that if I did have the same thing that was blasted all over the news shows, I would definitely have to go to the doctor. And going to the doctor ALWAYS meant one thing: shots. That was certainly one thing that I was even more terrified of than any plausible or probable or imagined illness: the many shots that one would definitely have to receive if he or she were laid up, crumpled and frail and covered in bruises like the men and women on the news. There would absolutely, positively be many, many shots to make it go away. Instead, I kept the bruises and the mosquito bites and the probability of my coming demise from anyone and everyone -especially my mother. Like many of the other things that would come to scare me in my youth, I bottled the fear up inside and did my best to hide it from the world.
As if the news weren't bad enough, though, the major networks of the early eighties also brought me the twin terror of movies-of-the-week (every one of them based on a true story) and the sensational path to fame wrought by the camera-loving Geraldo Rivera. These two forces, true stories and Geraldo, introduced me to my three other biggest and most (ir)rational fears (the infectious mosquitoes being promptly forgotten when the imagery of this trilogy of terror eclipsed bruise-laden limbs of patients on tv), fears that were born in my childhood and remain somewhat in existence for me today in comparable varieties: nuclear war, Charles Manson, and satanic cults that thrived on kidnapping and sacrificing blond-haired, blue-eyed pretty boys such as myself. Interestingly enough, all of these would (and still do) consistently come full circle into my life countless times throughout adolescence and my formative early, mid, and late-twenties - the ideology within the latter of the trifecta re-appearing once again last night, during and following my viewing of
Paranormal Activity 2 with Junior Trosclair.
(
...to be continued...I have more to re-write before I make any more edits as I type through another post...)
