Fred

The dog growled low and let one obnoxious strand of drool slip past its snarling lips. The salt-and-pepper colored hair on his upper back signaled a body-language warning that was more imposing than the growl. Its beady eyes were locked on mine; paralyzing me beyond movement. Next to this 20 pound demon sat a fat old lady; with arms outstretched and a sedated smile upon her face. I remember looking up at my father for some help in that impossible situation. He only looked back down at me with pity and said, “Go hug your grandma.”

That day I was scared more than I ever had been in my entire life. And Jericho, the overly-jealous dog that (insert old lady voice) “wouldn’t ever hurt anybody”, Well now, Jericho was nothing in comparison to the terror that would later befall me. He was only a terrier mix and no more than half-a-meter tall, but to a five year old boy with an overactive imagination he was Lucifer in a dog suit. I think now that I may have over-reacted to Jericho’s menacing demeanor. In-fact, in his entire lifetime he never bit me more than a half-dozen times. Every time during grandma-hugging sessions, I might add.

After “pleasantries” with my grandma and other family members, my parents went out to run errands with my aunt. My uncle and cousins were in charge of looking after me while they were gone. Late in the afternoon one of my cousins offered to let me join them in watching a movie. I was happy to be involved in “older things”, so I did not heed the warnings of (insert teasing girl voice) “it might scare you”… besides it couldn’t be scarier than Lucifer, could it? So as not to keep you in suspense; Yep, it sure as hell could. 

I joined my extended family in the extended living room and proceeded to warp my fragile mind with images that are all-to vivid in my memory today. Flashes of images I should say… partly because that’s how memory works and partly because I covered my eyes for a significant amount of the movie. (A side note of no particular relevance is that my uncle, “the practical joker”, told me he would let me know when it was safe to open my eyes. Of course he lied.)

So, a child murder burns to death and returns to mutilate more children in their dreams. With a complex plot (for a horror film), gruesome special effects (for its time), and famous actors (to be) it became the first in a long series. Needless to say, I never saw any of the other sequels. I just watched the original and, for me at least, I’m sure the others cannot compare. I reviewed the movie recently and it occurred to me that in addition to the pure terror of a metallic-clawed man with a partially fleshless face, the IDEA of it all might have been scarier. Deep down I knew it was a movie and, even at that age, I knew “he” didn’t exist in the “real” world but I must have felt that the idea of it was very real and that somewhere a person had created “him” by way of the imagination and subconscious... by way of terrible dreams.

Anyway, I grew up a lot that day. Well maybe not that day, it took a couple of weeks for me to go to the bathroom alone for fear , but I did lose a little bit of my innocence. In fact, that is when I lost the first little bit… and from that day forward I would continue to lose it until I had practically lost faith in humanity. Eventually I began to gain it back slowly and lose it again, and so on and so forth until I became an average, ordinary unbalanced adult.



Some notes that I would like to add:

I am grateful to the movie industry for my loss of innocence being a second-hand experience. Many people I know lost it more directly and are the worse for it. Innocence is a treasure that should be guarded and protected, but it sours into naivety if kept for too long.

Many questions have plagued me since reviewing the movie…
1) Why was I not horrified again by the gruesomeness, and the IDEA?
2) Why was it so popular as to warrant nine sequels?
3) Is my dislike for water correlated to the abundance of water related terror scenes?