Oh the horror!

The idea that we don't have anything to fear except fear itself, should be comforting except when one  considers how they define "fear itself." What's interested me is that despite the negative aspects of being afraid, people still actually want to be afraid...for fun- which leads me to horror movies. In my case there are limits to how much I want to be scared by the silver screen.( I have to admit  I don't like slasher movies. It just doesn't seem like there's much point to watching people get hacked to death just for the heck of it. I think that dislike started when I watched the movie called Valentine about a guy who asks 4 women to dance with him at his school dance. Three of the women say they wouldn't dance with him and give some gruesome reason why they wouldn't e.g. I'd get my throat cut first-or something like that. When the guy grows up he kills off all of the women in they manner in which they said they wouldn't dance with him. The only woman he doesn't kill is the one that said she might dance with him but then didn't get the chance to do so because the dance ended. It was a very bloody movie and afterwards I never looked at school dances the same way again.) I guess then that movies I really like are thrillers, a liking I think I obtained from my parents who are big Hitchcock fans. Anyway, here are some of the horror/thriller movies I actually like:

• The Birds: (Birds start attacking people in a small town) I remember vividly, one appropriately dark night in the middle of a torrential rainstorm watching Hitchcock's The Birds with my dad. I couldn't look at a bird for a couple days afterwards without fearing it was out to get me! 
• Wait Until Dark (Audrey Hepburn plays a blind woman who gets terrorized by 3 men who believe there's a doll with heroin stuffed in it hidden in her apartment. Fun fact: when talking about Oscar nominations he did/didn't receive Alan Arkin who plays the lead baddie in the movie said of his role in Wait Until Dark that: You don't get nominated for an Oscar for being mean to Audrey Hepburn.") I happened to watch this movie on Halloween with a large group of friends and there's a certain part in the movie where Audrey thinks she's finally killed Alan Arkin's character until he suddenly grabs her ankle. Just at the moment he did this we all screamed as if on cue. Then we all burst out laughing at ourselves.
•  The Skeleton Key (Kate Hudson plays a hospice nurse for a man living in Louisiana. After acquiring a skeleton key to the man's attic, she finds a secret room within the attic where she discovers instruments for practicing voodoo. Violet-the man's wife says she has never been in the secret room, but that the items probably belonged to the original owners' two houseworkers, who practiced black magic and were lynched as a result. It turns out that Violet and another man named Luke Marshall were the two lynched house workers who somehow managed to inhabit the bodies of victims they lure into living in the house for a while and so they live forever.) I liked this movie because it kept me guessing to the end, even if I did feel it was a really messed up story when I finished watching it.

From watching these movies I learned that I'm glad I'm not a zookeeper so I don't have to deal with  birds all day long, I need to religiously watch where I step so people don't unexpectedly grab at my ankkes  and I should avoid entering spooky old houses as it leads to rather awful results. (Unless of course it's a haunted house on Halloween and I'm going there with a group of friends who would protect me!)