Discuss: Movies That Shouldn't Have Scared You ......

Horror films leave me ambivalent. I just don't get into most of them, with the exception of good ghost, vampire or werewolf movies. My friends assume I studiously avoid monsters and zombies because I'm squeamish about gore, or am easily scared -- but I'm neither. I'll watch them if they are on television, or part of a film festival, but I don't go out of my way to seek them out. (On the other hand, I'd give anything to see Trick'r Treat. That looks like my kind of horror film.) But there are movies that have left me sleepless, frantically turning on every single light on the way to the bathroom, waking up in a cold sweat because they pervade my dreams. Some of these were films that terrified everyone, like Poltergeist or IT. And then there are ones that, to this day, I don't really understand why they affected me so deeply. One of these was Signs. Yes, you have permission to laugh. Go on, I'll wait.

Got it out of your system now? Good. I'll explain. Aliens have always freaked me out more than zombies or slashers, despite that homicidal maniacs with machetes are far more likely to kill me in real life. And Signs tapped into my deepest fears -- which would be, it seems, being trapped in a house with nothing but my family and my dogs, while an invading force bangs on my windows and runs on my roof. In the theater, I was curled into a terrified ball in my seat, afraid an alien claw would grab my ankles. Once I got home, I didn't sleep for two weeks -- every time I turned off the light, I saw an alien standing on my neighbor's roof, looking at me. You couldn't convince me that was their swamp cooler. It was an alien, coming to eat my family.


My family and friends thought this was hilarious. They kept going behind me and doing clicky alien talk just to see me jump. The kicker came when my sister and I went to a nighttime Halloween corn maze -- and she ran far ahead of me, hid in the corn, and waited until I wandered by. All I heard was a little clicky alien voice over my shoulder. Just like Mel Gibson, I stood there frozen, certain I had hallucinated, afraid I hadn't. It's just a movie. It's just a movie, isn't it? My sister tackling me into the dirt, laughing hysterically, answered that question.

I laugh about it now, of course, and agree with everyone that the ending was preposterous and that the aliens weren't scary once you saw them in CGI form. But every time I watch that movie (and people love torturing me with it), I cannot watch that scene in the corn ... where that slender alien leg pivots back into the shadowy stalks ... without feeling a very cold shiver run down my spine. And it isn't because of that night in the corn maze.

So, this is a post for the scaredy-cats, or even the hardcore horror aficionados who have a skeleton or two in their closet. There has to be one movie -- from your youth, or your last DVD rental -- that scared you senseless for no good reason. Heck, it can even be a television show! Now's the time to admit that Beetlejuice made you cry, Tremors made you wet your pants, or Cat's Eye kept you sleeping with a baseball bat beside your bed.