Is there such a thing as horror deprivation? Life has been so busy that I haven’t been able to carve out the time to watch any horror movies for several weeks now. That steady diet has given me blog topics and a strange kind of personal comfort in this all-too-scary world. More than that, it is often a coping mechanism. I sometimes think more people might read this blog if I “rebranded” it as horror-themed, but perhaps there’s a different way to go about it. Some writers, with enough shares and likes, have their daily observations become part of the national wisdom. The rest of us, it seems, are simply background noise. I’ve also been told blogs are passè and that may be the case. I have trouble keeping up. I don’t even have time to watch horror!
As with most things in life, I keep a list of movies I need to see. Like claws such a list continues to grow unless it’s trimmed once in a while. A movie is a couple-hour commitment and when even weekends are programmed to the last minute it’s difficult to squeeze them in. I always welcome the more pleasant weather of spring, but so does the yard. I’ve always thought, like good haunted house owners, that I would let the yard go. Here in town there are ordinances, though. It doesn’t look tidy—right now dandelions exceed the tolerated grass length a mere day after mowing. Like triffids they pop up and won’t go away. I could be in, watching a movie. My credibility’s on the line here!
The pandemic, from which horror movies will arise, led many people to having too much time. Netflix soared. For whatever reason, it had the opposite effect on me—is this a special effect?—I had even less time than before. I had to cancel my Netflix account because I had no time to use it. Horror is a coping technique. Real horrors spill from the headlines daily. Sometimes the antidote is in the poison itself. The way to be less scared is to watch more horror. We’re still in the pandemic and Putin decides to start a war. Republicans confess that Trump tried to take over by force and then backtrack. Global warming continues apace. There comes a point when the only therapy is to watch something worse unfold, as long as it’s fiction. It’s Saturday. It’s raining. What can one possibly do?