![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Learning to trust no one
Saturday, 11 August 2007 12:13 pmConsonants, You Knew Pretty Much Where They Stood, But You Could Never Trust a Vowel.*
-:- -:- -:-
I just finished watching American Nightmare, which is a documentary about horror movies—specifically, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Last House on the Left, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Shivers, Halloween, and possibly something else I'm not remembering.
(Not that it's important, but I've seen four of these. The ones I haven't seen are Last House on the Left and Shivers. At least, I don't think I've seen Shivers. I could be wrong; I've seen a lot of movies I don't remember anymore.)
Anyway, I've been trying to write about George Romero's Dead series for a while now. This is not that post.
Pat and I saw Night of the Living Dead at the Emerson, and I was crazy about it. I insisted we see Dawn of the Dead when there was a midnight showing at Lafayette Square (which is on the west side of town and nowhere near home and scary to drive home from in the dark with a driver with night-blindness. But it's not like we didn't do that kind of thing on a pretty regular basis). And we saw Day of the Dead when it came out. (I was underwhelmed. I was even less whelmed when Land of the Dead two years ago. I, um, I fell asleep.)
But before any of that, there was something that happened when I was a little girl. This is what I remember.
I was at my grandparents' house with my father, his parents, and some . . . other relatives? I don't know if that's who they were; I don't know if I knew who they were at the time. Even thinking about this confuses me because I know my mother was at home, and what was I doing out with just my father, and why were at my grandparents' in the first place when there were other people there? (We weren't allowed to go over when there was anybody else there—and I mean anybody, even my aunt and uncle. Well, except when the Catholic relatives came to town. Then my grandmother brought them over to our house for my mother to entertain them. Oh, and when my cousin Patty Ann came to town flipped out, then my mother got to look after her. I would explain that to you, but I mostly don't understand it.)
Anyway, we were there for quite a while. I was about seven, and I was bored. I got sleepy, and I was sort of drowsing on the sofa while they talked. And at some point, one of my relatives started talking about a movie she'd seen. The only part of the description I remember hearing was the scene where the little girl kills and eats her mother, though I do remember something about the whole zombiefication of people, that dying did it to you. I remember that it could happen to anybody.
Now, you have to understand, I had nightmares all the time, and was afraid of the dark, I was afraid of "them." (I'd tell you who "them" is, but I don't know, I only know I was sure "they" could hear me when I went for a drink of water in the middle of the night, and that they would get me as I walked down the hall to the bathroom in the dark, and that they would take my mother away from me. I had serious separation anxiety problems about my mother.)
I remember being so afraid, so afraid I thought I was going to pass out, and for some reason being even more afraid of letting anyone know I was afraid. I was sure that when we got home, my mother wouldn't be my mother anymore, and I was—I was silently hysterical. By seven, I already knew not to let people know what I was feeling if I could possibly help it because they would laugh at me, they would hurt me. So I lay there on the sofa, panicking and wanting to get home before whatever they were talking about happened to the only person I could trust to keep me safe.
It wasn't until years after that I saw Night of the Living Dead and realized that was the movie they'd been talking about.
In American Nightmare they talk about the Vietnam war, and the images we saw on TV, and the subtext of Night of the Living Dead. For me, what the movie has been about since before I ever saw it, was about how people you trust can suddenly, for no reason you can understand, become people you can't trust, people who want to hurt you, kill you, devour you. Trust no one.
(As I've been writing this, I've been watching a thing on Superman on the History Channel, and they were saying that when they made the Christopher Reeve movie, they wanted it to be an epic, unlike any movie ever made. And I suddenly realized that, in presentation, it's very much like another movie: Gone With The Wind. It has the same feeling of, Here it is, the movie you've all been waiting for! Right off the top of my head, I can't think of another movie like that.)
*Maniac Magee
-:- -:- -:-
I just finished watching American Nightmare, which is a documentary about horror movies—specifically, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Last House on the Left, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Shivers, Halloween, and possibly something else I'm not remembering.
(Not that it's important, but I've seen four of these. The ones I haven't seen are Last House on the Left and Shivers. At least, I don't think I've seen Shivers. I could be wrong; I've seen a lot of movies I don't remember anymore.)
Anyway, I've been trying to write about George Romero's Dead series for a while now. This is not that post.
Pat and I saw Night of the Living Dead at the Emerson, and I was crazy about it. I insisted we see Dawn of the Dead when there was a midnight showing at Lafayette Square (which is on the west side of town and nowhere near home and scary to drive home from in the dark with a driver with night-blindness. But it's not like we didn't do that kind of thing on a pretty regular basis). And we saw Day of the Dead when it came out. (I was underwhelmed. I was even less whelmed when Land of the Dead two years ago. I, um, I fell asleep.)
But before any of that, there was something that happened when I was a little girl. This is what I remember.
I was at my grandparents' house with my father, his parents, and some . . . other relatives? I don't know if that's who they were; I don't know if I knew who they were at the time. Even thinking about this confuses me because I know my mother was at home, and what was I doing out with just my father, and why were at my grandparents' in the first place when there were other people there? (We weren't allowed to go over when there was anybody else there—and I mean anybody, even my aunt and uncle. Well, except when the Catholic relatives came to town. Then my grandmother brought them over to our house for my mother to entertain them. Oh, and when my cousin Patty Ann came to town flipped out, then my mother got to look after her. I would explain that to you, but I mostly don't understand it.)
Anyway, we were there for quite a while. I was about seven, and I was bored. I got sleepy, and I was sort of drowsing on the sofa while they talked. And at some point, one of my relatives started talking about a movie she'd seen. The only part of the description I remember hearing was the scene where the little girl kills and eats her mother, though I do remember something about the whole zombiefication of people, that dying did it to you. I remember that it could happen to anybody.
Now, you have to understand, I had nightmares all the time, and was afraid of the dark, I was afraid of "them." (I'd tell you who "them" is, but I don't know, I only know I was sure "they" could hear me when I went for a drink of water in the middle of the night, and that they would get me as I walked down the hall to the bathroom in the dark, and that they would take my mother away from me. I had serious separation anxiety problems about my mother.)
I remember being so afraid, so afraid I thought I was going to pass out, and for some reason being even more afraid of letting anyone know I was afraid. I was sure that when we got home, my mother wouldn't be my mother anymore, and I was—I was silently hysterical. By seven, I already knew not to let people know what I was feeling if I could possibly help it because they would laugh at me, they would hurt me. So I lay there on the sofa, panicking and wanting to get home before whatever they were talking about happened to the only person I could trust to keep me safe.
It wasn't until years after that I saw Night of the Living Dead and realized that was the movie they'd been talking about.
In American Nightmare they talk about the Vietnam war, and the images we saw on TV, and the subtext of Night of the Living Dead. For me, what the movie has been about since before I ever saw it, was about how people you trust can suddenly, for no reason you can understand, become people you can't trust, people who want to hurt you, kill you, devour you. Trust no one.
(As I've been writing this, I've been watching a thing on Superman on the History Channel, and they were saying that when they made the Christopher Reeve movie, they wanted it to be an epic, unlike any movie ever made. And I suddenly realized that, in presentation, it's very much like another movie: Gone With The Wind. It has the same feeling of, Here it is, the movie you've all been waiting for! Right off the top of my head, I can't think of another movie like that.)
*Maniac Magee