From the past

I have just reached a goal I have been (occasionally) striving for since I started this blog!
Finally, I have managed to hack into my old myspace page and find the very first pieces of writing I did on horror movies. My birthday is coming up, so it seems a good time for reflecting--shall we take a look?

February 27, 2007--while watching house of wax

scarry mooviee!!

Current mood:scared

  (look at  how hilarious these smiley faces are!!)

scary movies. quite an interesting topic, no? some people must enjoy being scared out of their minds, and believe me, i like to be a little bit frihgtened (woo spelling!) as much as the next guy or girl, but eriously (spelling is fun!). come on. i like scary movies that are only scary while your watching it. like House of Wax. I've watched that at least three times and am no more afraid of things than i ever was before, except of course huge mansions made completely of wax and wax faced people with really sharp swords and creepy mechanics. the only way anything like that could happen to me is if i went to a small mechanical town on a camping trip and was stupid enough to take advice from a creepy mechanic.(it took me a minute to figure out what mechanical town meant. Everyone in the town in that movie is a robot.) plus, the town was burnt down at the end of the movie, so i pretty much need not worry about that ever happening to me. but some movies, like when a stranger calls and others liek (hooray spelling!) that, leave the ending wide open. it is perfectly possible that a creepy stalker could come and terrorize me and kill all my friends when i was babysitting at a large mansion.or this one im watching right now, The Hills have Eyes. now im going to be petrified of drivnig through the desert and accidnetly trapping myself in an atomic testing zone. i mean. i could just put on my tinkerbad (tinkerbad was a character i made for myself to channel all my socially inappropriate urges, like watching slasher movies and being devious and...talking to boys, perhaps?) face and sit numbly through the whole thing (ok, so tinkerbad isnt completely numb, but you get it,)(what. what. what.) but afterwards i would still be scared of atomic testing zones...not like i wasnt in the first place. but moreso.

"didnt she die?"

"oh yeah! she got the pole stuck through her head.!"

"but what about the other guy, is he dead?"

"sort of..."

(that's a conversation that my brother and I had while watching House of Wax, the first horror movie I really saw.) 

I sort of agree with myself in the past, I suppose, about a lot of this. The movies that are really situational--House of Wax--are much less scary in the long term than those that can happen to anyone--that is, of course, the brilliance of teen slasher films. Nightmare on Elm Street, for instance, could easily happen to me--I've got a boyfriend, i have friends, my parents leave town sometimes, our elementary school janitor was a child molester (?). But Burnt Offerings, which I'm about to watch, is about fear in a very specific situation. I constantly fear (in a non-serious, analytical way,) that when I'm with my friends we'll end up in a slasher movie, but I don't really think about the spirit of a vacation house that I stay in with my family driving me crazy. 

So those were my first ever thoughts on scary movies that I felt were worth sharing. I wish my spelling was better--what was that? I totally one the in-class spelling bee in eighth grade too, what is up with that nonsense? 

Here's the second one, an hour and a half later that day--much less articulate, much less true

HOW TO SURVIVE A SCARY MOVIE

HA! This is fun! pshycology of scary movies.

(yes! go little me! even though you can't spell psychology this is true! if only you knew then that this realization would be such a defining moment in your life, maybe you would have spelled it correctly.)

HOW TO SURVIVE A SCARY MOVIE

gotta say, I am proud of myself for intuiting the formulaic nature of slasher movies after watching...one of them...)

1, at the beginnign (spelins are phun) of the movie, dont be cool. be lame. be super jerky and you'll probably survive. (Obviously this isn't true. I was basing it off of Chad Micheal Murray's character in House of Wax, who was kind of a loser and survived, and this character in The Hills Have Eyes who wasn't really a jerk, but smoked cigarretes, and also survived because of his action movie hero attributes, if I remember correctly. At the time I was very misguided and though that Jarad Padalecki was cuter and a nicer guy than Chad Micheal Murray. Cool guys do usually get killed though. )

2. little cute kids usualy live. if your a cute little kid, your in luck. the scary movie industry has a soft spot for you. (false. This is true in Hills, but not really in any other movies I can think of off the top of my head. The way movies tend to deal with children is to make them as creepy as possible. I haven't seen a lot of family horror though, so I could be wrong. Poltergeist is in my instant queue. Also, this is hilarious, because I was a cute little kid when i wrote this. 

On second though, maybe that's really disturbing.)

3. keep your shirt on. it sounds weird, but its true. if ever a mutated villain is going to come and chase you to who knows where, it will be when your wearing the least amout of clothes possible with still being in your rating zone. the best way to avoid this is to wear clothes at all times, especially if you happen to be tall and blonde, or Perez Hilton. (go eighth grade me!! so right!)

4.dotn fall in love. if you fall in love, the person you fall for or yourself is sure to get massacred. (I was a very cynical fourteen year old. But true. Based on both Hills and House of Wax, but it applies pretty well to some classics. Could we get into a debate here about whether or not the type of people in slasher movies have the capacity to be in love? Let's not.) 

5.if you have blood on you, dont panic. it may just mean that the people around you are bleeding, so dont worry that you will bleed to death. if your going to die, it will be very violent. (This is a big one. I applied this two years later in Getting in Trouble. It's very true.)

6.understand the misunderstood. there is usually an underhanded evil villain, but they're usually just using a misunderstood mutant to kill people for them. if you try to convince the mutant that they dont need to kill you, you might get lucky. maybe. (ok, so maybe there was only a really underanded villian in charge in House of Wax, but it is kind of a common theme. The argument could be easily made that Jason is the mutant under control of his manipulative mother--same with Norman Bates, even. So close, but not quite.)

7.it is very risky to be a damsel in distress. sometimes damsels in distress will live, sometimes not. especialy, obviously pretty onew who tend to flaunt their helplessness and need for the opposite gender will almost always die, while damsels who are just understatedly pretty who are sweet but not helpless or needing of a boyfriend in any way usually survive. (the first time i noticed survivor girls! and the first time i judged promiscuous girls!) 

8. always keep a full service cell phone handy. dont drop it, dont have a phone that has any less than 100% full service all over the universe. thats your best bet. (true stuff. only an issue in post-'95 horror, which is what I started watching. It's a mystery that I enjoyed horror after only watching post '95 stuff.)

9.watch your back, and your fingers. in a scary movie, theres almost always somebody who gets a pole stuck through their skull, and theres almsot always somebody who gets at least one finger sliced off. (correction, in House of Wax, 50% of the horror movies I've seen at this point, somebody gets a pole stuck through their skull an somebody else who gets one finger cut off, which were both really strong moments in an otherwise horrible film with few redeeming qualities. However, still a good rule. You need your skull to get through the rest of the movie, and if the killers got a pole, he's gonna use it.) 

Oh, little Krista from four years ago. What a crazy character. Whatever weird identity crisis I had freshman year interrupted my new fangirling for slashers, but by April I watched Going to Pieces and I was hooked forever. 

And now we are here. 

Also, here's a picture I found on my myspace. One year, we did this photo contest around Halloween with our severed limbs (....) where everyone got a turn with the camera and the limbs and put them in various places around my house. This was one of mine...

The caption under this on my myspace page was my abbreviation for "Don't question the madness!!!"

Remember, it was the adults' idea. It is their fault I am this way. 

I should probably thank them.