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Sunday, February 16, 2003
Estremera: Stir crazy
By Stella A. Estremera
I also couldn't see any reason why I should feed my imagination with some maniac writer's idea of a horrifying death and everything that goes bump in the dark. I love the dark, that's why. Thus, I don't want anyone messing around with the comfort that darkness brings.
THE recent crop of horror films is driving me nuts. Not the I-love-these-genre-couldn't-have-enough-of-these kind of nuts. But the why-do-people-want-to-fill-their-braincells-with-ideas-that-would-give-them-reason-to-be afraid-of-the-dark kind of nuts.
Thrillers, horror flicks and ones that show the various ways people can be cut up and splattered on walls or ceilings are nothing but garbage that one's body, and sanity, can do without.
I should know because some time in my youth, I forgot how to scream. A relatively well-developed pair of eardrums tends to make my ears ring and my head spin when subjected to sounds louder than a normally loud speaking voice.
The few occasions I did manage to scream, I ended up dizzy with the steady ringing of my ears. Try watching a horror flick without screaming...
Having dropped screaming from my normal vocal exercises, I can only gasp, squeak, whimper, and hold my breath. My tolerance level for such self-induced torture of one's imagination then is for just a few minutes.
Otherwise I'd drop down, dead from asphyxiation or heart attack, or my brain will be permanently damaged for lack of oxygen.
Maybe that's why I'm tilting toward the unusual side -- the few times I gasped, whimpered, and held my breath must have strangled some teeny-weeny braincells and they just died along the way.
I also couldn't see any reason why I should feed my imagination with some maniac writer's idea of a horrifying death and everything that go bump in the dark.
I love the dark, that's why, and sleeping with the lights on always gives me a pair of baggy, bloodshot eyes in the morning. Thus, I don't want anyone messing around with the comfort that darkness brings.
But tell that to friends and you'll end up in trouble. I should know. As I'm writing this down, the hours are ticking fast toward tonight's pajama party at the posh Marco Polo Hotel with four other friends.
It all started with Jojie's gleeful announcements that she has collected just about every "The Ring" flick she could get her hands on.
Buddies Lani and Bobby have just watched "The Ring" in the cinema when they were told that the Japanese version was even scarier. This was followed by an even more gleeful announcement that Jojie has not just the English version and the Japanese version, but "The Ring 2" as well; the second in the trilogy of the Japanese version that ends with "The Ring 0", she explained. Don't ask me why this is so. I'm not Japanese and so I have been taught from pre-school that you count one-two-three and not one-two-zero.
From then on, Lani has been bugging me about borrowing Jojie's loot. Being oh-so-accommodating, I did. I never thought I'd land in deep trouble.
After several days of bugging, Jojie finally said that she'd willingly lend the videos to Lani on one condition: I must watch the film with them.
Having relayed such condition, Lani offered that I spend a night in their house so I will have company while sleeping after watching the movie.
Before I knew it, Lani has whipped up a pajama party to watch "The Ring" not at home but at Marco Polo. How that happened, I no longer wanted to know. I'm too busy conditioning myself to suffer through the night and lose the serenity of my darkened bedroom, forever.
In the meantime I still couldn't understand why millions of people all over the world (you have the Japanese and the English versions of The Ring to show for it) love to subject themselves to needless mental torture.
Life is torturous as it is. We toss and turn as we see President Bush thump his war drums anew, terrified by the repercussions such war can wreak on the very feeble global economy.
We look with dread at the spiralling cost of grocery items. We bite our nails every time the bills come in, driving our budget stir crazy.
On the sidelines, we moan in despair as yet another person is killed in every imaginable way there is to kill a man. We hit the roof upon reading yet another young girl molested and battered to kingdom come. We quiver in fright as yet another bomb explodes, ripping apart bodies of innocent people.
Yes, life is horrifying enough. We don't need to feed our minds with more terror. Criminals have become even more terrifying, we don't need to teach them other ways to cut up and mutilate people.
And yes, the darkness of the night was never meant to scare anybody, I don't believe the Guy up there is that cruel. The dark is there to rest our bodies, brains and weary souls.
In the meantime, I'm staring at the light blue pair of pajamas with bunny and piggy prints that Gigi brought for me and dreading the coming darkness. |
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