The BIG Scare

As I’ve discussed, I’m pretty easy to get a jump out of. When I watch horror movies I scream at the cheap scares and the simple jumping-out-at-you bits without anything particularly extraordinary required to get that kind of reaction from me. So, when something particularly extraordinary does happen, I jump that much higher, scream that much louder. The first occasion I can remember is my first viewing of Psycho during which my dad grabbed my ankle right at the moment when someone gets stabbed. I jumped so high that I’m pretty sure my head touched the ceiling.

Well, last night, my environment seems to have turned against me to turn what would have been a frightening scene into a heart-stopping fright. We were watching Insidious. Without doing a full review let me just say that it’s one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in recent years. Without copying the home-movie look of the Paranormal Activity franchise it manages to have the same feel- that inside glance at a family’s world, contained in their seemingly simple suburban home. All the scare moments from the very beginning got me- that shadowy figure in the background, that face emerging from the shadow, that silhouette that shouldn’t be there. Every little glimpse got me to jump, yipe, and inch closer to my boyfriend for protection. It was scary enough all on it’s own, is my point.

But apparently scary wasn’t enough. It had to be heart-attack inducing. At least that’s what my house seemed to decide. Because, right near the end of the movie when all the lights are going out as the demons get closer and closer my kitchen light- all on it’s own- turned on. The light had been off, for the entire movie. And right at that scene when the tension is building so much that I already had a racing heart rate and was holding my breath that light turned on.

We looked over into the kitchen, and saw that not only was the light on but was flickering in an insanely creepy way, and my heart just stopped. I couldn’t even speak. My boyfriend, being slightly more reasonable, paused the movie and went to go over and check out why this light had spontaneously turned on. I grabbed him, not wanting him to go over to the haunted light. He assured me that there was some logical explanation beyond ghosts and/or demons.

After turning the switch on and off and concluding that the flickering was coming from a desperate need for the bulbs to be changed he hypothesized that the light must have been in the mid-way position rather than all the way down and that the vibration from the sound of the movie must have moved it to the on position. I took some convincing, thinking that the insidious villains from the movie were coming to get me. I spent the rest of the movie tucked so far under his arm that I watched the movie from beneath his sleeve. And I haven’t touched that light switch since.