30 Horror films: 2 Weeks
“I know what we can do over our two-week break,” I announced to my sisters one night, after we were debating how to spend our work-free, homework-free, 2-week break.
“Let’s watch 30 horror films!” I’m not even sure how I thought of the idea – or why I decided to pursue it - as my sisters and I don’t even particularly like horror films. But it sounded like a good idea at the time.
“Um, why would we do that?” My sister Danielle asked me.
“Why not?” I retorted.
My brilliant logic won them over, and our quest began.
We started asking for film suggestions from all of our friends (which we would later classify into two groups: Our respectable-taste-in-movies friends versus our smile-and-nod friends). At first it was fun. We would excitedly rush off to Blockbuster and grab some movies, confer with each other, and tell every confused soul we possibly could about our plans.
But after a few days, it became more like work:
“Listen,” I remember my sister Lauren telling me in a very serious tone, “You can’t go to Tom’s tonight. We have to watch three films tonight to meet our quota. We’ll never catch up in time if you go.”
The sad thing is, I agreed. “You’re right,” I said, ashamed at myself for putting friends above films. “You’re absolutely right.”
However, after the first week we realized we should not isolate ourselves completely from the outside world, lest we go crazy like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. So we decided to have a Horror Films night, in which we invited 25 of our closest friends over to our dad’s apartment (which I’m sure he loved) and provided snacks and drinks for anyone willing to sit through two horror films. Of the 25 people invited, 11 showed up. 10 were guys. While these odds seemed to work out well for us at the time (10 guys, 4 girls), we lost touch with all of our non-horror-films friends during these two weeks and during the ‘recovery’ time afterward, where much of our conversation and thoughts still centered on horror films.
Besides isolating us from our friends, horror films also caused us to fight: “We could watch 2 movies in the time it takes us to watch Amityville Horror.” I said, disgusted, to my sister Danielle.
“Yeah but the two shorter movies are supposed to suck!” she retorted back. “Who even recommended The Hunt? The same guy that recommended The Ring! I’m not watching it.”
“It’s quantity that matters, Danielle. Not quality!” I walked away in a huff. Clearly, something was wrong.
Not only did it isolate us from our friends, isolate us from each other, but it also isolated us from ourselves.
You see, I used to have innocent, if not downright boring dreams. My dreams consisted of either driving or grocery shopping (usually picking out grapes or cereal – and I was always confused when I woke up in the morning and was lacking something that I “distinctly remember buying”). But Horror Fest 08’ changed all of that…
Soon I was chopping off body parts with the hover-mower from Dead Alive, being chased by aliens from The Descent and fighting zombies from 28 Days Later. I even invented an anti-zombie martial arts in one of my dreams, which would later lead to a series of very serious conversations about zombie-fighting with many of my horror-film loving friends (as these seemed to be the only friends I hung out with anyway). I became afraid to go to sleep, wondering what my mind would conjure up that night, praying it wouldn’t be too gory, or that I wouldn’t remember it when I woke up.
At the end of the two weeks, I had learned my lesson: Do not watch 30 horror films in the period of two weeks. Some time later, at a party, I was sharing this valuable lesson that I had learned over break, and – to my surprise – a few of my friends made fun of me. According to them, it was “obviously a bad idea.”
“Perhaps,” I said, but then I had second thoughts…
“If there’s ever a zombie apocalypse,” I told them, “you know damn well who you’ll be calling.”
Ashley Heidemann
