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Courtesy of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day,
this is Arp 272, some 450 million light-years away.
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Pictures like this are usually trotted out for Halloween. It’s kind of scary, ghostly even. But it is not the stuff of a good scare. I recently wrote a scary piece for our community magazine. It is scheduled for next year sometime, to be run under the title “Do You Remember… A Good Scare?” remembering scary movies. I thought I’d run part of it by you now. I began the piece talking about “itchy” things like spiders and roaches and ants - oh, my! - in the movies, but then I went on to this:
--- For a really good scare there is nothing
like a classics, new or old: Nosferatu,
Something Wicked This Way Comes, Nightmare on Elm Street, Dracula, Scream,
Frankenstein, The Shining, or Silence of the Lambs. In many, it’s the
musical clues make us nervous: it builds and builds and screams, and then! But Hitchcock was the master of the art of
visual clues. In The Birds, you
notice the massing of the crows, or a guy lighting a cigar while gasoline runs
from a broken pump and surrounds him. You know what’s going to happen, but it’s
still a jolt. In Psycho you see the form
of a figure approaching in the bathroom, a knife in its raised hand, and,
though there is nothing at all gruesome to see, the unsuspecting Janet Leigh is
offed while taking a shower. We see the blood running down the drain. Holey
socks! What was that? What’s next? Whew!
At one time or another, we’ve all had real
scares, but the un-real movie scares are better for us. A good movie scare can
be cathartic, providing a strong physical and emotional reaction that seems to
do us good. Like a really good laugh, a really good scare can be therapeutic.
It can take us, even for a short while, away from our sorrows and worries. In
some instances it can even provide a sense of closure, a sense of “Whew! Well,
I feel better now.” ---
Yes, a good movie scare can be therapeutic,
but for me the effect goes on longer than the momentary jolt. I tell you, I can no longer go to a scary movie or even read a scary book.
Authors like H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King? I used to absolutely love them. I
still love them, but only as far as what I remember of their stories. I will
never re-read them. The last scary movie I saw, years ago, was a rerun of
Horror Express. I dreamt about it all night it seemed, and for several nights. That
was it for me and scary movies. Same thing with the last horror novel I read –
I don’t need dreams like the ones they produce.
Scaredy cat? Oh, yes! That would be me!
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| The Witch Head Nebula - from today's APOD - not scary at all |
