People who play video games to unwind may be better off watching a horror film on television instead, say research scientists of Birmingham University.
I couldn’t agree more. The terrible tempers, tantrums and twitchings of young people playing video games have indeed made me turn with a screech of relief to the friendly devilry in Transylvania, to homespun mad scientists while even the mummy’s curse seems music after that other one who is always screaming, “Leave that game and do your homework.”
I prefer a bit of decent terror to a bunch of little horrors any day.
I have more rapport with the person who is normal and nice and suddenly changes to something revolting.
Take Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; one moment the suave surgeon and the next a raving madman. And all because he’s confused about medical benefits!
Then there is the creature from the nine-kilometre swamp, a thing covered with weeds, dripping moisture and exuding the miasma of bog and brush. That’s what happens to you when you have a temperamental septic tank.
I must also confess to a pas sing interest in Wolf Man. Come full moon he is growing hair all over his face and howling for girls. He reminds me so much of the young blokes in my office.
Certainly horror is family entertainment.
Recently I had been watching Dracula when my wife entered.
I held her close, took a bite out of her neck and said, “My, that’s a good year.”
Later, however, I went as pale as your common apparition. I picked up my wallet to find that it had been sucked dry.
I suppose that fear of the unknown is a part of all of us. We are tribal and primitive if only we scratch the surface.
And scratch the surface of the best furniture and you’ll find how tribal and primitive some of us are.
Needless to say, Frankenstein has always been admired at our place… the staring eyes, the shuffling gait, the great clumsy hands, the doors falling off their hinges, shelves splintering to matchwood, chairs crushed to a pulp, people screaming.
My wife says: “He reminds me so much of your handyman jobs in the house.”
Torture films often get to me, the sheer bestiality of banquet scenes, with the starving victim on the rack and crushing his diet biscuits with his clammy hands.
But, as my neighbour, remarked, who wants horror films when you can get the water rates, the power, the telephone bill and a letter saying your relatives are coming, all in the same mail?
Sometimes terror comes softly in sweet disguises, with long, dark, drooping lashes, rosy lips and unfathomable eyes like the pretty tellers in my bank when they tell me I’m overdrawn.
There are times too, when even my wife makes me un easy. Looking at her covertly I see a distinct resemblance to those voodoo ladies who stick pins in their victims. The thought came to me when she was sewing buttons on the shirt I was still wearing.
One child, watching a horror film on our television, rushed down to tell us about the thing on the screen: “It seems on another planet, it’s huge, it rolls over everything in its way and it has rocks in its head. ”
There’s a lot of it about in our family!
Max Fatchen—rattles the family closet… and is aghast at what falls out