Horror!

Last evening I watched Paranormal Activity 3. It was scary, in bits. It begins with the kid who can see the resident ghost, the innocuously named Toby(who is, but doesn't want to be called fat). 5 year old Christy talks to Toby, has him attend her tea-parties, runs around the house, chasing him, at 4am, jumps from her first-floor room into the living area below and lands promptly on her feet. Toby the goof then goes rogue. Like Jason Bourne on steroids, he upturns furniture, sticks it all up on the ceiling, picks up the other kid by her hair and whirls her around gleefully, pulls beds, slams doors, smashes a perticularly ugly lamp. I could do with some of that energy. And how cool would it be to have ALL the furniture off the floor when trying to sweep and scrub!

Anyway, the story goes on, mostly operating in horror cliches. There is one scene of crystalline perfection. The baby-sitter, goofing around with the kids, dresses up in a white sheet and goes about flailing her arms. She then sits at the kitchen table, reading under a pretty Tiffany lamp and right behind her is a kid-sized shape, draped in the same sheet. She turns and poof, the shape collapses, leaving the sheet behind. Scary? Hell, yes!

Hardly had I finished with one scary kid when another jumped on screen in last night's episode of Supernatural. Sam and Dean (and the sexy car) go after a killer painting and the homicidal ghost turns out to be a chit of a child who had offed her entire family with a rusty razor that surprisingly enough is painted into this early 20th century family portrait. The kid is creepy, even without the artistically painted dark circles under her eyes. Her doll with the unblinking eyes is worse.

I thought I'd had enough exposure to the horror genre already but then came this morning and I found myself in class on a Saturday morning, attending a pointless lecture on writing research proposals. And I finally figured what real horror was all about.