What Scares You?

[I've been writing with students in my Writing Project workshop, a class for K-12 language arts teachers. This is a rough draft...still figuring out exactly what I want to say. Can't get the ending right.]

Summer 2002. Dissertation finished. Five-week summer-term teaching gig finished. Most days top one-hundred degrees in sunny Tucson, a city I’m departing in a few weeks, degree in hand, for a teaching job at Miami University. Trading the southwest for southwest Ohio. “But it’s a dry heat” for “oh the humidity.” Teaching assistantship for tenure-track. Ten years of college for, well, thirty-five more years of college.

Hopped up on Diet Coke and air conditioning, a friend and I decide we need a good scare, concluding that a midnight showing of The Exorcist at a local arthouse theatre would be the job. We both had tender childhood experiences with the holy trinity of horror cinema: The Omen, The Shining, and of course The Exorcist, the godhead of that evil triumvirate.

Because my siblings were a decade older than me, I accessed the horror genre at what I now recognize as probably too young an age. Slasher films at nine and ten. At ten or eleven, my brother’s copy of Stephen King’s Night Shift, a pulpy paperback with a cover picture of a gauzed-wrapped hand covered with realistic eyeballs, followed soon by anything twisted Hubbard Public Library had to offer, notably a creepy true-crime novel based on the Zodiac Killer and a cold-war comic about an astronaut abandoned during a space walk. Cable tv showings of The Omen and The Shining at perhaps eleven.

But I never saw The Exorcist until ninth grade religion class. If older siblings don’t warp you, Catholic school surely will. Our religion teacher, the newly ordained Fr. Francis, was doing a unit on church rituals. Naturally exorcism held more interest than, say, baptism or even trans-substantiation. A retired priest at the school, according to Fr. Francis, had actually performed several exorcisms during his incarceration at a World War II P.O.W. camp in northern Africa. We knew Fr. Sala as the quiet retiree who strolled around schoolgrounds and didn’t speak much English. Hair as white as the snow that covered the haunted hotel of The Shining. We could barely believe exorcism was a legitimate church ritual let alone that we had a real, live, 80-something exorcist in our midst. All of a sudden, Fr. Sala’s thoughtful countenance, incessant pacing, hours spent in the chapel, and fright-white hair took on new meaning. We never approached Fr. Sala.

But we did convince Fr. Francis to screen The Exorcist in class. Like no horror film I had ever seen. Zero comic relief. No foolish characters asking for their grisly fates. No contrived, far-fetched exposition. Just an exploration of evil. Just Satan in a kid’s body. I remember a kind of respect for the film, maybe stemming from all we had learned about exorcism’s real presence in church doctrine and church practice. I can recall subsequent class discussions about evil in the world, the devil, the unforgivable sin. Mostly I remember being scared.

So on that dry Tucson evening, my pal and I file into the theatre. The air conditioning chills us instantly. Turned up extra high, and I think of the bedroom of the film’s protagonist Reagan, frigid with possession. The theatre must be doing this on purpose to freak the audience out. I remember reading an article that the film’s director used dozens of air conditioners to keep the set freezing. In the same article, I read that the director shot a real gun to frighten Max Von Sydow and Ellen Barkin and capture on film their genuine fear. I tell my friend that if I see an usher packing, I’m leaving. She has no idea what I’m talking about.

Kids begin to file into the theatre. I’m the oldest person there. Mostly goth kids. Black eye shadow. Black Levi’s. Black blouses with frills. Black combat boots. a kid of perhaps fifteen sits down next to me wearing a frown and what looks like the puffy shirt from that episode of Seinfeld. Several don trench coats and it occurs to me that we’re at the only place in Tucson in August where a trench coat makes sense. My teeth chatter.

My friend and I grow self-conscious about our pre-show banter. We feel like chaperones with our loose khaki short, our conversations dotted with 1980s references, and our absence of angst. I’m suddenly aware of the ten-year high school reunion invitation resting behind a magnet on my refrigerator. I’m suddenly aware that I own a refrigerator magnet. I do math in my head to remind myself that I was probably just ten or eleven when these kids were born. When they entered the world, I was probably reading a library book about a serial killer or watching The Omen on HBO. Kharma.

Most seats fill up. The lights go down, mostly camoflouging the black-clad teens. A girl with body glitter emits sparkles. A purple Mohawk two rows in front of us refracts the glow of the opening credits. My last thought as the movie begins is whether this is their first viewing of The Exorcist.

Soon I have my answer. Once Reagan, the little girl played by Linda Blair, in a career-defining and probably a career-ending move, enters full-on possession mode, the theatre comes to life. The kid in the puffy shirt smiles what I take to be the day’s first smile. And the kids in the theatre know, and shout out with glee, all the words. It’s like going to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When Satan adopts the voice of the exorcist priest’s mother and gives the “Oh, Jimmy” monologue, the kids yell out the “Oh, Jimmy” monologue. When Satan growls, “Reagan’s not here, now undo these straps,” the kids yell out “Reagan’s not here, now undo these straps.” They love it.

Forget about the self-consciousness over age, coolness, credibility. No respect, I allow myself to think. The Exorcist isn’t camp. There’s no irony here. No comic relief. This is evil, damn it! I knew an exorcist in high school. We’re not watching Freddy Kreuger here. You’re not supposed to be having fun. Stop it. You take evil seriously. You take The Exorcist seriously.

Some people of a certain age (i.e., my age) bemoan mediocre, big-budget adaptations of The Grinch and The Cat in the Hat. For me, seeing The Exorcist with the goth set made an icon a little less iconic. I had to wonder whether a little healthy respect for evil was still part of the repertoire of the young horror aficionado. Take it from a former ten-year-old and a guy whose high school had a resident exorcist: that kind of respect keeps the nightmares at bay.