When I was a kid I couldn't get enough of ghost stories or any other creepy supernatural tale. There's just something about cooler weather, golden afternoons, and dark nights that makes me want to settle in with something scary, and I know from my teaching that many kids are the same way.
It's been ages since I've had that pleasure, though. I trace the decline of my enjoyment to 1980, the year I saw Friday the 13th. Back then there was no such thing as a slasher movie, and I can still remember the sick feeling I had as I trudged out of the theater along with the other shocked and silent patrons. We were unsure what we had just seen. A couple years later I had a conversation I can't forget. "I cried when I saw Friday the 13th," a colleague told me, "because I had never seen someone killed before."
Imagine that! A world where we had never seen simulated death and dismemberment! It seems like a very long time ago. And over the decades, it also seems that such graphic violence has completely taken the place of a good, old-fashioned boo! of a scare.
I suppose there have been some exceptions. The Sixth Sense (1999) comes to mind, and although there was plenty of blood and gore in that movie, too, somehow it had a gentler sensibility. I also liked Disney's Hocus Pocus (1993); it was spooky and entertaining. And the TV show The Ghost Whisperer was a little hokie, but satisfying, but that went off the air in 2010.
To be honest, I think I had given up on the whole idea of October goosebumps, that is until I happened upon the podcast Spooked, by the producers of Snap Judgment. Well-produced, compellingly-told true stories of ghosts and other dark and scary things, I was hooked from episode 1.
I sometimes listen to podcasts to help me go to sleep at night, but when I tuned into this one? Man! I was wide awake and itching for another episode. Check it out-- it's really that good.
It's been ages since I've had that pleasure, though. I trace the decline of my enjoyment to 1980, the year I saw Friday the 13th. Back then there was no such thing as a slasher movie, and I can still remember the sick feeling I had as I trudged out of the theater along with the other shocked and silent patrons. We were unsure what we had just seen. A couple years later I had a conversation I can't forget. "I cried when I saw Friday the 13th," a colleague told me, "because I had never seen someone killed before."
Imagine that! A world where we had never seen simulated death and dismemberment! It seems like a very long time ago. And over the decades, it also seems that such graphic violence has completely taken the place of a good, old-fashioned boo! of a scare.
I suppose there have been some exceptions. The Sixth Sense (1999) comes to mind, and although there was plenty of blood and gore in that movie, too, somehow it had a gentler sensibility. I also liked Disney's Hocus Pocus (1993); it was spooky and entertaining. And the TV show The Ghost Whisperer was a little hokie, but satisfying, but that went off the air in 2010.
To be honest, I think I had given up on the whole idea of October goosebumps, that is until I happened upon the podcast Spooked, by the producers of Snap Judgment. Well-produced, compellingly-told true stories of ghosts and other dark and scary things, I was hooked from episode 1.
I sometimes listen to podcasts to help me go to sleep at night, but when I tuned into this one? Man! I was wide awake and itching for another episode. Check it out-- it's really that good.
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