Good morning. Sometimes the scariest movies are the ones that depict the ordinary horrors of life.
Fear factorsI was fascinated to discover recently that each October, my friend Alex undertakes a spooky-season film festival, endeavoring to watch one horror flick for each day of the month. I do not expect that his roster includes the 2012 documentary "Part of Me," a chronicle of the musician Katy Perry's California Dreams concert tour. But I happened to watch that film this week, and it made me contemplate what, exactly, makes a movie frightening. "Part of Me" is not a scary movie, not outwardly at least. It's mostly a confection, lots of footage of Perry dressed up in candy-themed costumes, dancing and singing and gamely greeting her devoted fans in arenas around the world. There is one scene, however, that comes near the end of the movie. Perry is in São Paulo, Brazil, where the largest crowd of the tour has gathered to see her perform. As fans fill the arena, we see Perry sprawled backstage sobbing. Her entourage mills about, fretting over how to handle the situation. "You have two options. You can cancel the show, or you can do your best," her manager tells her gently. Perry thinks for a moment, then commands her makeup artist to begin his ministrations. She goes onstage and puts on the spectacle, even though she's hanging on by a thread. (The film implies that this episode was, at least in part, precipitated by the breakdown of her marriage to the comedian Russell Brand.) The scene of Perry crying wasn't outright terrifying in the way a horror movie is, but it filled me with anxiety all the same. Here's a person laid low with sadness who has to scrounge up some will to go out onstage and be a convincing avatar for uncomplicated joy and delight. This "show must go on" gumption is the stuff from which stories of cinematic uplift are made, but maybe it was my frame of mind, or the cultural moment, that made Perry's resilience seem chilling. I admired her fortitude, and felt grateful that I didn't have a multimillion-dollar machine depending on my being able to shake off a personal nightmare. This might be why I don't tend to seek out scary movies — there's enough that fills me with dread in movies that don't advertise themselves as particularly spine-chilling. One might expect that the new movie "Saturday Night," about the making of the first episode of "Saturday Night Live" in 1975, would be a fun romp, but that movie, too, was rife with the anxiety of artists needing to put on a show in spite of strong forces that would have it otherwise. The new FX documentary series "Social Studies," about teenagers and their relationship with social media, gripped my attention, but I also found myself gritting my teeth as I worried about the kidstherein, their compulsion to perform carefree abandon for their followers while the realities of their offscreen lives were in many cases pretty bleak. One of the appeals of scary movies is that one gets to undergo the experience of a worst-case scenario with the knowledge that this is a fiction, that no matter how anxiety-inducing or ghastly or gruesome the events onscreen, we are safe, we are going to walk out of this theater and have dinner with friends. There are no zombies in the bushes, there is no killer in a hockey mask lying in wait. The journey from sheer terror back to the gorgeous safety of real life offers an ecstatic release, a burst of gratitude for the unremarkable pleasures of the mundane. For those of us who can find things to fear in the least fearsome of films, this, perhaps, is the key to enjoying a Halloween-season fright fest: find movies that deviate so much from real life that the anxieties they provoke aren't even remotely plausible. Seek out depictions of horror whose stories offer maximum contrast with the actual dreadful content of everyday life. I've scoffed at the stock characters of Halloween — the witches and ghosts and skeletons rattling around in top hats and tails. Who would actually find these beings frightening? They don't even exist! Maybe, for a fraidy cat like me, that's a good place to start. For more
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