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“Are you sure about this?” I ask Isabella. She nods, sort of in my direction. She can’t know for sure, because she’s covered her eyes and is sitting on the far end of the couch, huddled, a fist in her mouth to keep herself from screaming.
We all have Halloween on the brain; we’re looking forward to Saturday night, and what’s more: she has Friday off from school so there’s no homework. Time to be lazy and watch some television. Bad, inappropriate, and un-educational garbage; it’s the best kind. For just such an occasion, we have recorded some episodes of Goosebumps. It’s only a little bit scary, nothing creepy enough to give her nightmares. Actually, it’s kind of bland, and I wonder if she won’t get bored with it. I hope so, because honestly, I can’t imagine sitting through two back-to-back episodes myself.
The first one we watch is exactly what I expected: a blah and predictable story about a kid getting piano lessons, there’s a ghost, she warns him about something…I lose track within five minutes and walk away to do something else. Isabella is not impressed; she quickly fast-forwards to the second episode, expecting something similar.
Except, the second one is nothing like the first. It’s not as if the story is all that compelling; a few kids, stuck in a swamp, visiting their grandparents in their Cajun Trappers’ hut, with a monster in the attic…but it uses a device that Isabella is not yet familiar with: the invisible threat. As with so many scary shows, the anticipation of something is much scarier than the actual monster itself.
The monster, when it is finally revealed, is almost always a let down. It’s the creeping-up-the-stairs, the slowly opening of doors, the darkness that could hold anything and shows you nothing, that is causing her to squeal and squirm.
“I think we should shut it off,” I say, but she won’t hear of it.
“But you’re not even watching!”
“It’s fun,” she says. “It’s scary, but it’s fun-scary, not scary-scary.”
So I go against my better judgment and let her watch. That night, she stays in bed for a whole five minutes before she comes back downstairs, clutching her pink unicorn, announcing she’s afraid of the monster.
Of course, there is no monster; she knows that. She’s just learned that when there is nothing to see, and the room is dark and quiet, our fears run away with us; what scares us the most is our own imagination.
Fun-scary my tuches; I’m deleting all the Goosebumps episodes off the DVR.
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