By: Dr. Michael Robinson | Communications Studies Professor
For a good scare, forget your Edgar Allen Poes and your Stephen Kings! Instead, turn to a little kid. For they are the true masters of the horror genre.
I don’t mean what kids carelessly do or the kinds of peril they face in life sometimes. Being a parent is absolutely terrifying in that regard. Some of those vulnerable little tykes have a real knack for getting into scary situations. But you can prepare as much as possible with good childproofing and attentive parental vigilance.
What I mean are the things that you are not prepared to hear as a parent. Nobody ever takes you aside and warns you that someday your kid will say something absolutely and devastatingly creepy.
You know those little six-word or two sentence horror contests? They’re fun writing exercises to get at the simple nature of horror. The scares that come out of kids are like that. The shorter the sentence, the scarier it is.
My kid only needed five words to chill me to the core.
It happened one seemingly ordinary morning when I came into the room to wake him up. My toddler looked at me, sat up, and calmly said five words that sent a shock down my spine. His manner was matter-of-fact. There was no malice in his voice. He simply said the words.
“Today is the last day.”
I paused. “Excuse me?” I replied.
So he repeated himself. “Today is the last day.”
His unaffected tone was what spun my brain around. I’ve struggled a bit to try to figure out how to punctuate or modify that in writing to convey the true experience. There was just a sense of the utterance being so absolute, like it was THE last day. But he had not emphasized the words or even the syllables in any way. And it was somehow impossible to think that it was the last day for a specific thing. It would have been terrifying to be told that it was the last day for me. Likewise, it might have been joyful to be told it was the last day for watching endless loops of Thomas the Tank Engine.
Today is the last day. . . as in the last day ever.
He didn’t say it again. He just started his busy little kid day in his usual busy way.
But those weird thoughts started creeping into my brain. The world of the normal had ruptured and I was in that mental place dealing with what Sigmund Freud called “the uncanny.” I did not panic or anything. But I kept wondering– What if he was right? What if it was the last day? I realized immediately that this was the premise of a great horror story and I was in the middle of it.
The calm routines of the morning wore those thoughts down. . . eventually. After all, who has time to think about the possible end of the world or the disruption of the known universe when there are clothes to pick out and breakfast to be made? And infinite Thomas DVDs to watch?
Of course, the world did not end. So that’s a good thing.
All good horror fiction stays with you. It makes you wonder about what to do in an exceptional or paranormal situation. And I still think about that morning from time to time. It still gives me the same chill.
