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I’m so small my big brother can toss me over his shoulders without missing a step. He has to carry me sometimes because I’m always barefoot and broken glass lines the path to the factory where Mommy works. There are eight of us in this tiny house, plus dogs and cats, but one bathroom. I’m the youngest so I don’t get my own bed yet. I sleep under a green quilt tossed over the couch.

I am so scared I can’t move. I barely breathe. My big brothers like scary movies and the only TV in the house is just a few feet away. I’m trying to sleep, but they’re watching an old 1950s sci-fi flick. Martians vaporize Earthlings. A cop sights a UFO in our town. It made the national news. The anchor mispronounced our town’s name, a Lenni Lenape Indian word meaning “sassafras.” I quietly wait to be vaporized, and am surprised when I am not.

Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Incredible Shrinking Man, the Blob, the Thing, the zombie, warrior skeletons fighting Jason and the Argonauts: all haunt that TV screen. I suck my thumb. I don’t dare speak. If I did, they’d make fun of me. They think I’m asleep, and they talk about me. They call me “dumb.” They call me “weird.” They wonder if I’ll ever be “normal.” I want to say, “If you’d stop beating me up, calling me ‘fatso,’ and watching scary movies while I’m trying to sleep, I’d have a better crack at being normal someday.”

The Haunting is the worst. It’s a black-and-white, 1963 movie. Even though I’m just a stain on the couch, I sense that The Haunting is about so much more than spooks. But because I must remain silent, I can’t say in words what’s so scary about it. The Haunting’s evil seeps into the marrow of my bones and stays there, like a virus that I can never clear.

I’m an old lady now. This time of year, as Halloween approaches, I revisit that tot sucking her thumb on the couch. Though I’m a grown-up, scary movies still pant at my heels. They accuse me: you are weak. You must learn to be brave.

Interior strength and exterior toughness were the highest values among us working class Slavs. We had to be “strong like bull.” My older brothers were all over six feet, athletic, and they liked to challenge cops. My sister was a nurse who worked the ER and saved lives. During WW II, my dad lead men in combat.

One night an unknown number of toughs outside our house shouted scary threats. There was a dispute involving my brother. My mother, a short Slovak immigrant, without hesitation or even turning on the outside light, swung open the back screen door and marched outside. She was dressed only in a housecoat and armed only with her tongue, a formidable assassin. I never once heard her say the F-word. She never needed it. My mother tore the punks apart. They dispersed and that was the last we heard of them.

When I was a teenager, I thought I had finally grown out of my fear of scary movies. I went to The Exorcist. I spent most of the movie with my head inside my boyfriend’s shirt. We left early.

My sister laughed. She was asked to leave the theater. She had read the book while spending a weekend alone in an isolated cabin. She loved Stephen King. How the hell was I related to these people?

I eventually hitchhiked, alone, coast to coast and back again. I fended off attackers armed with guns and knives. I crossed, alone, the length of a sparsely populated African nation on a moped. I trekked, alone, carrying my own pack, to Kala Patthar. I’ve handled tarantulas. I’ve fed snakes, and also eaten snake. I have zero fear of public speaking. I never kill spiders in my apartment. Once, while hiking, I was paced by a black bear. I knew that none of this was enough, because I feared that I would still pee myself if I ever watched The Haunting again.

I did what I had to do. I began buying tickets to scary movies. I was afraid to watch The Haunting or The Exorcist. But I watched plenty more. I paid to watch Donald Sutherland turn into a space alien in 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. When 1999’s indy, The Blair Witch Project was advertised as super scary, I rushed to the theater. That same year I admired the craftsmanship evident in The Sixth Sense so much that I was never scared. I laughed at 2004’s brain-eater comedy Shaun of the Dead. I kept my eyes open through the 2013 box-office blockbuster The Conjuring directed by horror master James Wan and starring art-house darling Vera Farmiga as supposedly real-life ghostbuster Lorraine Warren. I rolled my eyes through the 2017 horror-as-racism-lecture Get Out and was actually intrigued by the experimental Midsommar, Ari Aster’s 2019 horror flick filmed entirely in daylight. I didn’t want to see any of these movies. Every time I bought a ticket, every hour I spent in the theater, I was trying to become as brave as my mother was that night she faced off with the thugs. And I was trying not to be myself, the thumb-sucker.

As befits any discussion of spooky stuff, there are discordant details in this narrative that are impossible to reconcile. For example, gore doesn’t intimidate me; it offends me. Gore is a constant in slasher flicks, body horror, and torture porn, in movies like The Last House on the Left, the Saw and Pearl franchises, and the recent Demi Moore film about an aging actress, The Substance.

Even as a kid, when I saw Lon Chaney’s make-up for The Phantom of the Opera, I realized: they made him look ugly. Kids teased me by calling me “ugly.” Gore is all about exploiting people’s shallow recoil from ugliness – the ugliness of being born with less than perfect features, the ugliness of illness, the ugliness of age. I worked as a nurse’s aide. I handled blood, pus, mucus, vomit, feces. I washed the dead bodies of my patients; when the time came, I washed the corpse of my beloved, horror-loving sister. Through prayer, God helped me to recognize and interact with the human being beneath the “distressing disguise.”

Exploiting gore as entertainment flatters the inner adolescent who has never come to terms with imperfection or mortality. There is plenty of evidence suggesting that violent media contributes to violent behavior. I think that gory movies are not just trash; I also think that they are morally corrupting.

I did unwittingly buy a ticket to body-horror master David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986). I’ve been a Jeff Goldblum fan girl ever since his eight-second scene in Annie Hall. “I forgot my mantra.” In The Fly, Goldblum turns himself into an oozy, hairy, puking, fly-human chimera. I wasn’t scared. I thought that turning a hot movie star into a fly was a waste. I thought, “This nonsense is best suited for some teenage boy.” Gore scares me in this respect: that creators produce it, and that audiences buy it.

There is zero gore in The Haunting. It doesn’t need gore.

Another discordant detail. I love Halloween. As a kid, I loved The Uninvited, a 1944 ghost story. There are significant differences between The Uninvited and The Haunting. More on that below.

Third, I don’t believe. In spite of that still-unexplained UFO sighting in my hometown, I no longer wait to be vaporized. I don’t believe in magic. I would happily sleep alone in a room with the notorious, allegedly demonic “Annabelle,” a Raggedy Ann doll.

My bug-eyed students would insist that Ouija boards are portals to hell. I told them that if they could summon Satan with a Ouija board, I’d give them an A. No takers. I made that offer because I wanted my students to test seductive but implausible beliefs against cold, hard evidence. Objective reality doesn’t flatter human frailties. The scientific method is not stored in the genes. Each generation must be inculcated anew in those gifts of our heritage that dragged our ancestors out of the cave.

I am a devout Catholic but I find it hard to believe in demonic possession or exorcism, or the literal truth of the Biblical account of the Gerasene demoniac. Jesus encounters a possessed man and exorcises him. There are good reasons for questioning the literal truth of that account. For example, there is debate as to where this encounter occurred: was it in Gerasa, Gadara, or Gergesa? None works perfectly, given the geography of each. There are plausible metaphorical interpretations; see the “Happy Catholic” blog here and Wikipedia here. Jews living under Roman oppression did resort to symbols to convey deep truths too dangerous to state plainly. The demons possessing the man are named “Legion,” which calls to mind a group of Roman soldiers, the oppressors of Jews like Jesus. Jesus sends “Legion” into a herd of pigs, an unclean animal to Jews. The pigs jump off a cliff and drown; their drowning calls to mind Pharaoh’s soldiers in Exodus. Jesus is the new Moses, leading his people to freedom and establishing a new covenant.

To me The Exorcist is not so much about the devil as it is about misogyny. An adolescent girl, who had previously been sweet and appropriate, suddenly starts talking dirty and spewing disgusting bodily fluids. I know a menstruation metaphor when I see one. During puberty, previously pure and innocent children morph into sexual beings. They become moody, snotty, and unlikable. The “possessed” brat must be tamed by celibate men. Perversely, The Exorcist markets porn behind a mask of piety. Regan plunges a crucifix into her private parts, spurts blood, and screams, “Let Jesus ____ you” as her mother watches, helplessly. That’s just cheap and nasty.

The story behind The Exorcist is the supposedly true 1949 account of the exorcism of Roland Doe. I find it hard to believe that story, too. No, I don’t believe. Yes, the movie scared me. I don’t think that this “ghost in a car commercial” is real but it scares me, too.

Maybe most anomalous of all: I don’t believe in ghosts, but I saw one. Ghost movies scare me, but the real ghost did not.

I was living in a rented room in the Berkeley Hills. I had an enviable view of a lush garden just outside my window. Beyond the drooping bough from a tree and apples so close I could reach out the window and pick them, off in the distance, looking like a LEGO toy, rose the Golden Gate Bridge. I never felt comfortable there, though.

One night I woke up to see a form approach me. A product of a Catholic family and Catholic school, I knew exactly what to do. I immediately and unambiguously declared, “I am with Jesus, and you can’t have me.” The form disappeared and I went back to sleep. Shortly thereafter, my landlady told me that the room had been her brother’s, before he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

One of the most trustworthy people I know lives in a house built and once inhabited by a notorious criminal. One night, my friend woke up and saw this very criminal looking down at him, wearing a quizzical expression that seemed to say, “What are you doing in my house?” The sight lasted mere seconds. Shortly thereafter, news broke that this criminal had died.

Someday I’ll know the truth, but for now I don’t need to work the calculation that balances out the equation, “I don’t believe in ghosts / I saw a ghost / ghost movies scare me / the real ghost did not scare me,” because neither one of these stories has any impact on my life.

Finally, this anomalous detail. It was around the same time that the parlor couch was my “bedroom” that I saw something else on TV that horrified me. Film footage of the liberation of concentration camps. “That’s what they did to us!” my mother shouted. The images, and my mother’s fury, scared me deeply. I don’t have nightmares about scary movies, but I have a recurring nightmare about Nazis that scares the stuffing out of me.

Rather than silently cringing in the face of that horror, as a teen, I saved up money from my minimum wage nurse’s aide job, and visited Auschwitz. I exposed myself to photos, videos, paraphernalia, that haunt me. I wrote a dissertation, now a prize-winning book, that addressed Nazism. Why was I able to plunge into a real scary thing while I shudder in fear at the mere thought of fictional scary films?

The first turning point in my relationship to scary movies occurred twenty-five years ago. I was part of an active internet discussion site. A guy named Chris Jaworski asked why people watch scary movies. I felt as if Chris had reached back in time and shaken the shoulder of that child pretending to be asleep on the couch. He was saying, “You feel. You are afraid to speak. Let’s analyze. You’ve been all alone. Come deal with it with others.”

To exorcise a demon, some say, one must know the demon’s name. When exorcising the Gerasene demoniac, Jesus demands to know his name: “Legion, for there are many of us.” In that internet conversation twenty-five years ago, we spoke the name of the demon.

Theories abounded. Maybe people like scary movies because scary movies “desensitize” them to the horrors of real life. Maybe “kids today” watch graphic slasher flicks because today’s kids are rotten, soulless cretins, unlike the much better kids “back in my day.” Maybe people like roller coaster rides or drugs; scary movies affect the body quite physically. Scary movies replace our lost shared mythology. Teens like horror movies because they are losing control over their bodies. They suddenly sprout breasts, muscles, or hair, they have wet dreams, they bleed, their voices change. Scary movies offer girls a chance to overcome shyness and cling to their boyfriends.

No single post was the key that turned the lock on my own problem with scary movies. It was, rather, the very process of naming and analysis that began my slow liberation from fearful paralysis.

COVID shutdowns and the subsequent writers’ and actors’ strikes limited my ability to watch movies in a theater. I took a new approach to my effort to defeat, once and for all, the power that scary narratives held over me. I began to listen to scary stories on podcasts.

I’ll never make a movie, but I do tell stories. A mechanic, hearing a malfunctioning car engine, can mentally take that engine apart and isolate the source of an alarming sound. A storyteller doesn’t just surrender to the flow of a story. She takes that story apart in her head, as if it were an engine on a workbench. She isolates the constituent parts and recognizes how the teller is working to create an effect through words, pauses, foreshadowing, and other nuts and bolts. I realized that tellers were trying to scare me through these mechanics.

Podcast ghost stories never seem to begin in media res, that is, in the middle of the action. “I saw a ghastly apparition in the bathroom mirror.” Ghost stories don’t begin like that. There is a lot of table-setting. There are always, first, sound effects signaling the kind of situation where a human would be vulnerable: wind, hooting owls, echoing footsteps that convey isolation. Suddenly, there is distant laughter or screams, and minor key music. Then a narrator promises that you are about to be really, really scared.

The podcast stories often begin with innocence. A happy family moves into a new house, expecting a new, happy life. Then there is foreshadowing. “We began to hear stories about this old Victorian house at the end of the dirt road.”

Extended table-setting, combined with predictable, repeated formulae, bored me. “Can we just cut to the chase here,” I would think. Severed head in shower stall? Faint apparition on staircase? Dogs barking at nothing you could see?

Ghosts, like the stories that feature them, engage in a lot of build-up, and minimal payoff. They waste a lot of energy approaching their targets. Ghosts really seem to like to walk upstairs. Slowly. Audibly. Look, if ghosts can move at will, why do they bother with approaching? Why not just appear next to their target hauntee?

Storytellers insisted that their stories were true, but they also were happy to make some profit from sharing them. After a good scare, they advertised their website. Others had an ax to grind. One teller was a black guy who had to exorcise his white grandfather’s ghost by forgiving him. Even though, as a black man, he was sick of “black people always having to forgive white people’s racism,” he did.

One story contributed more to my recovery from my fear of ghost stories than any other. It was a long one, a real shaggy dog. There was a storm, and people were evacuating. This went on for several minutes. Finally, a man at the side of the road waved the storm evacuees into his house. He offered evacuees over-night refuge. They ate macaroni and cheese, watched TV, were given sleeping bags to sleep on the floor, and the next day went on their way. Later, they returned, to discover the house was a ruin. Neighbors said it hadn’t been inhabited for years.

Macaroni and cheese. Ghosts cook, eat, and serve macaroni and cheese. There were ghosts that speak audibly. That generate scents, usually sweet perfumes or foul decay. In one podcast “true” story, a ghost consistently leaves payment on his kitchen table – in exact change – for a paper boy. In another “true” podcast story, a ghost plays full tunes, expertly, on a Scottish bagpipe. In traditional folklore, incubi and succubi have sex with humans. In the 1982 film Poltergeist, ghosts stack dining room table chairs on top of the table.

In short, ghosts can do physical things. But you never hear about ghosts pooping. On the other hand, ghosts don’t perform or receive colonoscopies or groom pets. Demons never parallel park cars. Look. If a ghost can walk upstairs, which the senior citizens among us can attest is no small feat, then, darn it, ghosts should poop, too. But they don’t. And that formulaic list of things ghosts can do, that leaves out things that they should also be able to do but that wouldn’t fit so well into a well-told tale, informs me that even “true” ghosts stories are, like other fictions, smoothly running machines with predictable beats that exist, not to plunge into any deep truth of the human condition, but just to scare kids at a slumber party. Taking oral ghost stories apart, like a machine, and laying the constituents out on my workbench, and reverse engineering a generic ghost story, bled the genre of much power, for me.

Other “true” podcast ghost stories disturbed me in a different way. One “true” storyteller acknowledged that she had a bad relationship with her mother because of her mother’s concern for her mental health. The tale teller claimed that a demon lives in her closet. The demon attempted to drown her in the tub, and then tried to suffocate her with her bedding. The demon told her that she wanted to die, and he was just helping her out.

I assumed that the podcast hosts would, as responsible adults, inform this young woman that her best bet would be to visit a mental health professional.  That’s not what they did. They affirmed her belief that she was being haunted by a demon.

In podcast stories, ghosts and demons pay attention to people who often sound lost and lonely. If you have no friends, and you find no meaning in your life, being stalked by a demon might feel like a deliverance into personal significance and meaning.

A teller of a “true” tale recounted graphic, sadistic murders, ostensibly committed by a demon summoned by a Ouija board. The hosts made no comment about the violence, and they affirmed that a demon committed the murders.

There is a dark side. Some people do inexplicably horrible things. Sometimes inanimate forces ruin lives so ruthlessly we have to wonder if the active agent was not gravity or storm surges or gene defects, but rather Satan himself. Maybe, some theories go, scary stories onscreen or orally told are actually good for us, because they equip us to deal with the dark side. Too often, as the podcasts show, scary stories handicap too many in dealing with the dark side. Convincing yourself that a billowing curtain is not moved by the wind, but rather by a ghost from whom you must flee, prevents you from closing the window. The feedback that podcast storytellers receive from hosts and fans encourages a retreat from the rational into the darkness and impotence of superstition.

I’ve had a crush on Donald Sutherland ever since 1971’s Klute. Sutherland plays a good guy cop who rescues bad girl Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda). That’s partly why I bought a ticket for Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In analyzing, now, my fear of scary movies, I suddenly realize that I actually engaged in such analysis while I was watching that movie.

Sutherland is trying to escape invading space aliens. He hears music and sees ships, and hopes for escape. The music he hears is the bagpipe version of “Amazing Grace.” Sutherland’s hope is crushed. The ships have been taken over by aliens. In the final scene, Sutherland himself is revealed to have been taken over by the pods. A distorted version of “Amazing Grace” plays on the soundtrack of the final scene.

Judy Collins’ 1970 cover of “Amazing Grace” is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. The story of the song – it was written by John Newton, a slaver turned abolitionist – is a testimony to the power of Christ. In 1972, The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards released a bagpipe version. That, too, was precious to me. When Invasion of the Body Snatchers exploited this precious hymn to convey the folly of Sutherland’s hope, that cynical and abusive manipulation took me right out of the movie. I wasn’t immersed in a story; I was furious at Hollywood. I resolved that I would refuse to associate my hymn with this film’s exploitation of it.

Hollywood demanded a “happy ending” to the original 1956 Invasion. As clunky as that tacked-on ending is, for me, it highlights the preceding horror. As Van Gogh said, we see green best when we see it contrasted with its opposite, pink. Horror fans’ comments under the Invasion bagpipe scene on YouTube astound me. A typical comment reads, “I love it when a movie crushes my sense of hope.” Invasion ’78 says that we are all pod people, hope is folly, and there is no meaning. How, then, can there be any sense of horror?

The Haunting was directed by Robert Wise. Wise was nominated for an Oscar for his editing of Citizen Kane. He won Best Picture and Best Director for West Side Story and The Sound of Music. Martin Scorsese named The Haunting first on his list of the scariest films of all time. One of the world’s scariest films was sandwiched between two beloved musicals. Wise was a master craftsman and every detail of The Haunting, from the anamorphic lens that distorted images to the house’s clutter and low ceilings is designed to make the hairs on the neck stand on end. Wise encouraged his actors to step on each others’ lines – this “rude” behavior added tension.

Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson, a poor man’s Clark Gable) hopes to investigate the allegedly haunted Hill House. He invites Luke, the house’s cocky young heir (Russ Tamblyn), Theodora (Claire Bloom), a chic lesbian psychic, and Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris), a mousy woman who has had unwanted paranormal experiences. Spooky things happen; eventually Eleanor dies. Why did this movie upset me so much? Watching The Haunting through my analytical lens, rather than through my “movie fan” lens, I saw things I had never consciously seen before, and certainly would have been terrified to articulate when I was a child.

Eleanor is a jittery, self-effacing, socially awkward spinster. She wears her hair in a bun, no make-up, and dowdy clothes. She has no friends, and no life of her own. Eleanor sleeps – get this – on a couch. She lives with her sister and her brother-in-law, neither of whom care much about her. She had previously spent her entire adult life caring for her invalid mother, who has recently died. Eleanor was inside with her mother so much that she blinks in strong sunlight.

Some unnamed evil haunts Hill House. It immediately makes clear that it wants Eleanor. Eleanor awakes in the night and hears a masculine voice delivering a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon. Then Eleanor hears a child crying. The viewer hears Eleanor trying to buck herself up, trying to gather the courage to protest against child abuse. “This is monstrous,” Eleanor says to herself. “This is cruel. It’s hurting a child and I will not let anyone, anything hurt a child. I will get my mouth open right now and I will yell, I will yell, I will yell.” Finally, Eleanor screams, “Stop it!” At another point, Eleanor beats against a door of the house, shouting that she will fight it. In short, Eleanor struggles with all her might against the sick pull of Hill House. In the end, though, she can’t resist it. Was it really an unnamed evil that doomed her?

No.

Upon analysis, one realizes that it isn’t ghosts who lure Eleanor to her doom. Dr. Markway, a suave, handsome professional, is kind to Eleanor. Risking his own life, he rescues her from a shaky spiral staircase. He caresses her cheek tenderly. They gaze into each other’s eyes. She kisses his hand. Soothing, romantic music plays – an abrupt change from the cacophony of terrifying sound effects for which this film is infamous. This all occurs towards the end of the movie. You think, okay, maybe this fright fest will end happily with Eleanor rescued by a man. She will find her place in the world.

The movie denies us that life-affirming resolution. Eleanor is terrified by the sudden appearance of Dr. Markway’s wife. It isn’t a ghost who pushes this spinster over the edge. It’s loneliness. She tries to drive away from Hill House, but, again, Dr. Markway’s wife jumps in front of her car. Eleanor veers into a tree and dies. The end of the film makes clear that Eleanor has been subsumed into the dark supernatural entity that runs Hill House. The movie shows us pathetic Eleanor flailing wildly against her interior timidity and the exterior, supernatural evil of Hill House, trying to be braver than she’s ever been. The house flattens her as if she were under the crush of an advancing steamroller.

There’s an even darker subtext to all this. This subtext is truly “unnatural,” a word we use for both the supernatural and that which is contrary to life’s natural order. The Haunting provides us with the genealogy of those who have inhabited the house. Generation after generation, the needs of the young to separate from the old and flourish in their own lives is thwarted. The young who do attempt to do so die and are subsumed into the supernatural evil of the house. Eleanor is a loser because her sickly mother never allowed Eleanor to have her own life. Eleanor never developed a healthy ego. She’s a flower that has stayed in the bud stage, never blooming, for too long. Dr. Markway saved her life. That might be the one moment in her life when she mattered to someone.

No wonder this movie freaked me out. It depicts, over its almost two-hour runtime, the grinding, merciless destruction of a harmless woman whose only fault is that she has never mattered to anyone.

Those who champion scary movies as cultural tools that prepare us to face life’s challenges can’t defend The Haunting. Its central plot is human sacrifice. Dr. Markway, his wife, Theodora and Luke aren’t better people than Eleanor. They just have healthier egos. They get to clap the dust of Hill House off their palms and walk away. The novelist whose work inspired the film is the brilliant Shirley Jackson, who also wrote “The Lottery,” one of the greatest short stories ever written, which more explicitly depicts the human sacrifice of an equally arbitrarily chosen, otherwise blameless woman.

The 1999 remake of The Haunting, in trying to salvage Eleanor, names the previously unnamed evil haunting Hill House: laissez-faire capitalism. In the 1999 version, the original owner of Hill House abused child labor in his textile factories. Eleanor becomes a messiah figure who voluntarily dies to liberate the ghost children from being trapped in the old, dead, white man’s house. With Eleanor’s sacrifice, the ghost child laborers are able to ascend to Heaven. Note: I live in a two-hundred year old former textile mill. If any ghosts here want deliverance, they should petition Jesus, not me.

The Woke Haunting, that insists that Eleanor must be Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to be sympathetic, is as abhorrent to me as the 1963 version. Eleanor is a shy wallflower, not a Communist labor organizer. Eleanor’s happy ending probably involves her own apartment, where she can sleep in her own bed, probably a cat, and some nice unassuming guy.

The Uninvited (1944) scared me, but it didn’t traumatize me. I often rewatch it on Halloween. I think it’s a perfect film. It’s not Citizen Kane, but everything it wants to do, it does right.

Like The Haunting, The Uninvited features a haunted house. The evil in The Uninvited is a murderous mother who abuses and then haunts a daughter. This theme is as real and as disturbing as Eleanor sleeping on a couch. The difference between the two similar films: those resisting the evil entity in The Uninvited are determined to rescue the ghost’s victim, and to cleanse, not to abandon, the haunted house, and they exercise effective agency. Heroic Rick Fitzgerald (Ray Milland), his lovely sister Pamela (Ruth Hussey), and trusty Dr. Scott (Alan Napier) join forces. The house, a Georgian mansion rising above sea cliffs, at the start of the film, exudes a sickly, nihilistic miasma. After our heroes beat up the bad ghost, the house is so fresh and clean, sunny and pure, it could advertise Clorox.

The Haunting’s plot strips struggling Eleanor of any power. Dr. Markway, one potential ally, must restrain himself; he is a married man. Theo, her other potential ally, is hamstrung by her sexual attraction to, and also her superior contempt for, Eleanor. In the end, Eleanor is without effective allies. The Uninvited ends happily, with that requirement of tales’ happy ending: two completed relationships. Rick and Pamela both end up in happy couplings.

Agency, determination, and love v. impotence, nihilism, and an inability adequately to love a mousy woman. Why could I expose myself to material about Nazism, but couldn’t bring myself to rewatch The Haunting? Because I felt determined to use what I learned about Nazism to honor the victims through my scholarship and teaching. Movies played no small role in this. Like all movie-watching Baby Boomers, I was awash in media celebrating World War II heroes. And I lived with one of those heroes, my dad who lead men in combat.

Like The Haunting, the 1947 James Cagney film 13 Rue Madeleine scarred the stuffing out of me. Cagney is Bob Sharkey. Sharkey knows when and where the Allies will invade Europe. Nazis capture and torture Sharkey, attempting to get the details out of him. Sharkey resists. Sharkey’s superiors fear that he may crack under torture and reveal the D-Day details to his Nazi captors. They order that 13 Rue Madeleine, Nazi headquarters, be bombed. Sharkey hears the bombs. He knows he will soon die, but he also knows that he will never reveal his secrets. He laughs in his captors’ faces. You can watch this scene here.

No actor can better Cagney’s physicality. He is tied to a chair and exhausted from torture but every cell in his body exudes defiance. The Haunting communicates defeat in the face of overwhelming, supernatural evil. Movies like 13 Rue Madeleine insist on the value of heroic defiance, even in the face of torture and death. Horror films paralyzed me with fear. World War II movies made me want to jump into the fight and give it all I had.

Why was I not afraid when I saw what to me, at the time, seemed a very convincing evil spirit in that house in the Berkeley Hills? Because I was confident that Jesus would kick that entity’s butt.

I wish I could say that current scary movies, and the allegedly “true” narratives I heard on podcasts, equip audiences with virtuous power in the all too real fight of good against evil, including supernatural evil. Too often, though, the message is one of nihilistic overwhelm, of humans as lone, powerless playthings in the hands of unbeatable dark powers.

I wish, too, that American education and the wider culture insisted on teaching young people how to differentiate truth from falsehoods. No matter what class I was teaching in any given semester, I always devoted a lecture to tests for truth. I wanted students to know about Occam’s razor, cui bono, the scientific method, double-blind experimentation, statistics, peer-reviewed scholarship. Before they took my course, they didn’t know any of these things. Belief in conspiracy theories and dubious claims of the supernatural were rampant.

I realized one more thing while writing this essay. When I was a very young child, my environment encouraged me to believe that I had to have the same abilities as my older brothers, young men on the cusp of adulthood. I didn’t, and I’ve felt like a loser ever since. I shouldn’t have been put to sleep on a couch in a common room where I could not protest or escape material that was beyond my years. Writing this essay has gotten me to the point where I rewatched The Haunting and The Exorcist with my analytical lens. I didn’t have to suck my thumb to get through them. “Why did it take you so long, fatso?” I can hear my brothers taunt me. I admire the toughness of my natal family. I just wish love had played a greater part in the mix.

In that conversation, twenty-five years ago, initiated by Chris, some theorized that the appeal of scary movies is that they “desensitize” viewers to the horrors of life. I have never wanted to be “desensitized.” I want all my senses. It’s in using my senses – all of them – that I have finally overcome not just how much scary movies used to scare me, but also the shame I have felt at being so scared. Using my analytical lens, I’m able to decommission the power that scary movies have held over me since those long ago days on the couch.

Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.