Greg and Zanna look for, and find, the source of all fear.
SCARINESS SCORES
Projectile vomiting: 1
Head turning: 2
Inappropriate stabbing: 3
"Captain Howdy": 4
Spider: 5
SHE SAW
After we watched The Exorcist, Greg asked me why I thought it had been so popular. I threw out some half-baked ideas: People are fascinated by possession - the idea that they, or their loved ones, could be inexplicably controlled by evil. "No," he said definitively, "It's not that." The visual effects would've been quite terrifying at the time (people actually fainted in cinemas)? No, he assured me, wrong. Could it be because the person possessed was a sweet little girl? No. Was it that some of the things she did were deeply disturbing - gruesomely masturbating with a crucifix for example? Wrong again. Maybe it was because horror films speak to the fears of the era and something about possession touched a nerve in the 1970s? No. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Was it because it spoke to the plight of the disbelieved woman: the mother knew something was terrifyingly wrong with her daughter but rooms full of male doctors repeatedly told her there wasn't. "Hmmm maybe," he said, unconvinced. Some combination of all these things? "Nope," he said, "It's something else," and went to have a shower.
Later, he bounced into the hallway, overcome with excitement. The Exorcist is about people being scared of their teenagers' hormones, he announced. The girl is on the cusp of puberty and is about to turn into a crazed teenager and that speaks to the fear of all parents, he said, declaratively and nakedly. He was naked. It sounded so stupid, more stupid even than the absurd way he was drying himself, which involved wiping water off his body with his bare hands while holding a perfectly absorbent towel.