My New Horror Movie Genre

When I was a kid, I LOVED horror movies. My mom wouldn't let me watch them, but my dad was sick a lot and my sister and I stayed at Dawn Amaismeier's house many weekends while my mom was at the hospital. Louise, Dawn's mom, would take us to Erol's Video and we would rent two movies: a horror movie and a funny movie. We would watch the horror one first, get scared to death, and then watch a Mr. Bill movie or a comedy of sorts to mellow us out before bed. That was elementary school.

In middle school, my friend Jen Osborne and I watched the "Nightmare of Elm Street" movies repeatedly. We would then hang a Freddy Kreugar poster over her bed and go to sleep under it, scared to death and giggling singing "One, two, Freddy's coming for you." Why? No idea. What is it in us that loves to be scared?

Then something happened: Right around the time that I had Alexandra I stopped being able to watch horror movies. I can't do it. I get too freaked out. Maybe it has something to do with being a mother, having these two little lives to protect, and all that, but I cannot for the life of me watch a horror movie. But I can and do read/watch dystopic/apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic books/movies. In fact, I'm pretty addicted to them.

Name a dystopic novel and I have read it--most likely twice: all Margaret Atwood books (The Handmaid's Take, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood), George Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, Cormac McCarthy's The Road...the list goes on. And movies? Fuggetaboutit. I watch them all: The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, any stupid thing about a meteor hitting planet earth and we're all swallowed up by a tsunami and I'm on it like white on rice.

And then I go bonkers with fear. I strategize on how to save my kids from the Cloverfield monster, lament that I have no survival skills (can't shoot a gun, find clean water, start a fire), and think of starting a canned food/bottled water secret stash in case of a pandemic that we just happen to survive. I am not exaggerating when I say that I lay in bed at night thinking of how to get my kids, who sleep on opposite ends of our 800 sq foot apartment, to safety if there were an earthquake.

So, although I have given up the original genre of horror flicks, I feel I have transplanted myself into a much scarier and more realistic genre of dyspotic/apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic film and fiction. And as much as Freddy Kruegar scared the bejesus out of me in 7th grade, the possibility of a the waterless flood that will wipe out humanity scares me even more.

Maybe I need some anti-anxiety meds, or is this just motherhood making me crazy?

(On my list of things to learn in case the world implodes and I survive with my kids: build a fire, skin and eat small animals, forage for non-poisonous foods, shoot multiple types of guns, find clean water, self-defense...Any other suggestions?)