“Dad,
what’s the scariest movie you’ve ever seen?” Danny asked.
I replied
reflexively. “ALIEN.”
“What’s it
about?”
“Um,
well... it’s about this group of... well, sailors really. On a spaceship, sometime in the future. They’re on like a high-tech space tugboat,
towing a gigantic space barge of minerals or something. The ship’s computer picks up some kind of
alien signal they think is a distress call, and the company orders them to go
check it out...”
We were on
our tandem bike, hauling down to his choir rehearsal. Twice a week we have this invaluable
father-son bonding time for half an hour.
I pick him up from school and we bike together, me the captain and Dan
the stoker, that five or six miles. It’s
our only chance to have manly talks, and this particular week Danny had decided
he wanted to know about scary movies. He
was in fifth grade, and if memory serves, this is exactly when scary movies
became an obsession for me and my buddies, too.
I spent the
next several minutes reciting, over my shoulder, my recollection of ALIEN’s plot
to my son. ALIEN without an S, mind you:
the Ridley Scott one. Turns out when you
try to summarize ALIEN without the thrum of the engines, the
spooky music, the perfectly calibrated lighting, the underplayed and overplayed
acting, and the hissing cat, it’s not frightening in the least.
“That
sounds great! I want to watch
it.”
“No!” I
barked, again reflexively. “Your mother
will kill me!” And then another thought
came to me. “Besides, ALIEN may not
really be the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.
It depends on how you ask the question.
It’s subjective, right? Opinion,
not fact.” He’d been learning a lot
about fact vs. opinion in class. “The
movie that probably scared me most in my life was WAR OF THE WORLDS, because I
saw it when I was a little kid.”
“What’s
that about?”
“Well,
there’s this mysterious meteor lands in a field...”
So after I
told him the plot of WAR OF THE WORLDS we came to an arrangement. He would work his way up to ALIEN. We would have our very own home science
fiction film festival. We proceeded to
do exactly that, with his sisters joining us for some of the tamer
offerings. E.T., CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE
THIRD KIND, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, MEN IN BLACK, PLANET OF THE APES,
and a favorite of both me and my wife’s, GALAXY QUEST. We two adults kept laughing at all kinds of
things in that last one that the kids didn’t get at all. “What’s so funny?” Leah asked.
“It’s a
Star Trek joke.”
“What’s a
Star Trek?”
So that, of
course, took us down a whole new path, one that led to Danny’s instant
conversion to Trekkie, Trekker, whatever.
His sisters can take or leave Kirk, but have turned into huge fans of
Mr. Spock.
Eventually,
after about a year of these occasional viewings, we worked our way up to ALIEN.
I gave Danny and his buddy Niko stern
warnings about how scary the movie would be, how I would not be held
responsible for the nightmares that were sure to plague them for months, nor
for the imagined stomach aches they might suffer. Then we watched. Big screen.
Subwoofer on. Curtains drawn. Sisters absent. And...
“Yeah, that
was good, but it wasn’t scary.”
When the
baby alien came bursting out of John Hurt’s chest, they had laughed
uproariously, and made me repeat the scene a couple more times. “That’s the stupidest looking thing I’ve ever
seen,” was Niko’s verdict. “It looks like a bloody sock puppet!”
I decided
to up the ante. The next week we watched
JAWS. Again, they liked it. Again, no nightmares.
My
inability to make a scary movie impression on two people who should be at their
most impressionable led me to search my cinematic soul. I also learned that Niko’s dad is a big fan
of zombie movies. That, finally, jogged
my memory:
TWENTY-EIGHT
DAYS LATER just arrived from Netflix. Let’s
see if those smug little twirps can sit thorough this one without tears!
I will keep
you updated of the result. In the meantime,
send suggestions. Keep in mind that
these are twelve year-old boys of the current generation. They’re hard to scare, but they’re still
pre-pubescent. SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is
out of the running, for instance. So is
the movie that is really, truly, the scariest one I’ve ever seen, that I dared
not even try to describe to my son, or any child. It is the Dutch film SPOORLOOS. Trust me.