Even before my older sister Lisa died, even before she got sick, I watched a lot of horror movies. They cost me sleep so if I had any sense, I wouldn’t like them as much as I do. But I do.

Mainly it’s the monsters. Not the slaughters they accomplish or how much and loud they make people scream but how powerful they are. And their back-stories, the stuff about what made them monsters in the first place. Like Jason Voorhees, from Friday the 13th. Before putting on a goalie mask and macheteing people, he was a camp kid who’d drowned because his counselors were off making-out in the woods while he was trying to swim. And Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street, his story’s actually pretty complicated.

Freddy was evil even before he died. He molested children. But before that, he’d been a baby whose mother was a little girl who’d been locked in a sicko asylum by accident. After the vigilantes had burnt adult Freddy to death for touching their kids (which you only hear about, it happened before the first film), he comes back from the grave, looking bad-ass. His face is melted, it shows big patches of the sensitive red under his skin, and he wears a slouchy hat and a glove that has ten-inch knives for fingers. He’s back to haunt and kill, but he doesn’t fuck with the people who lynched him, and not the psycho possible dads who raped his mom either. He stalks the children of the people who lynched him. And in the sequels, he goes after later generations of kids who try to grow up on Elm Street.

I know that sounds strange—that those kids get killed without even being relatives of the original angry mob. But if you think about it, living on the same street is a kind of being related. It’s like the way that all Jason’s camp counselors are related, one summer’s counselors being like the children of the same camp’s counselors from summers before.

What Freddie and Jason ultimately want to do is to stop the whole Elm Street and Camp Crystal Lake systems from continuing. Or they want to make more monster ghosts, I don’t know why. Maybe for company, or help. The films never actually say that Freddy or Jason’s victims turn into monsters after dying, but I’ve always figured that could be a marketing thing. A good monster is what makes a film popular and, once the movies have one, they don’t want to distract people with every logical spin-off. If each slaughtered kid though actually does turn into his own undead monster, it works out to be a kind of Blob Tag. One by one all the kids die, then haunt and kill. They become one big It.


After Lisa came home from the hospital, the doctors had said nothing serious was wrong with her but she still had to take meds. Every four hours. For being tired all day—more tired than before she went to the hospital I thought. Also her chest still hurt, which kept her from sleeping. She would do this thing that was like hyperventilating but quieter and, instead of passing out, her face would get dark and red. It could happen to her just whenever. Mostly at night, she said, but sometimes during the day, which I would see. Like, over breakfast. We’d be at the table and she’d be pouring sugar on her cereal one minute. Then I’d look up and she’d still be holding the sugar but staring into space, looking intense. Changing colors. She said that when that happened she had to think hard about breathing.

I started watching more movies than ever then.