Our theme for the month of October is “childhood fears.”
As an autistic adult, I look back on certain elements of my childhood and think, Oh. That was probably a symptom.
Example: in elementary school, I had a short-lived fixation on browsing online toy catalogs.
It was short-lived because in browsing the online inventory of the now-defunct KB Toys, I found a poster for one of the original Dracula movies. Why was a toy store selling posters for horror films from the 1930s? No sé. Whatever the reason, it was there, and the image of Dracula about to chomp Mina Harker’s jugular burned itself into my brain. I was next, I was sure of it.
Nighttimes became torturous. As I laid in bed, I’d look first at my bedroom window, then at the window down the hall, waiting to see the giant bat scratching at the window or the claw-like fingers forcing the window open, followed by a lithe figure slithering its way into the house. My parents noticed my apprehensiveness whenever it was time to head to bed. I knew they’d find my fears ridiculous, so when pressed, I came up with the more plausible (to my seven-year-old mind, anyway) explanation that I was scared of kidnappers.
Reader, I was born in 1999. My unfortunate encounter with that Dracula poster and ensuing paranoia happened when I was seven or eight, so somewhere in the 2006-7 range. Reader, take a trip down memory lane and ask yourself: what film franchise kicked off in 2008? More importantly, what did that franchise prominently feature? If you said Twilight and vampires, ding ding ding! Winner! And, in the same way the explosive success of the MCU a few years later would in turn kick off a renaissance of superhero television, Twilight making big bucks at the box office kicked off a slew of vampires on the small screen: True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, the blessedly short-lived The Gates, the US remake of the UK’s Being Human, and My Babysitter’s a Vampire. (I liked that show, but it was the exception to the rule.)
I did not have a good time watching TV in fourth and fifth grade. I also have a distinct memory of one of my friends, who had been reading a book about famous movie monsters, chasing me around Mrs. Colaluca’s fourth-grade classroom, trying to get me to read the entry on Dracula. …yeah.
Eventually, the vampire deluge decreased to a trickle. The last Twilight film hit theaters, The Gates and My Babysitter’s a Vampire got cancelled, True Blood went out with a whimper rather than a bang, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter…existed. I breathed a sigh of relief.
And then someone at AMC got their hands on a certain Robert Kirkman graphic novel series and saw dollar signs.
The Walking Dead took me out of the frying pan and into the fire. I blame Honest Trailers…and sabertooth tigers. Sabertooth tigers because they grafted into prehistoric humans’ brains an unshakable fear of being eaten alive, and Honest Trailers for bringing that fear to the surface of my brain with a montage of characters becoming walker munchies in their trailer forTWD seasons one through three. I will say that my aversion to the reanimated and shambling put me ahead of the curve: I hated The Walking Dead long before its hopeless tone and rinse-repeat plots scrubbed away audience goodwill.
Like an inverse of 2008, The Walking Dead spurred on a horde (heh heh) of zombie films: the 2010 remake of The Crazies, World War Z, Warm Bodies, Cooties, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, Cell, The Girl With All the Gifts, Train to Busan, Anna and the Apocalypse–the list goes on.
I’ve been spilling ink about my childhood fears of vampires and zombies, and my gut-spilling begs the question: have I gotten over them?
Sorta.
My receding goosebumps at the mention of Nosferatu is in part because of my warming up to horror movies. Ironically, in middle school, as I had Twilight and The Vampire Diaries to the left of me and The Walking Dead and Zombieland to the right, there I was, stuck in the middle watching horror films in fifteen-minute chunks on YouTube. Watching A Nightmare on Elm Street, Final Destination 3, Friday the 13th Part III, and the ‘90s It miniseries cured me of a third childhood fear, blood. Taking the edge off my hemophobia in turn whittled away at my want for a garlic salt-loaded shotgun and/or Michonne’s katana and/or Blade’s contact information.
Zombies can still stay far away from me, although nowadays that’s less out of primal fear and more out of annoyance at the sheer repetitiveness of the genre. Oh, humans are the real threat, not the implacable bullet sponges disemboweling people with their bare hands? Suuuuuure. The military gets overwhelmed within twenty-four hours, but a group of people who raided the nearest Cabela’s survive for years? Suuuuuuuuuuuuure. That guy has nothing wrong with him, even though he’s wearing a wool sweater during summer in Atlanta and has been hiding his arms behind his back for the last three hours? Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure.
As for vampires? I mean, I’m still probably never going to watch The Vampire Diaries or The Originals #ArrowverseIsSupreme, but one of the best–Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter–and one of the worst–Octavia Butler’s final novel Fledgling–books I read this year both had vampires for protagonists, so do with that info what you will.
Also, without vampires, we wouldn’t have “Decode” by Paramore, Robert Pattinson’s Batman, The Lighthouse, or “Somebody get these BEGGARS out of here!”
So, there’s that.
Noah Keene graduated from Calvin University in December 2021 with a major in creative writing and a minor in Spanish. He currently resides in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. He spends his free time reading and putting his major to good use by working on his first novel. See what he’s reading by following him on Instagram @peachykeenebooks and read his other personal writing by going to thekeenechronicles.com.
