Dawn of the Dead

I was flipping channels a few nights ago and caught the last 15 or 20 minutes of the remake of Dawn of the Dead (with Sarah Polley and Mekhi Pfeiffer), the George Romero zombie movie.  The only zombie movie I ever liked was Cemetery Man (with Rupert Everett), and that was a comedy.  But what little of Dawn of the Dead I saw through the cracks in my fingers, I kind of liked.

Now, let me explain something:  I do not like to be scared.  I guess some people think it's fun, and it gets the heart pumping and the adrenaline flowing, and if there is no real danger, there's no real harm.  This is not so with me.

I tend to run.  Then cry.

To this day, there has only been one Halloween "haunted house" that I have not been escorted out of (and that was one I went to when I was 18 and the only thing that stopped me from taking off was the fact I was there with my 6 year-old neighbor who was loving it).  My mother still talks about the Girl Scout trip when I was 11 to the haunted house where they actually had to shut the entire thing down for a few minutes after I sprinted through half the rooms and ended up collapsing in sobs in the "butcher shop."  It took several minutes of gentle coaxing by Frankenstein's monster, the butcher, and Jason (who went so far as to unmask himself) before I could be persuaded to move.

But before any emotional collapse, at any sign of danger, I'm a runner.  The fight-or-flight response for me is heavily weighted on the latter.

This is evident when I try to watch scary movies.  I get up, leave the room, peek back in, sit down and watch, then flee the room again.  I went to see Scream 2 in the theater and my friends threatened to tie me down to the chair after the third time I tried to get up to "go to the bathroom."  And it's not even the violence that upsets me.  I love creepy, disturbing stuff, too.  I think it's the fact that I know I'm supposed to be scared and that there is a meanie around the corner just waiting to jump out and startle me.  I don't like it.

But there is the fact that I do like some scary movies.  It took three or four attempts, but I finally sat through all of The Ring, and loved it.  (It did give me nightmares, but it was worth it.)

So now I want to watch Dawn of the Dead.  They played it on my movie channels a few times yesterday and I made an attempt with each one.  I was not successful.  Again, it looks like a fun movie, one that I would like, I just can't sit down and watch it.  I also had a lot of dreams featuring zombies last night.  One of them actually frightened me to the point I turned on the light and read a non-horror book for a while.  Then, I had an internal conversation that went like this:

( The Conversation. )

Welcome to my brain.