While I’m busy working through the final edit of my book –– The Humorist: Adventures in Adulting and Horror Movies — I thought I’d share a little history.
I’ve never been a “kid guy.” That’s sort of how this whole project got started.
When my wife, Rebecca, launched her “Maybe We Should Have a Baby” campaign a few years back, I launched my own counter-campaign to avoid the question for as long as humanly possible. I became a master subject-changer. A pro-level hide-in-the-bathroomer. I was bulletproof — until one day, she caught me off guard. I was cornered. Confronted. Rebecca wanted answers, but all I had to offer were more questions.
Why didn’t I want kids? I asked myself.
Was this a fear of parenthood, or a fear of change?
Would not having kids be something I come to regret later in life, or was it always my fate to grow into the kind of grumpy old man who eats prunes alone on his porch and sneers at other people’s children as they ride past on their bikes, like I already do now, in my thirties?
Naturally, I looked to the movies for answers, and what I found was a treasure trove of creepy kids all throughout the history of horror cinema. Children of the Corn, The Bad Seed, The Omen, The Ring, Chucky, the Grady sisters in the hallway of The Shining:
The list goes on and on.
I started writing this book as a way of working through my hang-ups. I was challenging old ideas, growing, changing. And it was working! I was digging deep — both into myself and into film.
I found clarity. And in that clarity, I realized something extraordinary:
I was right all along!
The creepy-kid trope has such a storied history in horror exactly because kids are both creepy and horrific. Hooray, revelations!
Read the first chapter of my book, in full, here.
The premise ballooned out from there. Horror movies became a way of understanding the many other horrors associated with adulting, but parental anxiety is where it all started.
In that spirit, and ahead of the book’s release this summer, here’s a sneak peak at the creepy kids who populate its pages, in stories that explore the hazards of genetics, the crushing weight of parental responsibility and the all-consuming dread of becoming a “dance dad.”
More to come soon — but in the meantime, a little advice: If I’ve learned anything from this soul-searching deep-dive into the self/scary movies, it’s to be proactive.
If your kid starts exhibiting stranger-than-usual behavior, for instance, you might want to befriend a priest … and a medium … and check for “666” birthmarks.
You know — just in case.
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Mike Cavaliere 