Scary Movies Are Good for You
For those unfamiliar with the crime drama series Breaking Bad – and unbothered by a spoiler of sorts – there is a memorable episode in which a member of the Mexican cartel becomes a police informant. When his drug-dealing associates find out they wreak their revenge by cutting off the informant’s head and sticking it on top of a tortoise (for reasons too nefarious to go into). The gruesome human/tortoise amalgam is then (slowly) unleashed into the desert to serve as a reminder to watching officers and other potential traitors that the cartel is not to be messed with.
As I watched this horror unfold on my television screen I couldn’t avert my eyes. Granted, my vision was partially obscured by the hands I’d placed over them to protect my sensitive disposition, but still. If you had told me six months ago that I would be not only tolerating, but enjoying, such violent entertainment I would have scoffed in derision.
Until recently I steadfastly refused to watch anything but saccharine sitcoms and predictable romantic comedies. My reading material, meanwhile, was confined to chick lit. I was on first name terms with every one of Marian Keyes’s fictional heroines and ploughed through more Friends reruns than I had hot dinners. I found formulaic plot lines a refreshing antidote to having to use my brain and a welcome reassurance that – in a volatile and ever-changing world – everything would be all right in the end.
Anything with the slightest element of fear left me scrambling for the nearest cushion to hide behind.
So far, so vanilla. But then I watched Breaking Bad last autumn and my lifelong conviction of what constitutes decent entertainment shifted on its axis. Admittedly the decision to witness protagonist Walter White’s metamorphosis from placid chemistry teacher into gun-wielding drug kingpin after being diagnosed with terminal cancer wasn’t entirely my own. My husband Chris – whose Svengali is Stephen King and who would make it mandatory to watch a horror film a week if I weren’t in charge – had long since tired of my aversion to expanding my cultural horizons. After eight years together I realised, for the sake of marital harmony, that I should at least show a willingness to branch out.
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