I was 11 when Titanic came out, and I saw it in the theatre with my mom and my godfather. When I went to bed that night, I pulled the covers over my head and bawled thinking of Jack’s beautiful face sinking into the ocean and Rose’s death dream where he’s young and virile again rather than a frozen, rotted-out skeleton at the bottom of the North Atlantic. Since then I have dreamed of a passionate love where one of us dies before we can hate each other. I have also dreamed of the scene where the guy falls off the ship and hits the propellor on the way down, because although it disturbed the living hell out of me, everyone in the theatre seemed to find it hilarious.
I want to say that if I saw Titanic now, I would laugh along with everyone else. But I think I’d still find it disturbing, which is weird, because I watch terrible things all the time and don’t feel particularly disturbed. I have never watched a Saw movie and thought “Oh, the humanity!” Usually when I watch a Saw, I just feel angry at Jigsaw for being so selfish.
Horror is a genre where guys get juiced like lemons in a way that makes you forget they’re guys, which numbs you to the fact that there are guys out there being juiced like lemons. If you couldn’t think of people as inflatable bop bags, you’d be wandering around matting your hair and muttering to yourself, because there is enough suffering in the world this very moment to equal three eternities of Hell. True horror is when you remember that the guy being juiced like a lemon is a guy, and lots of movies try to do that to you, but it’s trickier. We’ve all seen the guy get lemon juiced, and the other guy get barbecued, and the girl get ketchup bottled (that’s when you squeeze someone until they explode), so it’s usually no biggie.
The stuff that gets to us is way harder to predict, because disturbance is personal. I am way more disturbed by the thought of a character shitting in public than getting rigged up to a bone-wiggling machine as punishment for not taking a bigger bite out of life. After I watched Drag Me to Hell, I meditated all night on how horrible it would be to actually get dragged to hell and have your eyes bug out like that. And one of the worst things I ever saw was a giant throng of magic people standing in front of a slime pit chanting “slimo, slimo,” until a giant meatball rose up and ate two bystanders and burped out a butterfly woman. This is how I remember the Great Land of Small, a low-budget Canadian fantasy flick from the ’80s starring Michael J. Anderson from Twin Peaks. I watched it as a little kid and found it way more disturbing than the mom dying in “Bambi,” because moms dying at least made sense.
My friends, on the other hand, have all been disturbed by things I never found disturbing. When I was a kid, I pretended to find clowns scary because it seemed like the cool thing to do, but I was way more scared of Krazy Glue. The Exorcist never got to me, but I had to walk out of Meteor Man. My friend once watched a low-rent giallo with me and then bragged for like five years about the fact that she made it through the thing. I found the movie boring, but to this day I can’t watch the video for “Black Hole Sun.” I wish I hadn’t written the words “Black Hole Sun,” because I’m going to bed now. Now it’s morning and I dreamed about a bok choy burrito.
The Titanic guy got to me for the same reason everyone else found him hilarious: he bounced off the propellor like a banana someone chucked off a rooftop. Everyone was laughing, both at the guy and at the director for making slapstick by mistake, but all I could think about was how agonizing his death would be, and I was disturbed by his dehumanization. At least the propellor guy reminded me that terrible things are terrible. Last year I watched A Serbian Film and all I could think about was how much the main guy resembled my friend’s roommate.
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Alexandra Molotkow writes about life and stuff for Toronto Standard. Follow her on Twitter at @alexmolotkow.
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