I can't stop watching horror movies.

I don't know why I do this to myself.
I have a Netflix account. It is fantastic. I go online, pick out a bunch of movies I want to watch and then they ration them out to me a few at a time. My Wonderful Wife and I share the account, and we each have our own queue. She picks out all the girlie movies she wants and then I have the responsibility for choosing movies that we both would watch in between the ones that only I would be crazy enough to view.
Once every couple of months I queue up a horror flick. Normally it isn't the old fashioned movies, although I have given myself a history lesson now and again. Usually it is the cutting edge of mainstream horror films; the scariest, the grossest, the most tension-giving films you can't even imagine.
I love the rush, the thrill, the adrenaline of being scared by these movies.
But they scare me so much that it is a torture for me to watch them.
Take tonight's fare: "Hostel", a movie about American back-packers travelling Europe, lured by the promise of easy women to a particular, off-the-map, hostel where tourists are captured and used as torture victims for rich deviants. It's gory, it's scary and it's a complete stress-fest.
This movie is only 94 minutes long, but i have been watching it for over three hours. I take breaks to read up on the latest baseball scores, play a video game, write this blog. I need the breaks or I would cry myself to sleep later. I still might.
Normally, after watching one of these movies, I turn on all the lights on the way back to my bedroom. I turn on the one ahead of me before going back and turning off the ones behind me. I normally check all the doors to be sure that they are all locked. Tonight I forgot. On my way to sleep I try to distract myself from everything I just saw, normally without much luck. I sit awake, scrutinizing every sound in the entire house.
An hour ago, Little Bubba stirred himself awake. As a reflex, I paused the movie, went down the hall, entered his (dark) room and closed the door behind me so I can soothe him without bothering anyone else. As he fell back asleep, I realized how dark it was in the room. I realized how dark it was in the hall. I realized how little I wanted to open the door to leave his room.
Silly, right? If the movies bother me so much, why do I watch them?
I have no idea.
I can't help myself.
My wife just shakes her head at me. There is no way she will watch with me.
I actually only have one friend who will go see horror flicks in the theater with me: Darryl. We saw "The Village", "Saw" and some Dragon movie that wasn't really a horror film. Ok, "The Village" wasn't that scary either. But it was supposed to be. Darryl is the only one crazy enough to see these movies with me.
I still have no idea why I do it.
I am sickened by the gore, I am frightened by the shocks, I am upset by how tense the movies are.
I keep renting them.
I have about 10 minutes left in this movie. Probably not much left that will scare me, but I still needed a break to diffuse this stress I was feeling.
I'll do it again. I have fifty different horror movies in my Netflix queue, all just waiting their turn. I won't get to all of them. I'll see a lot of them.
My mother wouldn't let me watch horror films when I was a kid. I never saw any of the classics: Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Omen, Amityville Horror, Evil Dead, etc. I did see Poltergeist, and it scared the pants of me. There was a birthday sleepover I went to as a kid and (I remember this distinctly) I spent most of the night in the kitchen with the kid's mother while everyone else watched "The Thing" in the living room. I knew that if I watched it, my mom would be very disappointed.
Now I know she doesn't really care. Well, I'm sure as she is reading this she is shaking her head at me just like my Wonderful Wife does, but that's okay. I have seen most of those old classics now -- I have caught myself up on the essentials.
In high school I went to the movies often. I remember seeing two horror movies in particular: "Serpent and the Rainbow" and "Prince of Darkness". Those two were enough that I didn't watch horror movies very often after that.
In college I watched the Hellraiser series. Nightmare central, my dorm room.
So what's the other movie I have? The one that is "wife approved"? "The Producers", starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. We watched the first 20 minutes of it and it was so awful that I couldn't put myself through another two hours of it. The songs were silly, the acting was over-done, and the jokes were barely funny. I normally like Mel Brooks, but I couldn't handle this. My wife checked out ten minutes earlier than I did, reaching for her book.
So I put on "Hostel" instead.
Three hours later I am tired, and I can't wait to go to bed, but I am so nervous that I am not looking forward to it.
I can't stop watching horror movies.