Phobias

Last night, through the piles of drafted stories and watery, tired eyes, I had a conversation with my friends Dom and Sam about horror films. We were discussing Vampires and Dom made a reference to how I watched horror films as a young child. I said Death Becomes Her and Little Shop of Horrors were among my favourite films but how the man-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors terrified me as a child. This got me thinking about phobias. I guess you could say my phobias add to my quirk - if I have one that is - but are very odd. I have a - for want of a better word - phobia of giant plants - giant heads of plants at least that look like they might eat you. To this day I can't watch the scene from Jumanji where the giant plant almost eats the young boy.


This is one of a few 'fears' or 'phobias' that I have. The interesting thing about phobias is that it can help with writing - writing a story about fear was my initial sub-plot when it came to Cupid's Obsession but I decided to focus the story on love and perhaps write a separate story about fear. I also have - now I'm trusting you to keep my secret - a huge fear of the dark. I was always a night-light kind of child - asking my mother to keep my door slightly open so the landing light could flicker inside. My dad would always forget about this and accidentally switch the light off after he had been to the toilet - something that would result in me running outside and changing immediately. But as the years went by and my imagination grew darker I started to realise - my door is open! Somebody can easily come in!


Imaginative people always think beyond what is already there. For example, I went to see the film Martha Marcy May Marlene the other week - a film, for those of you who don't know, is about a cult, one that bares a similarity to the Manson Family. I was home alone the night I watched it and lay in my bed and thought "my bedroom door is unlocked, they could come in and stand around my bed and I wouldn't know." This resulted in me locking my bedroom door. This isn't a phobia of mine, I guess you could call it a paranoia when in the night and I wonder about all the unanswered bumps. 


My fears - spiders being my extreme one, heights being minor and another host of others which I won't bore you with - affect my writing. Fear, I feel, creates the best eerie stories. Stoker, after all, wrote Dracula after a nightmare that he had about three women crawling around his chair, the details of which were used for Dracula's brides. I, myself, bask in the idea of madness but fear it - after all, when you're mad nobody takes you seriously, right? That fear came in the form of three stories, one of them is very close to me and nobody has ever read entitled Bury the Hatchet. Here's a snippet of the fear:

"But they were different, they didn’t abide by the normal rules, they brought something new to the table, they gave a big middle finger to the other writers, they told Dickens and Shakespeare to ‘fuck off’, they told Tolstoy and Fitzgerald to crawl up their ass and die, they told me that it was alright to be as mad as them."