Well, At Least It's Quiet Here

Ten 'til five. Normally, I would have been gone 30 to 45 minutes ago. Sadly, though, One Ring won't be able to pick me up until 7ish. So I'm here at the hospital, trying to gather enough energy to work on my application for the next couple of hours.

I have to admit, this place gets creepy when there's no one around. Like most hospitals / schools / office buildings, the level of eerie-ness is in direct inverse proportion to the number of people roaming the hallways. So, now that it's after quitting time, and 99% of the day shift is gone, this complex has gone all quiet. Which would be nice, I suppose, had I not just been reading a bunch of online horror short stories and web blogs to pass the time!

I have to admit, I have a love / hate relationship with horror. I love the genre, in that I like to feel creeped out by a really well done scene (such as the ball bouncing down the stairs towards George C. Scott in The Changeling or hearing Gary Oldman laughing at Keanu Reeves's suffering in Bram Stoker's Dracula - and who doesn't take pleasure at Keanu Reeves suffering?). There were several scenes in The Sixth Sense that floored me. I actually couldn't sleep for a week after that one, and found myself actually wanting to investigate haunted places! And I don't even believe in ghosts!

But, alas, the trouble with the horror genre is that for every great movie, there are hundreds - maybe thousands - of knock offs, stinkers, and cliches. Pablo Francisco has this great sketch that I'm going to find on Youtube and post here about it. He talks about how every slasher movie is pretty much the same. Guy walks up to a creepy house, just as news of an escaped psychopath hits the radio, and goes in.

"Hello? Anyone here?" (Ch, ch, ch, ch, ah, ah, ah, ah)

"Billy?" (Ch, ch, ch, ch, ah, ah ,ah, ah)

"I'm going to get naked and jump in the shower!"

And the killing begins.

But that's the problem. You can't feel scared when you can't relate to the characters. If cliche character #1 (say, the jock) gets mutilated, folded, spindled, stapled, or whatever, and all he's done for the last twenty minutes is be a jerk and say horrible lines, who cares? Unfortunately, too much attention is placed on the special effects, and not enough on the plot, acting, and direction. To be honest, I found the frozen in time, blood splattered students in the music video for Pearl Jam's Jeremy far more disturbing and eerie than most of the horror movies I've seen recently. Psycho is consistantly ranked as one of the scariest movies ever, and at no point is there any gore whatsoever. It's chocolate syrup going down a drain. That's it. Yet that one scene has kept people out of showers for over a generation!

But I digress. It's quiet here. It's creepy. And I work with psych patients. Yeah, it's going to be a long couple of hours until One Ring picks me up! : )

Okay, back to the application. Oh, I heard the other day that the odds are even longer than the massive climb I was already attempting. More people applying, and they're getting really nit-picky, it sounds. Sigh.