That weekend I dutifully summoned my buddy Dave G. (the cartoonist currently known as Davey Oil), the guy who forces me to call myself the second biggest horror fan I know. By the time Dave and I got around to putting the thing into the VCR, it was late--I think around 11 o'clock or so. The house was quiet, and it was dark outside. We sat back and began to watch.

I'm not sure at what point it began to dawn on me that I had never, literally never, been so scared in my entire life. I think it might have been when the three student filmmakers woke up to find someone had constructed little rock monuments around their tent that Dave and I began saying "oh, shit" compulsively. I remember that around the third nightfall or so, when the tent was shaken, that my heart was pounding so hard it was actually uncomfortable and my stomach had that feeling it gets when you narrowly avoid a car accident. People, we were completely terrified. There wasn't a single level on which this film didn't work for us--the realistically pointless vulgarity of the kids' speech, the endless grays and browns of the video-taped forest, the way in which the lights from the camera illuminated just this much of the night, leaving so much of it ripe for possession by something... other. Even the fact that the Troma copies were the rough-sound edit enhanced the experience: though we couldn't hear what the characters could when noises awoke them during the night, we wanted to, and we sat on the edge of our seats and strained our ears and damned if our minds didn't provide a soundtrack that more than adequately scared the wits out of us.

And then--and then--the final scene. This time the yelling in the distance we could hear, and I still wish, when I hear it again, that I couldn't. The panicky running of Mike & Heather, that house looming up out of nowhere--my God, I was shaking, shaking hard. And then they went inside--no, please don't! I still vividly remember thinking to myself, almost in an abstract fashion, that if an old woman's smiling face were to appear in one of those (many, goddamn it) windows I would literally collapse in fear. Then up to the top floor, then yelling that "I hear him downstairs!", then running into that basement, turning a corner-- Heather following, screaming over and over again, past the handprints and scrawled gibberish on the walls, down the stairs, around the corner-- oh my God, what is he doing? WHAT IS HE DOING IN THE CORNER?

The End.

Dave and I sat for a moment, staring at the credits as they rolled by. Then slowly, we turned to each other. Our eyes widened. "Holy shit," we said, almost in unison, "what a scary fucking movie." There is almost no way in which I could exaggerate how horrified we were by that film that night. Despite the fact that at this point I had to urinate so badly it was painful, I think it took us 45 minutes to actually work up enough nerve to get out of our chairs and move to another part of the house to go to the bathroom. Since the bathroom was one of those deals where the fan comes on automatically with the light, thus making it difficult to hear what's going on the other side of the door if it's closed, I forced Dave to walk with me to the bathroom, stand outside, and continuously talk to me as loudly as possible while I peed, just so I could be sure that he was still there and hadn't disappeared. At some point we realized it was late and I had to drive him back to his house on the other side of town. This was a genuinely harrowing ordeal. We were scared of the distance from my door to the car. During the car ride, we were scared of the back of the car itself, which was way too dark for us to be able to handle it. We were scared of the way the headlights illuminated the night--way, way too much like those camera lights for comfort. When we finally got to Dave's house, it took us another 15 minutes to build up the courage to actually allow Dave to exit the car, walk the 20 feet or whatever to the back door, and go inside. Then I had to drive back to the house alone, making the back of the car even more frightening and making every dark street I passed by a goddamn nightmare. Then I had to navigate the space between the car and the house myself, then walk through the entire dark, empty, silent ground floor--past the freaking television where the freaking movie was just playing, for the love of God!--by myself, walk up those creaky stairs (stairs!) by myself, and turn the light on in my room without having a heart attack from thinking that something would be in there waiting for me. I say it again: this was the most scared I've ever been in my life.