I still own an old paperback copy of Carlos Clarens' Illustrated History of Horror Films. (According to Amazon, it's still in print, with "Science Fiction" added to the title.) I read it when I was in seventh or eighth grade, right around the time Karloff died. I'd like to write about both Clarens and Karloff in more depth some time, but for now the image that floats to the surface is one of the book's stills, a shot of Jason sword-fighting a skeleton in Jason and the Argonauts (1963--and how lucky was I to have been seven years old when it was released?); the caption simply reads, "Suspension of Disbelief." And while the intent is to indicate the sense of wonder such images conjure, for me it was all about the shocking disconnect between what I knew as I watched a horror film and what I could not help but feel: electrifying fear, a soul-deep shiver that forced me to wince, to look away, to flee. Scary movies erased all comfort, all cozy certainty. At such moments, I was abandoned by everything in and around me that could reassure. A truly instinctual response.
I've written about this fear before, and will probably do so again, but as the years passed I began to suffer from a different fear: that I had lost the ability to suspend disbelief, at least in terms of the breathless terror movie images could once so easily churn up. And I'm not sure when the fear waned to the point that I noticed it had done so; but I know it happened late, well into adulthood (even though a dry whispering voice tells me in uneasily reassuring tones that It isn't done with me yet; but more on that later). All I'm certain of is that I began to have to will myself into that feeling, give myself reasons to be very afraid. And that marked the beginning of the end; once I had intellectualized fear, I snarled the primal throughline, maybe for good and all, into an oxymoronic knot I'd never unravel. All I was left with was the memory of fear, and for someone attracted to horror films, that's like showing a picture of a steak to a hungry man. I already needed my imagination to be afraid of a movie; how was I going to imagine that I was afraid? A dead end, boos and ghouls.
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