The Horror of It All

Right now, horror has a name.

My laundry pile.

More precisely not MY laundry pile but the pile of laundry collected, Communist-style from the "collective" that is my family of six. It makes me shudder.

But that's the brilliance of the horror genre. Finding the frightening in the mundane. To that end, BAMBI was named, by Time Magazine as one of the top-25 horror films of all time. Brilliant. Heck, it scared the crap out of me when I was 6 or 7. So did Disney's Snow White. Stepmom wanting the HEART of Snow White? How cannibalish! And yet all wrapped up in technicolor sweetness.

Of course, the movie that terrified me more than anything? Those damn flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz.

But, like all horror, I can find good scares in the mundane. Like my laundry. However, CLOWNS top my list. Along with cockroaches (but not spiders), rats (but not mice--unless they are very large mice), the dark (don't like it), enclosed spaces (am claustrophobic, though I recently conquered a big fear and rode the subway in NYC after not having done so for 20 years thanks to panic attacks as I would descend the stairs into the bowels of Manhattan), and people who stand too close to me--I find that creepy . . . gimme my "space."

So how about you?