Confessions of a Triskaidekaphobe

Friday, December 13, 1996, I found myself driving eastbound on Los Angeles Avenue in Simi Valley, on my way to a Carl’s Jr. to order food for myself, my friend Andy, and several other coworkers at Edwards Simi 10 Cinemas. And as I approached the intersection of L.A. Avenue and Sycamore, I suddenly realized I was in the rightmost lane and would soon miss the left lane that would allow my approaching turn. In a moment of haste, I began to merge left having checked only my side mirror, but not my blind spot. No matter what anyone says, it will forever be the case that the one instance you fail to check said blind spot during a lane change, it will be hiding an enormous Peterbilt, with a bumper wide as a bulldozer blade and front grill like the grimace of a giant Halloween mask. Murphy’s Law, it seems, in all its
permutations, holds true, and such was the case for me that fateful afternoon that noticing this vehicular monstrosity, though I immediately reentered the rightmost lane, it was too late to dissuade the other driver from justifiably slamming down on his brakes, causing the truck to spin out, knocking itself and another car over the center divider into the path of oncoming traffic, leading to a lamentable series of subsequent collisions. The result of all this was that even though my vehicle had not come in contact with a single other car, I had been to blame for the whole thing. Fortunately, no one involved was seriously injured. Yet, regardless of the larger blessing of darker fates avoided, such things have a way of dampening an entire day, or week, or month due to the subsequent shock, regret, remorse, anger, or some arduous combination of these. But on what reasonable grounds should I allow myself to fixate on the day and date? Truth be told, I’ve surely had other accidents and unfortunate events occur on perfectly inoffensive dates. But for some bizarre reason, the mythic pall of a Friday’s intersection with the 13th calendar day has its hold on me. I recently discovered such to be called paraskevidekatriaphobia, the pronunciation of which is not for the verbally faint of heart, and in truth, I wouldn’t recommend attempting it, as it took a bit of research to accomplish, and even then, I was kind of dizzy afterward. Though it’s difficult to gauge which fear bore the other, a more general triskaidekaphobia definitely better characterizes this idiosyncratic malady. I admit to being occasionally prone to situational counting. So, the 13th step of a ladder or staircase is certainly worth hopping over, wouldn’t you say? As a math teacher (yes, as one who works professionally with numbers every day), I prefer to avoid 13 as a coefficient or test response. Writing 13 is uncomfortable. Bookmarking at the 13th page of a novel is unthinkable and, in fact, seems best to read through it as quickly as possible. The absence of a 13th elevator button in a high-rise seems perfectly appropriate. Receipts or dinner checks that come to 13 dollars give me the creeps. A game score of 13 feels downright calamitous. Goodness, how did I ever adopt so irrational and almost pathological an apprehension as this?

I believe I’ve been a triskaidekaphobe since childhood. The first association that comes to mind is the television promo that accompanied, oddly enough, the release of the original Friday the 13th in 1981. I believe I was mesmerized by it for some reason or other, and though I didn’t actually see the film until I was an adult, the promo was enough to inspire a terrified fascination. Now, I’m told I sat through the original Jaws at three or four; never took my eyes off the screen; and, strangely enough, never had nightmares, not of sharks, wicked witches, or any other ghoulish or otherwise frightful characters with ridiculous proboscides. My older brother, on the other hand, was not allowed to watch The Wizard of Oz for many years due to an arresting fear of Margaret Hamilton’s performance that would keep my parents awake half the night, despite his protestations beforehand. And though I’m certainly not immune to such sleepless bouts myself, some part of that mesmerized kid still dwells in me. And you know, I’m not gonna lie… Every once in a while, for no particular reason, I’m just in the mood for some gold ol’ schlock horror.

In the absence of a redemptive aesthetic, which involves a work of significance or meaning, the viewing mind simply defaults to an intermittent taste for diversion. Oftentimes we long simply to be humored, amazed, thrilled, even shocked. And what is it about the human mind that occasionally embraces fear for fun? Though a great many people have no such appetites, I myself admit to feeling the occasional bug for such mental popcorn and to capitulating every now and then to the seductive power of a terrifying tale. The original Saw is a perfect example, though the film proceeded to haunt me throughout the fall of 2004. I went in with an appetite for something gruesome and creepy, and came out thoroughly freaked and in dire need of a psychological shower. I came home and tried to get my mind bathroom fresh with a few innocuous episodes of Seinfled and the agreeably un-sinister duration of Finding Nemo. And still, I went to bed that night unable to rid my brain of those images, lines, and scenarios, continually fearful I would open my eyes and peer above the shore of my bedding only to find some diabolical figure hovering over me. This is the problem with a truly twisted tale like Saw. It doesn’t just thrill you; it poisons you. What’s more, I awoke the next morning, having gotten all too little sleep, and made the chilling discovery that I had accidentally left the front door of my apartment completely unlocked the entire night. Surely no bolt of lightning could have commanded the hairs of my neck with such force as such ominous irony thus disclosed. For months afterward, I found myself obsessively turning on lights upon returning home, repeatedly checking cupboards and closets for predatory invaders, and basically working myself into a simmering paranoia. However, despite my viewing of Saw and the paralyzing trepidation it inspired, I found myself wanting more. Sometimes, nothing would suffice but a run to Blockbuster, where I would casually peruse the gruesome disc covers that line the horror aisle. After a while, even the laughably low-budget, straight-to-video, cheesy romps with poorly-portrayed prom queens and badly-puppeted night creatures started to look good. What would it be? A demon-possessed ventriloquist’s dummy that threatens an entire suburban neighborhood? A vampire motorcycle gang? A psychopathic transvestite with a sudden affection for farm tools? Or the typical bump-and-jump haunting of a typical American family? There’s something to be said for curling up with a cozy stretch of expendable characters who foolishly investigate strange noises and stupidly explore dark corridors. And of course, now-a-days, whatever slaying is done must be achieved with almost operatic gore. Nothing like a good disemboweling, decapitation, or sudden loss of appendage with some implement of cleaving wielded with an almost endearingly awkward ferocity. And I’m ashamed to say, there were many an evening spent on a Friday the 13th or a Texas Chainsaw Massacre after which nothing would get me out of a damp and darkened basement or a fateful meat locker but an hour and a half of pure, unadulterated Pixar or a mindless sitcom with jokes too trite and agreeably superficial to allow the sinister gloom of the previous fare to linger.

But you know, after a while, I found I had had enough. You can only let yourself get freaked out so many times before the cycle of craving and regret starts to make you feel pretty ridiculous. I seemed to myself rather like those unwitting janitors and cavalier boyfriends who stupidly investigate the strange noise or careen down the dark corridors to their dooms. So what’s next? I asked myself. In truth, some part of me yearns for the bygone days of the harmlessly macabre, of Hollywood movie monsters, the original House of Wax with Vincent Price, Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend without a Face, and other B-grade cinematic pulp like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes or The Blob. You know, there’s just something about a teenage Steve McQueen and his best girl fleeing an absurdly portrayed gelatinous thing that took an asteroid taxi to Earth and becomes an ever larger mold of Jell-O as it virulently consumes the human fodder of a quaint 1950s Middle American small town. I realize that my goofy little penchant stems primarily from the nostalgic datedness of the film, which only in retrospect allows its subject to appear amusing, and brings me finally to the point of this expose of my darker appetites, which is simply this… A horror parody is a glorious thing. What is so wonderful about The Blob is the distance granted by time, production cost, and relative quality. I discovered that what I really and truly love is a good horror comedy, in which the genre is turned so ineffably on its blood-soaked ear that the cloud of fear and anxiety that would otherwise pervade your thoughts is forbidden to interrupt the ensuing laughter. This genre is nothing new, of course. It seems to have begun with the macabre humor of The Addams Family cartoon, created by Charles Addams and first published in The New Yorker magazine in 1938, and continued with those jewels of classic network television The Addams Family series and its less-revered competition, The Munsters, both of which, oddly enough, ran for only two seasons in the same two-year period from 1962 to 1964. And of course, the trend continued with feature films like Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks’ downright hilarious satire of the Boris Karloff original, and 1984’s fantastically popular Ghostbusters. A somewhat more severe example of horror comedy is Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy. While the original Evil Dead (1981) tried quite earnestly (and in many ways succeeded) to be a horror film, it’s 1987 sequel, Evil Dead II, is a comic romp of the grotesque and the terrifying, and the less gore-infused Army of Darkness gave the saucy series a charming twist of slapstick and mock-heroism. Oftentimes almost poking fun at its predecessor, Evil Dead II, in particular, was one of the most aggressive horror comedies until Shaun of the Dead in 2004.

This brings me at last to the paragon of horror comedy, likely the very best of every possible marriage of terror and humor: the zombie. The origin of zombies as the subject of modern popular horror goes back to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968. Let’s just say, I’ve seen it, and in all honesty, it’s really nothing to write home about. But as the initiator of an entire sub-genre of entertainment, a great deal of which has been made by Romero himself, it has its place. Romero’s 1978 follow-up Dawn of the Dead was actually a far superior film, despite its noticeably low budget and forgettable special effects. But even in those early years of zombie stardom, George A. Romero quickly found ways to showcase the inescapably ludicrous in the zombie’s situation. Yes, I must admit to a deep and wondrous joy in lampooning the undead as a subject of horror, a genre which came to my attention with Shaun of the Dead and has

continued with a variety of zombie parodies, all of which seem to reignite in me the irrepressible bliss of the grotesque yet satirically quaint. What is so endearing about a zombie? Having no truly sinister intent, but simply an insatiable craving that seems almost pathetic, zombies are the lovable buffoons of the horror world. With the movements and mannerisms of a nearly-articulate Keith Richards, their vacuous state and simplicity of motivation make them deliciously conducive to farce. How delightfully droopy they are, how absent in reason, how destitute in faculties, in form and moving how clumsy and single-minded, in action how like a fool, in apprehension how like a terrier. They have the marvelous capacity to inspire both fear and amusement, such that the grisly business of decapitation, evisceration, disemboweling, and limb severing becomes somehow campy, droll even, and I daresay hilarious! They’re not villainous, just hungry. I mean, it’s almost cute. Zombies are, in this sense, the perfect subjects of horror parody, and Shaun of the Dead was the first film to earn my affection for such a notion. Starring Simon Pegg and directed by Edgar Wright and brilliantly marketed as “a romantic comedy… with zombies,” it is a little cinematic treasure, delivering a fresh and unique comic experience by drawing satirically on both the schlock horror and the romantic comedy genres and propelling the story through a lovable host of small-town characters in modern-day Britain. One of my favorite scenes involves the truly hysterical attempt of the main characters to cross a street full of zombies by emoting them—drowsy, limping, and moaning, so as not to arouse the suspicion that food is in their midst. Laughed like a kid the first time I saw it.

I heartily acknowledge the need for more zombie comedies. I recently purchased the new novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a rather adorable retelling of Jane Austin’s classic romance interwoven with a variety of hilarious melees with the undead set in the nineteenth century English countryside. And in the same trip to Barnes and Noble, I found a marvelous nugget titled The Zen of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead, a delectable self-help guide from which the average person is able to learn the zombie’s secret to happiness, how to slow down the pace of one’s life, and devour those who may try to thwart your professional ascent. And a purchase I absolutely could not resist, both as a poet and as a zombie buff, was a small collection of side-splitting zombie haiku. Filled with delicious little gems written by and for the undead, this silly little anthology quickly earned a place of honor in my heart and gave me one of the heartiest laughs of my life with the following haiku, written by the protagonist zombie in the perfect syllabic meter of five, seven, five:

Brains, BRAINS, Brains, brains, BRAINS.
Brains, brains, Brains, BRAINS, Brains, brains, BRAINS.
BRAINS, Brains, brains, BRAINS, brains. (Mecum, 32)

Remarkable—even a simpleton from the ranks of the undead can contribute with such tremulous eloquence to haiku literature. The book, which is configured like a zombie’s scrapbook, tells the almost touching story of personal decay for an individual whose descent from infection to demise is documented quite poignantly, though with biting frankness, complete with mementos and souvenir snapshots taken by the zombie himself. O generous hilarity!

Most recently, my zombiephilia was treated to the release of the apocalyptic comedy Zombieland starring Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg. Like Shaun of the Dead, it delivers a story that relies on the horror genre for a situation and setting that propel other plot points involving the relationships of the characters and their various quirks. Of course, low expectations often yield surprising enjoyment. As I was hesitant to expect the level of comedic glory achieved by Shaun of the Dead, my viewing hopes weren’t too high. But Zombieland turned out to be exactly what I might have hoped for: a charming little comedy with a dash of zombies and a little piquant bloodletting thrown in for good measure. I mean really, why let the truly twisted tie you up? Rather, ridicule the ridiculous. Oh yes, more zombie comedies are most certainly the order of the day. Why not a family sitcom where the wacky next door neighbor who drops in at any hour just happens to be undead? Or a romantic comedy in which two zombies lock eyes from across a crowded wasteland? Why not a coming-of-age story about a kid whose lust for brains makes it tough to fit in? What about a zombie soap opera? Imagine those uncomfortable and melodramatic silences interwoven with the standard absent glares and drooling. And why not more classic literary characters happened upon, for no apparent reason, by zombie hoards? Why not a documentary in which some discuss their pain at being so unilaterally judged and discriminated against for their unquenchable bloodlust, while others boast boldly about how much they can put away at a potluck of personal remains? Oh, the possibilities are truly endless! And yet, as a friend once said, a fad can give rise to too much of a good thing, and perhaps the luster could be somewhat lost for Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland if subsequent efforts lead to nothing but inferior imitation. So for now, let us be patient and thankful, content with the few undead comedies with which we’ve been thusfar so magnani-mously blessed, and look forward to the laughable mock-horror and fetchingly mindless bumbling of undead throngs that may be yet to come.

To the right, you'll find a snapshot of a caveat guarding a rather winsome zombie physiognomy sketched on my white board by one of my summer school students who happens to drop by my classroom every so often just to visit. I have to say, it’s so nice to be appreciated.

Work Cited

• Mecum, Ryan. Zombie Haiku. How Books, 2008.