*Disclaimer: Some of the conversations, i.e., with my boyfriend, have been exaggerated for comic effect. But the story is true.
I recently made the grave mistake of watching Paranormal Activity 2 alone in my house with nothing but my dumb, goofy dog for protection.
Now, normally, I can handle "scary" movies by myself. In fact, I love them. I love them all. The good ones, the bad ones, the REALLY bad ones, the so bad they're good ones, and even the straight-to-video ones. I even saw the first Paranormal Activity in the theater with my brother when it came out last year. And we mostly just laughed the whole time. It wasn't even remotely creepy.
Not the case with the sequel/prequel.
From the time that I picked the movie out of the Redbox at Kroger, drove home, made some dinner, and innocently gathered my fuzzball of a puppy up and camped out on my bed, I was blissfully unaware of the horror with which I was about to be bestowed. I popped the DVD in and settled in for a solo movie night, just me and The Pupperoni. I was fully prepared to laugh and expected a horror comedy.
Again, not the case. I watched in slow, creeping horror as an unseen entity began to terrorize an innocent family and a small baby. I wasn't even that upset about the demon wanting the blood of the baby for its own purposes. Babies...meh. But hurt a doggy and I will CUT YOU. I WILL DISEMBOWEL YOU AND THEN REEMBOWEL YOU AND DISEMBOWEL YOU AGAIN. I was more really upset about what it did to their adorable German Shepard, Abby. I almost cried when Abby was yanked from the baby's bedroom by an unseen force and hurt badly.
I should have stopped watching there, but no. I had to know what was going on. I had to know what was going to happen to this poor family and I had to know if the dad was going to be punished for his rampant political incorrectness and racism when he outed the Mexican nanny for merely burning sage in the house to ward off bad spirits and trying to protect them and the baby. (He got his comuppence, don't worry.) I watched the movie all the way through to the end, even through the creepy laughing during the credits. And then I turned it off. And I just sat there, hugging my legs on my bed. Juno had watched the entire movie with me. She looked up at me as if to say, "Is there more? Is that going to happen to us?" I couldn't move. I had to pee REALLY, REALLY BADLY.
I looked over at my door. It was halfway shut. A panel had been chopped out of it when the doorknob got jammed and the room was locked with my dog in it and no way to get the knob off with a screw driver. It looked like the door in The Shining when Jack Nicholson busts his way through the door to get to Wendy, screaming, "Heeeeeeere's Johnny!" So that just made things worse. I stared at the door and I thought I saw it move a little. I had to pee and I had to do it now. But I did not want to get up and leave the room and go out into the dark hallway to get to my bathroom. I briefly debated peeing into a jug, but then decided against that nonsense. I was a grown woman. I was going to march out into that hallway and pee like a normal adult. I was not going to let the threat of an unseen demon stop me. I was going to throw my bedroom door wide open, proclaim, "FUCK YOU DEMON! THIS IS MY HOUSE AND I PEE WHEN I WANT TO!" and stomp on over to my bathroom and pee with loud determination.
In reality, I slowly swung my legs over the side of the bed. I could hear the demon out there, pulsating, breathing, waiting for me to naively open my door and step into his arms and give up my soul to Satan. He was practically giddy with excitement out there. I nervously stood up, the cold hardwood floor tingling the bottoms of my bare feet. I was frozen to the spot, but to sit back down and get back under the covers would just be admitting defeat. Peeing was a simple bodily function that I had to perform, regardless of whether or not Lucifer himself wanted to eat me for a midnight snack. So I slowly padded toward the door. Juno sat up and perked up her ears and gallantly jumped off the bed, meeting me at my side. She was determined to protect her mom to the death...until I opened the door. Then she contritely looked at the doorway, looked back at me, and then sauntered back to the bed with a contented sigh and curled up to go to sleep.
Fuck you, dog, I thought. Great protector of man and man's best friend my ass. It didn't matter. I was going to go out there whether or not she came with me. Even if she did, she more than likely would just make best friends with the demon and try to play ball with it. I wished I had her lack of fear.
I swallowed my fear and stared down the dark hallway. I swore I could hear the low laughter of the demon, waiting to clutch me with his spindly arms and whisk me away to another dimension where I would end up watching puppies get slaughtered non-stop for the rest of eternity. So I quickly turned the hallway light and bathroom light on in one fell swoop. It's amazing how much turning the light on when you're scared can make a difference. Suddenly, everything looked normal.
But I knew the truth. I knew that it wasn't.
I ran into the bathroom faster than a bulimic and peed with force. I washed my hands and tried not to look up in the mirror, lest I see the words, "REDRUM REDRUM REDRUM" painted on it in blood or something else equally cliche. I tried to fight the temptation to whisper, "Biggie Smalls" three times even though I knew Biggie would bust a cap in the demon's black ass with his gat. I had to fight this on my own.
So I slowly, bravely opened the bathroom door and peeked out. I heard a low growling sound and quickly discerned that it was my dog.
She was sitting in the middle of the hallway, staring at the air, growling, with all of the hair on her back standing straight up. She kept staring at a closed door with deep ferocity and intensity, as if her growling and barking would scare off whatever invisible fiend was threatening us.
At that point, I scooped Juno up and, heart pounding ten million miles a second, ran into my bedroom and slammed the door shut. I jumped up on the bed, careful to not let my feet dangle over the edge in case there was a monster hiding under my bed, ready to snatch my legs in its claws and eat both of them clean off. I held Juno close and stared at my door. Juno continued to stare and emanate a low growl at the door. She kept looking over at the door the rest of the night. I tried to ignore it and watch a funny movie, but all I could think about was the demon haunting my house.
The next day, I actually completely forgot about it, until I heard strange noises somewhere in the depths of my house. I called Boyfriend and he said, "Maybe there is a homeless man living in your basement. You should go down there and check it out. Take Juno and go have a look-see."
I said, "I'm scared of the basement. Can you come over and check my basement for me? And also my upstairs?" There was silence on the other end of the phone.
"It's probably nothing," he said. "But I'm really, really, really worried about you now. What if there's someone down there and he's just lying in wait, waiting to get you? What if he's living off the land during the day and then he comes and sleeps in your basement at night and makes weird noises? Now I'm scared for you. Oh god. Maybe I should come over and make sure everything is okay. But you should go down there and look anyway."
I tried to argue and say that in horror movies, it's always the idiot who goes investigating who ends up killed or in the mental hospital and that no thank you I was not going to go down in the basement by myself, dog or no dog. I hate that basement with a passion so burning that just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.
"There's nothing wrong with the basement," Boyfriend said. "Just that there might possibly be a homeless man or a ghost down there, but other than that it's fine. What are you so scared of?"
Aside from a homeless man and a ghost? I thought incredulously. But I had to tell him the real, true reason that I avoid the basement at all costs. Number one, it's messier than a "Hoarders Special" on National Geographic, and number two: The Head.
My grandparents used to have a life-size replica of the statue of David's head. It's a bust and it's huge and heavy and extremely scary looking. Something about it just gives me the creeps. When I was a kid, we visited my grandparents in Jacksonville, Florida, and they had that horrible bust in the guest bedroom. I was forced to sleep in that room with it. The first night there, I spent the entire night staring at The Head from my bed. To make matters even worse, my grandma had plugged in a nightlight into the wall behind The Head. So it was backlit and the lighting gave The Head a scary, demonic glow. I ran out into my grandma's kitchen the following morning after a night of absolutely no sleep and begged her to take it out of the room. To oblige me, she and my grandpa put it in a box and moved it into another room.
I completely forgot about The Head until I moved into their old house. One day I went down in the basement to look for some tools and to my utter horror and surprise, it was RIGHT FUCKING THERE STARING AT ME when I walked down the basement steps. I shrieked and turned around and ran back up the stairs.
I tried to explain all of this to Boyfriend and he said that I was just scaring myself more and psyching myself out and that I shouldn't talk about stuff like that when there is possibly a tribe of Satanists living in my basement and eating dead rabbits or painting pentagrams on my walls with period blood or something.
The next day, I was even more freaked out, because a homeless-looking guy walked past my house three times within an hour and rang my doorbell once. Also, someone put a shitty note on my car a few days ago and it was addressed to me.
It all started with my viewing of Paranormal Activity 2.
Maybe it's one of those movies like The Ring where if you watch the video tape, bad things start happening to you until you pass it on to someone else.
So I asked my brother if he wanted to borrow the movie and watch it, just in case.
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