Scaretissue: The Origin of a Bloody Good Name

I’ve loved horror movies for as long as I can remember. My buddy Chewie and I spent an inordinate amount of time in college not studying watching marathons of all our favorite thrillers. On days where we found ourselves hungover (more commonly known as “Saturdays” and “Sundays”) we would make frequent trips to the local video store to take advantage of their 5 videos for $5 deal. During that time we built a pretty impressive (and completely useless) knowledge for horror movies.

Flash forward to 2012, picture me sitting on my couch (yup, there it is) watching AMC’s Fearfest hosted by one of my favorite filmmakers, Kevin Smith. Mr. Smith is one of the coolest cats behind the camera; I’ve loved (most of) his films since Clerks and always appreciate how relatable he seems compared to most Hollywood types. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I’m without shame to admit that I completely ripped this off something he said.  Snoogans.

He was doing little vignettes before the commercials where he’d talk about his love for horror movies, relatable experiences as a director and a handful of other somewhat interesting anecdotes. There was one segment that caught my attention… he was speaking about the similarities between making a comedy and a horror film. Strange when I first thought about it, but he very insightfully pointed out that both styles are heavily reliant on timing. He said (and I’ll paraphrase because I can’t find the exact quote) that it’s all about poking the audience. You need to poke them at the right place and the right time, except in a comedy you poke their funnybone and a horror movie pokes you in your….scaretissue. And much like a dull machete in the hands of Jason Voorhees, the idea of the website went flying through my brain. Now I have the perfect excuse to re-watch all my favorite scary movies, which my wife is super psyched about. Is there a preferred font for sarcasm?