Why “I Kill Giants” Hits Home For Me
It was a random decision for my husband and me to watch “I Kill Giants”. The trailer looked intriguing and I’m a huge sucker for fantasy films. So me and my husband decided to sit and watch this movie for our date night. I didn't know this movie was going to bring me back to my dark memories and make me cry for over an hour.
Just to give a brief summary without giving much away. The movie is about a teen who faces her deepest fears in increasingly dangerous ways when a huge threat of giants tries to destroy her small town. Now, I thought this film would be heavy on action but I was happily proven wrong. It focuses on the main character (Barbara) who has to deal with howling life changing situations of her family and she copes with these feelings and events with fighting off giants.
When I was in the homeless shelter with my family, I coped with my situation with losing myself into Game of Thrones the TV Show/Books and writing fan fictions about Jon Snow and his famous actor Kit Harrington. I didn't want to focus on the fact that I was living in a shelter with my family. I didn’t want focus on the fact that I had to have an emergency abortion and lose my son Crighton while I was still in the shelter. I didn’t want to focus on the fact I tried to kill myself and ended up in the hospital for two days. Like Barbara, I took something that I loved and amplified it by 10. Nothing else in the world mattered to me during those two years but my endless imagination, fan fictions and poetry writings. But, just like the main character, I had to start facing my reality and stop letting my imagination take over my real world, and to me that was very scary.
After going through those howling experiences, I managed to come back to reality. I realized that I was pushing the people I loved away from me. But, even through the hell I was going through, I gained a love for writing, a director from Kit’s movie read my fan fiction and enjoyed it and I’ve met some close friends through my writing and love of Game of Thrones. Just like how Barbra met her best friend Sophia in the film, Sophia helped understand why Barbara was so out of touch with the real world. The real world in her eyes was cruel and unfair because of that she created her own world filled with giants that she gets to defeat.
I Kill Giants did put me in tears for almost an hour. It moved me so much that I wanted to give it this personal review of my own dark times in life. This really helped me realize that when a persons situation is so deep and traumatizing, we end up creating our own little world to fight off our worst monsters…
