SVU Scares: “I Don’t Like Scary Movies Anymore”

Submission by Heidi Hanson

“Do you like scary movies?” Ghostface asks Casey who is too stupid to just put down the phone and call the police. I laugh, yelling at the TV screen as though my words will change her actions, as though I haven’t seen this movie a thousand times. Moira sitting next to me is far less pleased than I am. She didn’t want to watch with me, but I managed to convince her. It’s October, after all. You can’t not revisit the classics! Plus, Scream was one of the more tame horror movies in my collection, and I’d picked it assuming that Moira’s fragile heart would be able to handle it.

“Can we please turn it off?” She begged, clinging to my arm. Of course the girl I fall in love with can’t watch anything that doesn’t come in cartoon form.

I grab the remote and pause the TV right as Ghostface appears in the door. Moira flinches away from the screen and hides her face, pressing herself into the back of the couch. With a sigh, I shut the movie off entirely. The screen goes black, and now the only lighting in the main room of our apartment is coming from the orange string of lights on the mantle beneath the TV. I’d love to share my favorite genre with her, but I also don’t want to overstep and scare her away. We’ve been together for almost two years, and yet I still worry at every turn that she’ll rethink what we have and decide that I’m not the one for her. I wrap our shared blanket around her shoulders and lead her back to our room with a hand on the small of her back. She slips under the covers, still wrapped in the throw blanket, and grabs her phone from where it rests on her nightstand, pulling up a cartoon that she’s tried to get me to watch countless times but that I just can’t sit through. I sit on top of the covers next to her,

rubbing her back and waiting for her to fall asleep. Once she’s out, snoring, an arm draped over her eyes, I kiss her on the forehead and then leave the room.

I turn the TV back on, lower the volume until it’s barely louder than a whisper, and curl up beneath a spare blanket. Instead of shouted and laughed objections at the main character’s stupidity, my running commentary turns to whispers, and I eventually fall asleep long before the killer is revealed.

I wake hours later to nothing but darkness. The TV should still be on, same with the string of orange lights, but the place is pitch black. At first, my brain jumps to the most unlikely conclusion — that I went blind in the middle of the night — before my ears register the rain slamming down on the windows and the thunder outside. The power is just out.

Thunder cracks, lightning brightening the apartment momentarily like the flash of a camera, blinding me. A shrill scream follows the thunder and lighting. I’m on my feet in a split second, running to the bedroom to check on Moira.

I find her huddled up against the headboard, blanket wrapped around her, shaking, tears building beneath her eyes.

“What happened? Are you okay?” I ask, climbing onto the bed and searching her for injuries, even though I’m sure that she was just startled by the thunder, reading too much into every shadow thanks to the scary movie that I’d been stupid enough to expose her to.

“I’m fine. I’m fine.” She says, wiping her eyes. It sounds like she’s trying to convince herself more than me.

“Are you sure?”

She nods in response, pulling the blankets tighter around herself. “Just thought I saw something. It’s nothing. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“If you’re scared, I’m scared. What did you see?”

“First off, that’s a lie and you know it, second, it was nothing. I had a nightmare, and then the lightning made me think there was someone outside and I just psyched myself out. I’m fine, really.”

“Want me to check it out for you?”

She looks like she’s about to refuse, but after a moment’s deliberation she nods. “It was outside that window.” She points to the window to the left of the bed, whose blinds were left open. “It’s just a branch or something.” She says it like it’s fact but I can hear the doubt in her voice.

I rise from the bed and crouch before the window, inspecting the outside of the apartment. It’s hard to make out much with all the rain slamming against the window, but I can just barely make out the forms of the bushes beneath our window.

And the figure crouching among them, definitely not a branch, definitely a human. I gulp, averting my gaze so as not to reveal that I’d seen them. I close the blinds and turn back to Moira, sure that my face is betraying my fear, sure that the person outside can hear my heart slamming against my rib cage.

Moira’s face falls as she made eye contact with me.

“Call the police.” I whisper. Moira grabs me by the arm and pulls me onto the bed as though she alone could save me from whoever was lurking outside our window. I hold her close as though I could do the same.

“Stop. This isn’t funny.” Moira whispers, forcing a laugh out as though that would change the reality of their situation.

“Call. The. Police.” I insist, and Moira fumbles around for her phone, dialing 911.

Something large crashes through the window before she can complete the call, sending shards of glass spraying everywhere, cutting into every square inch of exposed skin, drawing blood. We turn away from the deadly spray, and Moira lets out a piercing scream that just about bursts my eardrums.

Moira regains her senses before I can even consider the next step in this horror movie come to life. She grabs me by the arm and drags me from the bed, stumbling over the layers of blankets, hissing as she tears up her skin on the glass littering the room. She nearly trips over the axe lying in the middle of the glass, the source of the broken window, but we eventually get out of the bedroom. She slams the door closed and presses her back into it to prevent the assailant from getting past the bedroom.

I grab a chair from the dining area and brace it beneath the door handle like I’ve seen people do in movies, and then wait with my ear against the door. I hear crunching glass through the door. My heart skips a beat as the crunching nears the door, but then it retreats and is replaced by rustling foliage as the attacker returns to the bushes.

I don’t let myself think that we might be safe, though. I’ve seen too many movies for that. They’re never actually gone. You’re never actually safe.

I’d never once considered, in all of my horror movie watching, that I’d be the one on the other side of the screen, chased by serial murderers, making stupid mistakes that end with my head on a pike.

I’d never once considered that maybe, just maybe, the people in horror movies were more realistic than anyone gave them credit for. Because when someone’s breaking into your house, you aren’t thinking about how to get away from them, how to defend yourself, you’re just

thinking about how terrified you are and how you might be about to die. There’s no room for rational thought.

“My phone is on the couch. I need you to go get it and call the cops, okay?” I whisper to Moira, even though our attacker couldn’t possibly hear us over the storm raging outside. Moira nods and rises, palms out towards the door like that will keep the attacker from bursting through and killing us both. Robbing us. Whatever they intend to do with us.

Moira finds my phone and dials 911 once again. She whispers to the first responder as I continue to hold the door in place even though the chair is probably stronger than I am. Moira returns to my side, the call still going on the phone. I’d seen enough horror movies to know that they always ask you to stay on the line.

“They’re on the way.” She mouths to me as she listens to whatever the officer is saying. Before I can so much as nod, the front door bursts open, wood splintering and cracking with the force of it. Moira screams, the phone falling from her hand as she scrambles away from the person who is now in their living room. But the apartment is small, and Moira can only scramble so far before she reaches wall.

The intruder heads straight for her, axe in hand.