There’s much to say about the ‘rituals’ of growing up. If you haven’t completed certain steps, it can feel like you’re missing out on some vital part of life. I’ve never been kissed, never gotten truly drunk, and never had a sexy pillow-fight with my fellow teenage girls at a sleepover — probably because I’m a cis man who went to an all-boys school.
A step I was never drawn to as a teen was watching a horror movie in a cinema.
I’m going to admit something, and this has haunted me for basically my entire life: I’m too much of a wuss to watch horror movies, and that’s okay.
Horror movies are seeing a resurgence. Modern cult classics like Halloween are being revived; diverse twists are being performed on intellectual properties like Child’s Play; slasher tropes are brought to life in new and exciting ways through films like the gender-queer They/Them, the meme-ified MEG3N (to speak nothing of the chokehold this doll had on gay Twitter), and gen-z filled Happy Death Day.
There are oodles of reasons as to why horror is an important genre for the human experience. The thrills can be oddly comforting, allow people to process dark experiences in safe spaces, and over-stimulation can help soothe anxiety.
This doesn’t mean I have to like horror. I still have vivid nightmares about a single Saw trap I witnessed when I was fourteen in a WatchMojo video. The thought of it is gag inducing…
In a shocking turn of events, scary things are scary, I don’t like them, and I don’t want to watch them.
So how do I get my thrills? I love to read all the plot summaries. Some of these films are so camp!
My favourite storyline I’ve discovered is that of Jennifer Tilly in the Child’s Play series.
In the 2004 film Seed of Chucky, Jennifer Tilly, playing a version of herself, is impregnated with Chucky’s titular seed by his doll girlfriend Tiffany, voiced by Jennifer Tilly. At the end of the film, Tiffany switches her soul with Jennifer Tilly, trapping the Academy-Award nominee in a doll body until she is finally switched back in the 2022 show Chucky. This means, canonically, that every single role Jennifer Tilly has taken on between 2004 and 2022 has actually been performed by Tiffany.
If I could watch a version of Child’s Play without the spooky serial killings, I would. Alas, I cannot. I’ll just stick to reading about it in intense detail. Y’all can watch your horror movies. I’ll be in my room re-watching Barbie Life in the Dreamhouse.
