In The Dark

I was on sets for Poltergeist and The Shining. Friday the 13th, even met Freddy Krueger , was a stand-in on Saw. And more. I get what horror movies are about. I gave some ideas for them, in person. Rumor has it even though they were abusive, the little men from Los Angeles did not want me to say the word m-rder, so I said how about “REDRUM”?

What about The Dark is the average human being most afraid of?

I just figured it out this evening. It’s the level, the scale of the unknown. The amount of darkness is just a visual representation of the lack of knowledge in proportion to the importance of needing to know. I may have just written the formula for a horror moment. That’s how we build suspense in a movie, we tease with ideas visual and other(just a creaking sound or a water droplet, then we slowly reveal… ever slowly… BANG!!! Bats fly all around us! IT’S CHAOS OF NOISE AND SHRIEKING AND LIGHT AND DARKNESS MOVING SO RAPIDLY FASTER THAN WE CAN BLINK!!!

Does an epiphany hit you like that? Or an inspiration? That’s good.

But it is The Dark that worries us all. That lack of knowledge about something is like walking down wooden stairs in a dark old house and not having time to check if the next stair will bear weight. We could make it through a situation just fine, stairs are stairs… same size, keep the same size step and you can go down or up a flight with your eyes closed. But what if you couldn’t hear your footsteps, and you didn’t know how many stairs there are, and your legs are cold and numb…

It’s The Dark. We all need to worry about it. The Dark is LACK OF KNOWLEDGE.

Why?

What if you knew how to “drive a car” and you got in, drove up a hill and on the downhill slope you FORGOT how to use the brakes?

What if a small crowd of people came up to you and gave you 10 minutes of information from various sources and they all missed one key thing and you began to make a decision, turned to look at them, turned back and finalized it… and the shuttle… up in orbit… skipped on the atmosphere and careened into a unregistered prototype from another nation that was too close and spying… causing a fireball and a bright screen of catastrophe and everyone in the room stopped breathing to watch… Oh, we had a moment… of The Dark we… didn’t address?

Do you cry? Think of the bright light of failure? Or The Dark that you overlooked. Were you cocky? Was it too simple a possibility that another aircraft was nearby? What goes in your next Dark? Your hate of failure or what you actually missed. At what point is damage control, or dinner?

People will continue to look at the dazzling failure on the screen. Some are not used to looking at it and want to find truth, hope. You have your back turned to the screen, wishing no one else was standing the room. You know what it all really means. The whole universe. You have a great mind, but in the moment you let others give you the information and answers. And they were not as educated nor prepared. What excuse will you give? You… blinked?

What do you see here? How about a man who can see at night and has no fear? That is the vision. The idea. “What path is yours, and which do you seek?”