My greatest fear is death. When I was a kid I never worried about monsters under my bed or ghosts in the attic, but I would lay in bed wide awake at age 7 trying to reconcile the idea that I was alive now and wouldn’t be later. Almost 30 years have passed and I still find myself having similar thoughts. It sounds childish, but it just doesn’t seem fair. I’d say that not a week goes by where I don’t think “I’m going to die”. The extra-fucked up part of this is that I usually have those thoughts when I’m in the middle of really deeply enjoying something. I believe that the kids are now calling this “death anxiety”.
So why am I talking about this crap? Because I’ve got a Birthday coming up. Now, before anyone picks up the phone to see if I’m OK, I’m fine, everything is fine. I am very much looking forward to my Birthday, which I will be spending in Las Vegas attending my first wrestling show and eating a bunch of good food with my kind and loving wife. That being said, the changing of seasons and reminder of my age always triggers more death anxiety than usual.
When I was really young I didn’t believe in God, but I started to when I was about 10 as a way of coping with my mortality. But after about 10 years of going to church, I had to admit that it wasn’t good for me or my friends. I watched the people I spent my adolescence with becoming stranger and more detached from reality as they disappeared into their religious beliefs.
I’d like to think that I have a pretty good handle on my death anxiety these days and I try not to ignore or deny it. That kind of denial can be very unhealthy. I try to confront the idea head-on and jujitsu my fear of death into a reminder to be present and embrace what I have. Oddly enough, something that helps me is watching horror movies. This wasn’t a conscious realization at first, but a few years ago I noticed that I tend to go on a horror binge around April/May. Often revisiting some of my favorite horror franchises like George Romero’s ‘Dead’ films, Halloween, and Final Destination.
All three of these franchises feature an unseen force of evil with no real motivation. An indifferent and unexplained force that does nothing but extinguish life. If you remember, George Romero never offers a concrete explanation of why the dead have returned, Michael Myers was just a nice boy until he decided to murder his sister and become an avatar of death, and Final Destination is literally about death and the invisible hand of fate. This year I’m re-visiting the Phantasm films, a franchise that was born out of director/writer Don Coscarelli’s childhood fear of death.
These movies are not the solution to my problem, and watching a young Lori Strode defeat Michael Myers could be seen as another version of denial, but it feels more like a vaccine to me. I’m not the first person to say something like this, but I’m attracted to horror movies because they offer a safe environment to deal with my own internal bullshit.