Scary stuff

That which scares us is individual, personal, and hard to articulate because we don't like thinking about it, much less talking about it. Alfred Hitchcock understood. In his classic Psycho shower scene, you seldom see blade touch skin. Oh, you see a terrified face, you see a knife, you hear a screeching soundtrack and you watch blood swirling down the drain. But you don't see actual stabbing or cutting. That's because wily old Hitch wanted to scare as many of us as much as possible, and he knew that what he left to the imagination, we would fill in ourselves ... and terrify ourselves, each in our own unique way.

Stephen King understands this, too. After all, he created Pennywise the Clown, the manifestation of evil who could see into our souls and know what terrified each of us. Frightened us in a personal, intimate way. Frightened us like it frightened no one else. Blood, bugs, the dark, hairy beasts with claws ... whatever it was, somehow Pennywise knew.

Clearly Pennywise works for AOL these days. How else can you explain the photo that keeps popping up on AOL Main Page today? It's that Brazilian plane that smashed into the Amazon this past weekend, killing everyone on board. All that's left is flattened, twisted metal. If it wasn't for the caption and the lone tire, I wouldn't have known what it was I was looking at. As it was, by the time I realized what it was, it didn't do any good to look away. The image was already seared into me. It might not frighten everyone, but it sure as shit scares me.

I don't know what scares me more: imagining myself on a plane that has a sudden and speedy and violent rendezvous with the earth, or imagining someone I love living through those last few horrible moments before the inevitable. This photo illustrates exactly what I tried NOT to consider last weekend when my best friend was flying to and from Dallas in a small, private plane.

Some kinds of scary are fun -- Hitchcock movies, vampire stories, and other Halloween stuff. Then there's this kind of scary, and there's nothing fun about it.