Shut your eyes, Marion. Don't look at it, no matter what happens.
In which we bite into the forbidden fruit cup of fear...
As previously mentioned on TINYCPWICT, I grew up in a Jehovah’s Witness family. It was weird, but probably not as much as outsiders might think. To anyone from a ‘normal’ Protestant background, we were lumped into an amalgamation of Mormons, Mennonites, and all the others who strayed from the King James.
JW’s couldn’t celebrate any holidays, not even your own birthday. When it was time to decorate white paper bags for Valentine’s Day, the ones you’d leave on your desk for everyone to drop a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card that said ‘You’re as radical as pizza, dude!’ into, my ass was sitting in the hallway alone with a coloring book. Christmas activities (which shouldn’t even be a thing in public schools but yanno), guess who was filling up the pages with the smeary wax of off-brand crayons while listening to the muffled sounds of my classmates’ mirthful laughter on the other side of the door? You guessed it.
In the long run, it made me not give a shit about hoisting up any of these events that were clearly there to placate us into commercialized holidays. I got out of saluting the flag, too, which was pretty badass in retrospect. At the time, I felt ostracized, missing out on something clearly special that everyone loved and looked forward to. I was the quiet kid with funny hair and no friends or anything in common with my peers. It was a lonely time, especially because I never could truly grasp the religion or feel anything resembling faith. Sitting in the Kingdom Hall (a belabored way to say ‘church’), I’d close my eyes and try and try to believe, but felt nothing.
Perhaps the most harmful element to me was missing out on so much popular culture. We weren’t allowed to watch violent or vulgar television or movies. The aforementioned Ninja Turtles were taboo. No Power Rangers, no Simpsons, no fun. I’d flip through my illustrated bible stories for children, a saffron yellow hardback tome with scarlet foil lettering on the cover, and obsess over the strange paintings inside, images of people getting stoned (not in the fun way), burning bushes, and my personal favorite, the Book of Revelation. Pizza lizard cartoons were off the table, but have all the three-headed serpents flying over blood-red seas of sulpher, kiddos!
My parents bought the VHS box set of the Indiana Jones trilogy (which supplied the title of this blog, obvious knowledge for astute Jonesheads out there) when it came out, and that was as hardcore as my family got. Even then, there was a house mandate that as soon as the Ark of the Covenant was opened in Raiders of the Lost Ark, we had to stop the tape so we couldn’t see all the Nazis get their faces melted off. My parents went as far as to hide the Temple of Doom tape so we couldn’t even watch that one at all.
One summer break, as bored latchkey kids, my older brother suggested we watch the end of Raiders. I was terrified, not of what I’d see, but that we’d get caught somehow and get in trouble. Apparently, he was brave enough to have snuck it in the day before, and his urging only magnified my curiosity.
Although it is one of the greatest scenes of goopy body horror ever put onto cellulite, I wasn’t scared, but mesmerized. The effect looked like a candle rapidly melting into blood and flesh, the panicked eyeballs rolling towards the sky wide and full of guilt and regret for the violation they have committed. It was exhilarating, having opened up my own private Ark and facing no consequence. The movie ended, we rewound the tape, and put it back on the shelf where no one could be the wiser.
Eventually, my family quit the religion. It was rather unceremonious: some people from the Kingdom Hall came to our house to talk to my parents, us kids were sent to our rooms while they spoke, and we never went back. They never offered us an explanation, we just stopped going. I had never bothered to ask what happened until this year. It seemed like there was some dark mystery, and I felt like it should stay that way. When my mom called me this last summer to tell me that she was separating from my dad, I figured if we’re having hard conversations, now is the time to ask the hard questions. The answer was simply, ‘We just didn’t want to be involved anymore.’ That’s it. Fine by me.
There was still a bit of conservative monitoring over the media we consumed, the remnants of our former faith clinging to an abrupt apostasy, but it was no match for the timing, which was my adolescence. Teenagers are like soda brands. There’s a few distinct flavors and a hundred minute store-brand variations. Cola is your kids who wanna be good and successful and just like their parents. Your Dr Spice students are adjacent who wanna be good and successful to spite their parents.
I quickly fell into the Mountain Breeze crowd who wanted to skateboard and listen to loud music and smoke cigarettes in the ditch and get into very minor trouble. It was the first time I really made friends and started to do weekend sleepovers. This opened my eyes to how little most other parents cared about what their children watched. Friday night, they’d take us to the video store and let us rent whatever the fuck we wanted and we’d stay up all night watching gory movies.
It was a revelation. There was a giant world that I’d been blind to, only catching whispers on the playground. The first time a kid tried to explain a Nightmare on Elm Street to me, he said he watched a movie about Freddy making his glove and each claw was different and one was a bear claw. This kid turned out to be full of shit, which was disappointing when I finally got to watch the franchise cuz I kept waiting for that goddamn bear claw. Another kid told me that his dad let him watch a Friday the 13th movie where Jason ‘stabbed some fat bitch all the way through her stomach with a pole.’ I’m pretty sure he was conflating a few different death scenes there, but I was still like ‘Woah that sounds crazy!’
The weekends turned into not just an escape from school and family doldrums, but into a film education. Aside from rentals, we’d save up our money to buy tapes or magazines like Fangoria and trade them around and talk about them. I still have a lot of selections in my collection that were movies that traded hands over the years with my friends.
Of course, I had to pass on the tradition like a good older brother. One late night during summer break (seems like most of my best memories of youth took place in that sweltering and lazy stretch of months), I was in the living room watching a movie. The volume was turned down low so it wouldn’t wake anyone up. I was sitting cross-legged right in front of the television so I could hear.
Footsteps shuffled behind me. It was my younger sister trudging out of bed with a blanket wrapped around her. I felt a quick tinge of anxiety, being caught watching tv at midnight, and it being something not very household approved.
‘What are you doing up?’ I asked, sorta trying to cover the screen with my body.
‘I can’t sleep. What are you watching?’ she replied.
‘You might be too young for this, it’s pretty scary.’ She was still just coming out of the age where she watched Disney movies like Fantasia to get to sleep every night.
‘I wanna watch it, I’m not scared.’ I told her she could sit down and watch it, just be quiet and don’t tell mom. Years later, she still tells me this story and how it made her a horror fan.
That movie was The Shining (1980), and she sat like a trooper through the whole thing. The torch was passed.
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