For the first five years my husband and I were together, we shared a common interest in the most obscure horror movies we could find — Dario Argento, Ruggero Deodato, Gaspar Noe, Takashi Miike. We challenged one another, ordering movies like Cannibal Holocaust from Canada because it was hard to get in the states just to see if we could stomach it. (We could.)
Together, we would curl up on the couch, some disturbing horror fare before us, pop some popcorn and descend into madness. We were probably the only people who looked forward to watching the decidedly B-grade Black Christmas (an abysmally bad movie) the day it came out, just one month before our daughter was born.
My friends would lament our bad taste in movies, mock our desire to see House of 1000 Corpses while they went to see Merchant Ivory Productions, but it was our taste. Our shared sickness was powered by the same insanity that made us both skydive, bungee jump and enjoy fast cars. We dug the adrenaline. Unless a movie made me dig my fingers into my husband's arm and involuntarily cover my eyes, then it was not doing its job.
And then we had children.
I knew things had changed soon after we brought her home when I perused our DVD collection and was more interested in watching Jennifer Aniston bat her eyes and act ditzy than Sheri Moon Zombie dancing sultrily to "Rocky Mountain Way" in The Devil's Rejects.It got worse. Breastfeeding allowed plenty of time for watching television and movies, but instead of watching complicated or disturbing shows like X-Files or 24, I started DVR-ing thirty-minute sitcoms like Hope and Faith. Even worse? I was laughing along with the laugh track, relating to the clichéd situations the main characters found themselves encountering and trying to convince my husband that it was actually "Kind of dirty -- like, sometimes Kelly Ripa says things that could totally be taken two ways. Isn't that funny, honey?"
My husband refused to watch Hope and Faith, but was roped into TLC's A Baby Story a couple times. "This is the worst show I have ever seen," he groaned beside me as I nursed our infant daughter.
"But look how sweet they all are," I explained through my tears (oh yes, there were tears for TLC in those early months), hoping that he would also be moved by this version of our own baby story, minus all the blood and slime and goop that made it real.
And so when he asked, "Why do I want to watch this when I just watched the real thing?" I had no answer.
My husband was sure I had lost my mind, or at least my edge. He started pushing the issue, bringing home bootleg copies of current horror fare, suggesting we watch Hostel again — anything to reawaken my love of torture porn. But it was not for me, I told him, something that was confirmed one night while our infant daughter slept in the basinett upstairs and we settled in to watch one of Showtime's Masters of Horror — Takashi Miike's Imprint. It was torture porn at its finest — fingernails, needles and pain. I had to turn it off.
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