Mutant Bear Mascot Swarm

I cannot stand the feeling of saliva.
It has to be the nastiest thing on the planet. I know it is an essential for our body to digest food and keep our mouths moist, but it is disgusting.
Being licked or seeing it makes me have the urge to blow chunks. I don't know what it is about it but I can't help, but be grossed out. I doubt there are things as nasty as saliva. Blood I'm cool with doesn't faze me same goes with other bodily fluids, but the thought of saliva compared to those touching me are a thousand times worse.

Mutants

For the longest time I had never been really scared by horror movies. I had seen many with gore, ghosts and psychological twists, but nothing that left me saying, "Wow I'm legitimately scared." I think these feelings come from the far fetched nature of most horror cinema. I felt like this until I saw the most fucked up movie of my entire life, The Hills Have Eyes. I will never forget how uncomfortable and anxious I felt during and after this movie. The mutants in this movie are absolutely horrifying and the combination of these deformed mutants with rape scenes and gruesome deaths makes for a bone chilling film.

I'm not afraid of zombies or other humanoid monsters, but these mutants freak me out. They're so human-like and at the same time extremely alien. Their disfigured bodies and cold attitudes are very unsettling. I believe my fears stem from their actually appearance and all of the elements that surround them. It's like taking Sloth from The Goonies and giving him the mindset of Alex from A Clockwork Orange. In other words an absolutely terrifying combination. These mutants origins are also not far off from real life historical events. Take Hiroshima or Chernobyl for example. In both tragedies people were got radiation poisoning and gained many deformities. This real world aspect contributes heavily to the creepiness of the devilish mutants of The Hills Have Eyes.

The Elegy Of Emptiness

This... thing...
    I would have to say that this is one of the few things that deep down scares me, and it's origins are reasonable. One of the more famous creepypastas (short stories people write to try and scare people) is simply titled BEN. BEN is the story of a guy who buys a copy of The Legend of Zelda, Majora's Mask and unnatural things happen to him while experiencing the gameplay. For a large majority of the time, he (the player) is walking around the game normally... except, there is no one there. Not a single person is there, there is no sound playing, it's just him... alone. Just this alone is grounds to be creepy enough, but after some time, this statue shows up, put of nowhere, right behind you. It then keeps following you by teleporting to where you are standing. Faster and faster.

The reasons why this is frightful for me seem to be very broad. The statue is a symbol for the story, which in itself is scary. But I think there is also a deep down fear of being alone and the only other thing in your life is a former shell of yourself. Another reason I can come up with is that the statute itself is creepy. I mean, look at it, it just stares at you and doesn't do anything back.

Coyotes and Bears...

I've had my fair share of close encounters with potentially dangerous wildlife while growing up in Maine and living in Vermont as well.  I wouldn't say that I'm terrified of wildlife but I have seen animals gang up and attack other animals first hand.  The most prevalent types of attacks I've seen, or heard were done by rabid coyotes. Whenever I go home during the summer months I lay in bed at night and can hear them howl right in front of my house, sometimes outside my own window.  Their presence is actually pretty intimidating, especially when they travel in packs.  I remember one time I was walking home late at night and heard something running through the woods surrounding my house. I went inside and then heard pack of coyotes howl repeatedly and also the screams of another animal getting attacked.  I looked out the window of my living room and saw probably ten frail, rabid looking coyotes circling a small possum.  They were literally 25 feet from where I was standing inside. I was just outside probably fifteen minutes before they came through the woods and onto my dead end street.  That was definitely a scary experience just to see that many coyotes THAT close to my own home, brutally killing another animal. I've had other encounters when I've been outside in a friend's backyard and one ran up toward us and growled.  All I could see were its eyes and that was enough for me to believe that it was definitely not a dog.

An animal that I'm afraid of that I haven't actually seen in the wild, I'd have to say that brown bears are absolutely terrifying.  Not only are they massive killing machines but they can run faster than the average human, and climb trees effortlessly.  I've always had nightmares where I'm in the woods with people and we run into a brown bear.  Part of me wants to see one just so I can see how big they actually are, but another part doesn't because for some reason I've always been so afraid of them.  I love the concept of bears and I think they're really cool animals but if I ever met one by myself I'd probably freak out. I'm not a hunter or anything like that so I couldn't see myself trying to kill one at any point in my life.  My uncle has actually killed a black bear before and that thing was pretty big too.  It really puts into perspective how small humans are in comparison with animals.

Paranormal

I am not even sure if this one is allowed, because it is definitely controversial whether or not it is a real body... but I have always been slightly scared/fascinated with ghosts and paranormal things.  A lot of people would argue that this type of thing isn't even real, and I might even be one of them.  Thinking from the perspective of someone who argues that they are definitely real- a ghost is mostly just a mind/spirit.  They are represented to have a body, but without any normal properties of a human body.  The "spiritual bodies" are known to "take over" and inhabit normal human bodies though, in which case it would be impossible to say that they aren't a real body.
It's really fascinating to think about the concepts we learned about with mind vs body and everything, and try to figure out what is going on when someone becomes "possessed." Is a separate mind and body coming together to form one?
I have never personally experienced anything like this, and it is kind of hard to believe something is real if you have never witnessed it.  I see movies all the time, though, that do a good job of putting paranormal things in the realm of possibility.  It might only add to the fright/fascination not knowing if they are indeed real or not.  I want to say I would lean towards saying they aren't real if someone asked my opinion, but nighttime a graveyard or a big old house would still give me the creeps.

MARILYN MANSON

This Guy: Marilyn Manson. I find myself more disturbed than frightened by him, but nevertheless Marilyn has always stuck in my head as someone who I feel rather uncomfortable looking at. It's easy to see why anyone could be traumatized by his appearance. He might as well have a giant tattoo plastered on his forehead that says "Hail Satan". I remember watching some of his music videos when I was younger--definitely nightmare material. Now that I'm older however, I've learned that Mr. Manson is one of the smartest individuals I've ever experienced. He is well spoken and opinionated. For him, Marilyn Manson is a musical image and now I see just how genius it actually is. He is still freaky as hell though.

                                           

  Dead Bodies

         The main body that I don't like is a dead one. I would say its because it brings the fear of death into your mind. In scary movies seeing a dead body always leads to the protagonist shrieking in fear as they know that the danger is real. That is why dead bodies are somewhat frightening to me as I have seen family members and friends pass and seeing them in a casket is always an un-easing thing for me. I think this could best be related to the walking dead when people see their family members that are zombies they want to think they are alive and okay but they aren't. When I go to funerals especially when you kneel beside the casket I always expect the person to jump up at me and say boo. Its an uneasy feeling where you are constantly expecting something to happen but it doesn't. At the same time it is upsetting to think about it often as you can picture your face on the person this body is frightening due to the fact that it is not just scary or creepy in itself but it is symbolic of death and the loss we will all feel. The most frightening aspect is that you cant kill or destroy this symbol like you could a spider or an animal in your room. It stands for the greater fears of losing loved ones and in turn dying yourself it is the most frightening body to me because it stands for the inevitable one thing we have no control over and that is death. Therefore I think the most frightening body would be a dead one due to its foreshadowing that we are all doomed to die and become nothing and this to me creates an uneasy and upsetting feeling as we all know we are going to die but most of us ignore it and get on with our lives yet this is a bone chilling reminder that no matter how successful we are we will all meet the same end.

                           -James

Slipknot

Growing up I had a neighbor who I would hang around with everyday.  We had about a solid three year gap between us me being the young one and very naive to the world.  Anyway my neighbor was really into metal/hardcore music which I was never really to fond of, but being the little guy of course wanted to fit in with him and his friends and tried to get into as well.  I remember one day asking him for good music to look up and the first thing written down was "slipknot".  So at home I google the name and click on a website then all of sudden pictures like above are posted all over some eerie dark background with dark music playing as well which of course scared the crap out of me.

Even today looking at pictures of the people dressed up for this band freaks me out. Every aspect to the appearance seems just seems malicious and I have never really been one to be freaked out by masks, but just the photos I have seen of them all I find hideous and disturbing.  It was one thing in the 70's and 80's where the lead singers would paint there faces all up and wear crazy wigs, but I just don't get where the look of violence came from. 

Zombies

I wasn't sure at first what do write down for this blog post because my first instinct was to write about some kind of insect but I can usually deal with them.  So I had to really think about what kind of body I find frightful.  In the end I came up with Zombies.

In particular, there is a certain type of zombie that creeps me out the most.  These are the zombies that move slowly and that can take any amount of damage and are still coming after you.  The kind of zombie that you can only hope to escape by running away from.

It's that determination to kill that scares me the most about these types of zombies.  There bodies are literally falling apart but they won't give up.  They are decomposing and just want to eat your brains.  I also don't like to think about the fact that they were capable human beings like I am now and that they were either brought back to life or infected by something to make them these unstoppable creatures.

The Horror!

It's Halloween. I see blood, fake or real, and it doesn't bother me. I see spiders, snakes, goblins, witches, clowns, zombies, you name it, and I am straight-faced and nonreactive to each and every spirit of the night. I'm a horror movie buff and I absolutely love gore. Nothing conventionally frightening has ever really seemed to get to me.

There are however, three oddly specific,dreadfully nontraditional, and idiosyncratic fears that I have. I'm going to write about all of them because while each one triggers the same rigorous fear response, there are three very separate places that the fear derives from and each relates to a different one of the five senses.

1. Number one is not a body, but something that a body does relating to sense of smell. This is by far my greatest fear, and people around me commit this act frequently because in any rational psyche this action would certainly not induce fear. I don't even want to say what it is because it gets me so worked up, but here goes....

Hand sniffing.        


    Oh.                     My.                           God.


I might get sick from just talking about it. I couldn't put a picture of it above because if I google image hand sniffing, you will not be seeing me in class ever again on account of heart failure and brain combustion.

 I freak out when people sniff their hands, and I mean freak out. I have run screaming from rooms and when I was younger it used to make bile rise in my throat but I have gotten better at my reaction, however it does make me completely nauseas and anxious. I have tried to get to the bottom of why it makes me so scared for a long time, but I haven't ever been able to fully figure it out. It makes me anxious, sick, frozen, disgusted, and terrified.

I'd rather have Jason Voorhees chasing me at lightning fast speed with a rusty machete sticky with the blood of all of the other teenaged girls he had just slaughtered than have him chasing me at lightning speed with his hands cupped over his nose and sniffing.

People have asked in the past if it has to do with cleanliness and I think that part of it does, but it doesn't seem to be that simple. The fear of people with dirty hands (hence why Jason was a perfect example, because his are probably absolutely filthy) smelling their hands makes my fear multiply rapidly, but it still bothers me when people smell their freshly lathered antibacterial soaped up hands.

I have always been slightly odd about scents. I have come to realize that I have a heightened sense of smell and make a lot of connections and correlations based off of aroma. In particular, I have a hyperawareness of the smell of bodily emanations and it sounds extremely strange, but I can smell things on people. I can smell if someone had been drinking the night before even if it's not flowing off of them. I can smell if someone hasn't taken a shower, I can smell all of the different perfumes, body washes, shampoos, lotions that someone is wearing, etc. I mean, I'm not hound dog, but I am more conscious of smell than most people I'm surrounded by. If you ask me to describe the scent of something, you'll get an answer that is very complex. For instance, if you ask me what the classroom we normally have Bodies class in smells like, my answer would be vacuum bags, new balance sneakers with minimal wear, the antibacterial lemon-scented lysol that comes in a spray can, rubber, jacket pockets, and vienna sausages.

So I'm weird about smells. And I mean sure, hands are covered in gross, gross things. We use them all day long for basic functioning and communication. At any given moment, there are all kinds of disgusting germy creatures living in the cracks of your hands. It's repulsive to me to want to smell everything those hands may have touched throughout the day even if we are, by nature, not repelled by the fetid scents our own bodies produce. Hands are also kind of scary to me because they're like little people. When you take away someones hands you remove mass amounts of function. I would call my hands my most important body part, aside from my brain. I used to have such a strong fear that someone someday was going to chop off my right hand (my dominant hand) and then I would only have my left hand and of all the things I wouldn't want to have to learn how to do once I lost my hand, writing would be number one. So, I taught myself to write with my left hand just in case and am now ambidextrous. Let's pray that I get to keep both of my hands though.

So, there's something about hands, aromas, and germs that pool together to make me so fearful of this innocent act. Someday I'll get to the bottom of it, but for now I just have to pray continuously that I don't catch someone in the act.



And to all you hand sniffers out there, you're sick.




2. This next one is also not a body and relates to my sense of sound. Remember back in grade school when it was cool to have velcro sneakers and everyone begged their parents to buy them a pair? Well, that period of time was one hellish nightmare for this girl. Not only do I hate the sound of velcro to the degree that most would associate with the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, but it actually scares me shitless. I can handle velcro in small doses depending on the amount of wear to the nylon strips, but extended velcro sounds make me tense up and panic. It's not even so much that the sound is so horrendous, it's more so that it makes me feel, well, like I am covered in syrup. It also makes me feel like I cannot move. So basically the sound of velcro makes me feel frozen and sticky. Oddly specific reaction? Yes. Why this reaction? Once again, not a clue. It very well may be that I detest the sound so much that the only way my body can react is in fear. All I know is that it makes me want to curl up in a ball in a dark closet and pray that the echo of the velcro monster doesn't find me in there. I am also realizing just now as I wrote that last sentence that I have a huge fear of being covered head to toe in syrup.

Although I survived the velcro shoe phase, I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to completely stay away from this:

If velcro shoes weren't excessive enough, they had to go and invent a velcro wall that people wear full body velcro suits to jump onto.

Ugh.


3. Okay, the last one is an actual body. My initial fear response related to my sense of sight, but quickly escalated into much more.

Here goes:

Condoleezza Rice.

I know what you're thinking: how incredibly rude of me. After all, she was the first female african-american secretary of state but I promise I have my reasons.

I am the youngest child in my family and the only female. I have two older brothers, one of which really, and I mean really, liked to screw with me. He's almost five years older, so picking on his innocent adolescent baby sister became his favorite pastime.

Mind you that I was a very innocent, honest, and virtuous little girl that was sweet as pie and believed every outlandish lie that my brother fed me for a long long time.

I was roughly 10 years old. My brothers bedroom was right across the hall from mine. This had never posed itself as a problem, until one night while I was sleeping my door pushed open and it woke me up. I popped open my eyes in time to see the outline of my eldest brother's figure before he killed the power to my night light. He had made sure to shut off every single light in the house so it was pitch black and I did NOT like that. I hated the dark and I hated not being able to see. I jolted up in my bed and pulled my comforter up above my nose. I knew he was in my room but I didn't know what he was doing. He suffers from severe epilepsy and I thought at first that he was about to start having a seizure because he wasn't saying anything and he was behaving oddly. Just as I went to go screaming and panicking down the hall to my moms room, he said "Don't freak out. I'm here to help you. There's someone after you. I'm going to tell you how to handle her but I promised her that I'd keep the lights off."

I was so confused at this point. My eyes were bulging, but I could make out his form better now that the lights had been off for a few minutes. He sat down on the end of my bed and he said "We don't have time for questions, so you need to listen to my every word Katherine. You will not have the opportunity to ask me anything because I will need to disappear for my own safety as soon as I finish telling you what is about to happen."

As you can imagine, I'm freaking out at this point.

So what he said went something like this:

"Condoleezza Rice came into my room a few minutes ago, and she said she wanted my soul. But, I told her it was too black and that she wasn't going to be able to use it. Condoleezza was not happy about this, but I told her that you were indeed very innocent and that she could take your soul. She gave me thirty minutes to come and warn you of her arrival in your bedroom and so I could say my final goodbyes to you. You're such a good sister giving up your soul for me and being so calm about waiting for your impending doom. It was nice knowing you. I'll be sure to take good care of Ivan (our dog) for you. Oh, mom and sean (my other brother) said goodbye too. Okay. Times up. I need to get going. Bye Katherine."

He then proceeded to take both of the lamps out of my room and barricade my door shut so I had no available light.

Yes, I woke up in the morning and I still had my soul (or at least I think did), but I completely believed him. I was freaking out all night long waiting for Condoleezza Rice to show up in my room and kill me. I was mortified for weeks. He kept telling me that she was delaying her trip for a number of reasons but that she would be there when I least expected it because I had somehow pissed her off.

He ran with it for months, and he would print out pictures of her and tack them all around my room and would just put more up if I took them down. It took me way too long to realize that Condi was not coming for me. The story was not real, but the fear sure was.

Brothers.

Either way, her face scares the pants off of me not only because of the memories it triggers, but she is actually kind of scary looking. She is a very powerful and intimidating woman. She has beady shark eyes and a constant aggressive look on her face. She is certainly not someone I want sneaking into my room and stealing my soul, that's for sure.

Mutants

Mutants.......

Just plainly freak me the fuck out. Ever since I was young and saw the movie "Hills Have Eyes" in theaters, I was petrified of body mutation. The movie was very graphic if you have not seen it, beware, because it might lead to a few nightmares. I would definitely recommend it as one to watch tonight on Halloween.

By pointing out what kind of body that freaked me out the most, I was able to ask myself WHY it has a negative appeal towards me. Simply enough, I can say that I am used to normal looking people, with equally proportionated bodies. I am surrounded by people that look like me, which puts me in an peaceful state of mind.

However, if you put someone with either a mutated face of body, I just feel extremely uncomfortable because it goes against what I am used to seeing. I don't have anything against people that have mutated bodies, they just freak me out. He or she could be the nicest person on Earth, but still I will be equally enough uncomfortable around them.

Happy Halloween!
- Jake

Abominable Snowman From Rudolph

One thing that I'm scared of is the Abominable Snowman from Rudolph. When I was younger, I couldn't watch this movie because I was so afraid of him. In the movie he was introduced as the scary bad guy at first, and I don't think I ever got past that point in the movie when I first watched it. Obviously he's pretty creepy looking, with his big teeth and the fact that he was much bigger and more threatening than all of the other characters in the movie. I think I also was a little freaked out by the way he moved, which had more to do with the animation, but his jerky body movements were especially frightening to me. By now I have watched the full movie, and I understand that he's not supposed to be scary and he's just misunderstood, but if I'm bing honest I would say that he actually still freaks me out a little bit.

Cops

So I had a little trouble with finding something for this. Of course I am afraid of things, but these are more abstract things like people paying attention to me or making a fool of myself. As far a a concrete body, this is the best I could come up with.

I am am not so much scared of cops as in run away screaming but I simply don't like them. This goes for police officers, state troopers, even campus security people.  Whenever I see a cop, pass one in my car, or whatever, I stare them down and watch their every movement.  I watch them like a hawk, get defensive and even are angry at them for no reason.  

I think that this boils down to the fact that they can cause so much trouble.  They could do this simply because they are having a bad day.  There are so many things that a cop could pull you over for or give you a ticket that are just bullshit.  Like look at the clip art, CLIP ART, he has his hand on his gun and I did absolutely NOTHING.  Another part of this is that they are suppose to be there to protect us and then they could just cause problems for you.

The Tooth Fairy

Okay, this might seem a little childish, but this was the first Horror movie I ever saw. My older sister, who enjoyed my terror, forced me to watch this when I was 8. I couldn't sit through the film, and was terrified of the Tooth Fairy (the villain of the film) for years. I wouldn't let my mom pull my teeth out after that, and had to go to the dentist to have them removed. 

In an effort to get over this childhood terror, of what I now know is a really campy movie, I tried to watch it again this year with my friends. I got to the first action scene before I threw a pillow at the TV and ran to my room. I know the graphics are bad, and the story is crap, but for some reason that childhood terror of this movie stays with me. 

I mean, it's an old woman in a mask who kills children for "peeking" when she comes to take their teeth. HOW MESSED UP IS THAT? Then there's this child in danger in the movie, and I always about faint when the kid is in trouble. The adults; don't really care, children or pets; I die. 

THIS. MOVIE. TERRIFIES. ME.

On a plus side, I have forever sworn off Horror movies. 

I don't think I've ever seen one all the way through, except for campy ones like "Tucker and Dale VS Evil". I don't know, man. I just can't handle the creepy stuff.

Being Tickled

I absolutely CAN NOT stand being tickled. I know that being tickled isn't something that anyone necessarily enjoys, but for me if anyone tries to tickle me i freak out. I am petrified of being tickled. I understand that this is a bit bizarre in comparison to the normal "clowns, spiders or heights" fears, and I don't know where this weird fear even came from or when it began! Perhaps it was from growing up with two older brothers who thought it was funny to pin me down and tickle me. I mean after all you're laughing... that means you like it, right?! WRONG! I think what scares me most is that people think that you're enjoying it or think you think it's funny because you're laughing. When in reality there is NOTHING you can do to stop yourself from it. When you're being tickled you are basically completely helpless and there is nothing that you can really do besides flail and scream for them to stop. Gah. Never tickle people. It's the worst and I hate it.

Happy Halloween!

Being a fan of Harry Potter since a young age I have been exposed to a lot of scary bodies that were made for the film. But low and behold, the scariest of all was always good ol' Voldy. I remember when the movies hadn't come out yet so I had to use my imagination and the header picture drawn at the beginning of each chapter to get a grasp on what the characters looked like. I had always imagined him to be frightening, but when I saw him up on the screen for the first time I got the heeby jeebies. With the nose of a snake, the teeth of a great white and the sunken eyes like a ghost, how could anyone not be scared (excuse my language) shitless? However, now that I am grown up (a little) I now know that it is just all done with prosthetics and makeup. Now I am really fascinated by his face--because I want to learn how to do this and pursue a career in stage makeup-- and how they got it to look the way it does. I think it scared me as a child because it was unknown to me. I had never seen anything like it and that made it really difficult to process in my little baby brain exactly what Voldemort was. I was also scared of him because WOW he looked so real. How can something so scary be so real? Now I look back and think WOW he DOES look so real, and that is absolutely fascinating that now we can transform a human into looking the way he does. Good job guys, props to the makeup crew on HP!

E.T.

E.T.  is still the scariest movie character I have ever seen. Even just searching for a picture has creeped me out.  From the moment I first saw the movie, hiding outside my parents door, I have been permanently creeped out. I was very young, barely 6, the first time I saw E.T.. I was not supposed to be watching it, but of course I decided to just hide and do it anyway. I guess this is the karma. E.T. is the creepiest creature of all time. His fingers are so long and spindly, his voice sends shivers down my spine, and just thinking about his face makes me cringe. This fear of E.T. expands to not just his character, but to many things in relation to him.
For instance, often at the hospital there are machines that they attach to your finger to monitor your blood pressure. When you're a child, the doctors love to call these "E.T. monitors". As if that is supposed to make me feel better. Of course, it instead made me believe I was going to turn into E.T. and caused complete hysterics as a child. Another problem is tunnels. Specifically, white construction tunnels, such as the one that was on UVM campus for a few months earlier this year. This tunnel was very similar to the one in E.T. As ridiculous as it sounds, I took a longer way at night to walk back from class to avoid even going by this tunnel.

I think that my fear of E.T. stems from a few factors. One, it was something I was not allowed to watch. This automatically puts the idea in my mind that it will be scary, because at that time in my life not age appropriate equalled scary. Next, E.T. was probably the first somewhat scary movie I had seen where there were also real people in it ( not a cartoon). As a child, I assumed that this meant that there was a very real chance that E.T. could come to my house next. Finally, he's just so weird looking. People always talk about how cute and nice E.T. is. No. He's a creepy and terrifying alien.

I have not seen E.T. in a very long time. There is a chance that I could see past E.T.'s creepiest and give him some sympathy, but I don't think it's worth making me remember more of the movie and scaring me even more.

Bugs

One of the things that freaks me out the most are bugs. More importantly not bugs that I find out in nature, but bugs that find their way into my bedroom. If I see a bug, whether its a spider, moth, or ant, I freak out and I will not be able to sleep until I know I have killed it. I can't stand the thought of going to sleep and the possibility that the bug will end up crawling or landing on me. I have spent some nights up till an absurd hour just because I caught a glimpse of a bug and it disappeared. I let out a huge sigh of relief once I kill it, because it means I am finally able go to sleep.

Everything about a bugs body skives me out. I hate how quickly they move, their tiny and sometimes numerous legs, their antennas, and more importantly I hot ones with wings. Bugs that get airborne are the worst.  The fact that they can pretty much get anywhere they want is horrifying to me. I can't stand moths, they just have a creepy look. It's something about their wing pattern and their creepy antennas. I have had one that was the size of a fist enter my room one night and that was a battle. After many failed attempts at swatting at it, I hit it but it fell behind my bed. I wasn't sure if it was dead or not and I couldn't see it. I eventually got a flashlight and pointed it under my bed...it was still alive. I was fed up and grabbed a can of bug spray and emptied about have of the can in its general direction. At last I was victorious.

Dogs..

I am scared of dogs. I am not really scared of small dogs, but I am really frightened of big dogs. Sometime when I was younger probably third or fourth grade I was bit on the nose by my friend's dog. Ever since then I have been kind of terrified of dogs especially other people's dogs. I just never know how to react to them or what to do. I don't want to get bit again. By having that bad experience at such a young age it made me very skittish towards all dogs. Dogs freak me out because one they can be really large and kind of intimidating. When I see dogs I always back away because I fear that they will jump on me and I get scared like before when I got bit. I know that my nephew used to be very scared of dogs, but he is getting used to it. Even when I go home and see my own dog sometimes I get freaked out and that is when I get bit and or scratched. Overall, I am scared of dogs and getting bit by them on my face in particular.

I am Terrified of Willy Wonkas Oompa Loompas. When I was really young, probably 5 years old, my parents made me watch the movie. At first I thought they were kind of cute in a way. As the movie continued I realized how creepy they are with their green hair and tan in a can skin. Also their white eyebrows make me want to hide under my bed. I hate these things. I am now terrified of night lights too because when I was younger I woke up to a "shadow" of an oompa loompa (this was right after I watched the movie). NOT COOL. They freak me out and I refuse to ever watch this movie again because the sight of the oompa loompas scares me to death and make me feel so uncomfortable. They just run around in their little suspenders and striped socks....it's weird. 

Fearful Bodies

One thing that has frightened me for a long time is something that's really natural. I'm not sure why, but pregnant people terrify me. I'm starting to get better with it, but I still really don't like it. I know that it's irrational, but I always feel like I'll catch it. Even more weird is that part of me wants kids (eventually). But then theres this part of me that is grossed out and scared at the same time.

Spiders

Spiders.
I can't stand seeing them, talking about them, or being near them.I literally quiver. (If that's the right word). Even at my work, the fake spiders for halloween, I can't even touch or look at them. I feel all itchy and gross. Just wondering what on earth is cute about something with 4 times the amount of legs than me. I rather honestly be shot, then have a spider on me. Yes, I'm being over dramatic, but seriously, I think I would die. Literally talking about it right now is giving me goosebumps. Everyone is adding a picture of the things they are afraid of but, if you think I'm even going to search them... no. The texture of them, the way the crawl, the poison in them, the gross feeling of their webs. They can hide literally anywhere if you think about it. In your bed, shower, ear, car, everywhere, you could probably find a spider. I know they kill bugs and what not, but a mosquito bite is much better than a spider bite.

Clown Face

One weekend when I was about three or four, my parents took me to a seasonal Bozo the Clown train ride. Their thinking, it should be noted, was rational: trains + clowns = good kid fun. But here's what actually transpired: Little Adam boards train car with family and rides around track, enjoying himself. Little Adam sees tunnel ahead, gets a bit nervous because of the dark. Little Adam makes it through dark tunnel without crying. At end of tunnel, just as train emerges from somewhat-scary dark tunnel into the relief of sunlight, Bozo the Clown, official host of the train ride, pops out from behind tunnel's exterior to say a happy hello. Little Adam loses. his. shit.

I don't mean "loses his shit" in the traditional, "Aw, poor baby, here's a hug" way. I mean, Little Adam lost his shit at Bozo, screaming bloody terror into the poor underpaid hired clown's face. Little Adam lost his shit at his parents, who tried to console him. Little Adam continued losing his shit through the crowds, to the parking lot, into the car, and all the way home.

Fast forward a year or two later, and my parents decide to take me to Barnum & Bailey circus, along with my sister and grandparents. Things go OK--I've got my popcorn, there are acrobats doing cool things, there are trick-performing animals I'm far too young to recognize as probable victims of confinement and torture. Then, out come the clowns. This time, instead of breaking down, I broke bad. I persuaded someone--my parents, breaking a rule out of desperation? My much more indulgent grandparents?--to buy me a toy gun with a cork on the end, tied to a string, that could shoot out. I, future human rights activist and peacenik professor, spent the rest of that circus performance pretending to shoot the clowns dead. (Before I had kids, I might have asked why, after the Bozo incident, my parents were so quick to try again at the circus--didn't they get the hint about clowns? Now that I'm a parent, I get it: some experiences are so well-marketed as kid-friendly, so bound up in our notions of What Kids Like, that you can find yourself accidentally tormenting your kid in the unexamined hope that maybe next time he will just love the bouncy house, birthday party, ski slope, or whatever "normal" activity it is that your kid has decided to totally hate).

I'm far from the only kid who was scared of clowns. In fact, clowns constitute a not-quite-iconic (a la vampires, werewolves, witches, and zombies), but nevertheless persistent genre in horror: most famously in Stephen King's It and the Batman villain the Joker (for whom the balance of ridiculousness and scariness can vary significantly, depending on whether he's a drawing in a Silver Age issue of Detective comics or Heath Ledger), but also at any Halloween emporium near you.

But to me, the various touches that are usually added to these villainous clowns to make them scary--the fangs, the scars, and so on--are redundant. Clowns are already scary. But why?

One could start with the simple fact that clowns are disguised, and disguises make the known into the unknown, which is where most horror resides. The concealment of the face, whole or partial, frustrates our automatic attempts to "read" faces as friendly or hostile, happy or sad; it prompts us to dark imaginings of what's really behind the mask. Just think of the moment in Return of the Jedi when Darth Vader finally takes off his helmet, and sad, chalky old Anakin is revealed. Or recall when Peter Jackson's excellently terrifying on-screen versions of Tolkien's black riders, the nazgul, appear without their hoods, as ghostly kings. These are moments when pleasurable fear evaporates, usually replaced by pity. We're supposed to have some pity for Anakin, and the black riders, because of how the temptations of dark forces and rings have overcome them. But I think we really pity them, in these maskless moments, because of how swiftly and irreparably their dark mojo has abandoned them.

Clowns have a special kind of mask, though. Their mask is a smile. And that, to me, is way creepier than a hood or helmet. Alexandra Howson's survey of sociological scholarship, The Body in Society, describes "face work" as a form of labor we all engage in, making sure that our facial expressions fit with the "feeling rules" around us. For many of us, in everyday life, this means smiling when we're not really happy--when our boss asks us to volunteer for the weekend event and we reply, "I'd be happy to!" or when politely asking the person at the gym who has been hogging the treadmill for over an hour while talking on his cell phone when, approximately, he thinks he might be finished with his workout. As a student of mine, Scott Barrett, pointed out in a recent paper, studies show that there are many variations of the human smile, and the vast majority of them do not reflect authentic happiness. In fact, the smile of a chimpanzee, our close relative, is usually actually a "fear grimace" that indicates the individual feels threatened. The painted-on smile of the clown, especially when paired with a tear or an angry glint in the eyes, reminds us of the vulnerability and even the aggression that often lies just beneath the surface of our own daily smiles. Vampires and zombies are scary for the ways in which they are not like us. But clowns are scary because they openly dramatize the face work we do everyday, the falseness, the dark undercurrent beneath our routines.

Clowns are also, of course, entertainers, paid to smile--making the notion of face work as "emotional labor" quite literal. They smile to make us smile. Here, too, they merely make somewhat more explicit something that was already a central feature of daily life under capitalism: the servile smile, the customer service smile, the smile that's there not because I'm happy but because my job is to make you happy, or more accurately to make you think I care whether you are happy, care whether you smile. According to Arlie Russell Hoschild in The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, this kind of face work can actually accelerate the appearance of wrinkles and other signs of aging on the human face. Here, the connection to the more traditionally morbid themes of Halloween  finally appears: the clown, like all of us, is smiling his way into the grave.

Clearly, Little Adam on Bozo's train wasn't thinking through this kind of cultural critique of clowning. But by that time in my life, I'm certain, I'd seen plenty of false smiles--especially since a disproportionate number of those smiles are directed at kids, obligated as they are to live in a world in which every stranger is smiling at them, all the time. I had seen the "I'm about to give you a shot" smile at the doctor's office, the "Ack, this kid just barfed on the plane but I'll smile at him because he's just a poor kid" smile, and various other facetious smiles we grown-ups bequeath to future generations. That's the key word here: "future." I think maybe my five-year-old self looked at Bozo's painted-on, desperate-to-please smile, and some part of me said, it's a lie. And then another part of me said, it's your future. Is it any wonder I started screaming?