Sylvia Plath & Dylan Thomas

On this day Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts. Today is also Dylan Thomas’s Birthday.

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My wife has a subscription to Netflix. She signed up for the basic one movie at a time plan. We were getting the movies slowly at first, but now they seem to be showing up very quickly after we return one in the mail. I recommend Netflix. It’s nice coming home to a movie and having the option to watch it when it suits you rather than having to go to the video store and pick one out and return it by a certain date.

Anyway, my wife’s selection that we received last night was the 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror. I agreed to watch this movie while I ate my dinner, not expecting much. We watched about 40 minutes of it last night before stopping it and doing other things. I was pleasantly surprised. The acting is pretty good, and it actually is scary—at least visually scary. I felt that tingling in my spine while watching the movie and felt a little unsettled after we turned it off. I’m a pretty jaded movie watcher, and my wife and I both agree that it is very difficult these days to make a movie that is actually scary at some level and not comically ridiculous (e.g., the Friday the 13th movies or the Halloween movies). I hold up as paradigms of the genre The Exorcist, The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, and The Ring.

I did find it implausible that a young family would move into a house where the violent murdering of children took place. The children even sleep in the same rooms where the children were murdered in their sleep. The movie tries to offset that by emphasizing what a magnificent looking house it is. A real bargin for the price. That is supposed to overcome the couple’s hesitations about buying the house.

I feel frustrated and intrigued that the movie last night actually got to me a little. I thought that with my rational, secular, and fairly non-superstitious mind that I am above those tingles and tightenings of fear and nervousness. Apparently not. These feelings and responses seem to bypass the neocortex and originate deeper in the brain, probably in the reptilian brain.