Horror movie mom

My mom was a night owl who would stay up for hours after my dad had fallen asleep in his recliner and my older sister and I were in our beds. In the dim lamplight she’d watch movies on HBO while doing the TV Guide crossword. For years after she died, wherever I lived, I couldn’t sleep without the TV murmuring in the empty living room.

She loved horror movies. She preferred supernatural thrillers to gruesome slashers—though we did rent a VHS tape of A Nightmare on Elm Street. “The worst part of this one,” I remember her saying as she served me a take-out burger on my TV tray, “is it makes you afraid to fall asleep.” I think I was ten. Before she got sick and scared and descended into a fundamentalism she thought would save her, this woman dressed our family of four as the band Kiss for Halloween.

My sister didn’t like horror movies then. She had her first panic attack after she saw the voodoo-zombie film The Serpent and the Rainbow and developed a fear of being buried alive. Horror felt like something special my mom shared only with me while my sister was out with her friends. Together, we watched The Exorcist (a rite of passage for a Catholic child) and also sillier fare like Fright Night, in which Chris Sarandon plays a handsome vampire who moves in next door, and Witchboard, about a woman who becomes possessed by an evil spirit after using a Ouija board.