A Fearful Introduction

Hey everyone! My name is Jenna J. and I am new around here!!!

I am super excited to be a part of The Midnight Society!!! Like, you really don’t understand the depths of my excitement.

I am a writer who loves horror, young adult novels, and watching endless amounts of Netflix. I am a twenty something girl who lives in California and works in accounting at a university. I am someone who is still trying to figure out where I belong and what I belong to. I am an introvert to the core and I am not very good with people. But that’s all the boring stuff. On to the good stuff.

Let me get started by saying, I was a fearful child.

When I was 6 years old, I can vividly remember being terrified by Jurassic Park at the drive-in—to the point that I hid in the trunk of our station wagon so I didn’t have to keep watching and later had recurring nightmares of a T-Rex chasing after me up until I was about 18 years old. Around the same time I can remember watching the opening to Alien on TV with my uncle while he was babysitting and then for months afterward being unable to sleep at night because I feared an alien would come bursting out of my stomach at any minute. I had strange fears like my fear of vomit and I had normal fears like my fear of heights and roller coasters. But one thing was certain, I was a definitely a fearful child.

As I got older I grew out of most of these fears—though that fear of vomit is still pretty strong—and as a teenager horror became one of my favorite genres. Fears are fascinating things. When a fear isn’t a response to an immediate, serious danger there is a measure of psychology to the reaction. Why are we afraid of something that isn’t putting us in immediate danger? Why am I afraid of seeing someone throw up?

Horror might not scare me like it used to, but I’ve still got my fare share of fears.

Ever since I watched the Dawn of the Dead remake in the mid 2000’s—which I believe was my first zombie movie—I’ve been fearful of a zombie epidemic. I would not last long in a zombie epidemic. Zombies are scary things when you really think about it. Especially in this movie because they can run! Zombies are destructive enough when they shuffle around slowly but give them speed and they are down right terrifying!

Though I no longer lie awake at night waiting for an alien to come bursting out of me, I am also still afraid of aliens in general. There’s just this uncertainty to them that is disconcerting. Do they exist or not? I am definitely a firm believer that they do exist, but beyond that I don’t have any clue. And I’ve had super creepy dreams of waking up in my bed in the middle of the night to bright lights shining down from the sky through my window (or were they even dreams at all??).

Last, but certainly not least, on my list of fears are demons. The Exorcist is still, to this day, one of the scariest movies I have ever seen. I am always more likely to be scared by a movie about demon possession than I am any other supernatural creature. Just last year a friend and I were scared out of my own house at 2 am by what we thought was a demon (it turned out to be a power outage, my roommate moaning in her sleep, and way too many horror movies watched the day after Halloween).

So, there you have my list of fears. Whatever your fears are, let me know in the comments!!!

**All GIFs from giphy.com