Horror Films Were My Armor, Until I Lost My Cousin
Author Brittany Means reflects on her childhood love of scary movies, and how that affinity was transformed by grief
By Brittany Means
When my cousin Bub was 11 and I was 10, we’d stay up all night watching horror movies that we’d picked out at the video store. The Exorcist, Child’s Play, Wishmaster, Hellraiser. It didn’t matter how gory or disturbing or full of the bounding breasts of doomed women the movie was. Through all the slashing and guts and screams, we laughed with our mouths open—popcorn spilling out like blood—at the cheesy dialogue and over-the-top violence, but also to show ourselves and each other that we could look at terrible things and be untouched.
Horror movies had a structure. There were clear rules you could follow to stay safe. Vampires could be warded off with a cross or garlic. Frankenstein’s monster hated fire. But there was no discernible pattern to the terror in our lives. Bub was afraid of his parents’ fighting and his stepdad. I was afraid of how my mom slept for days at a time with her neck at odd angles and her eyes slightly open. There was nothing we could chant or wear or wield to stop the inevitable. Instead, we watched characters get sawed apart and eaten alive and burned, and we made up games to create safe horror scenarios.
“I’ll give you 20 seconds to run and hide,” Bubs said on one of our camping trips, when he’d playact hunting me in the woods. His sunburned face was set in a serious expression. I sprinted into the dark, darting my eyes around for a tree to climb, a hollow log to crawl inside of, a pile of leaves I might bury myself under—all while he counted down, affecting a deep voice. I knew it was a game, but there was something about his timbre and the dark and the way little unseen things skittered past my feet that made my heart race.
“This is real. This is real. This is real,” I chanted inside my head, pressing my back to a boulder. When the countdown ended, he came for me. The sound of the woods, the cicadas and bullfrogs, accompanied by a twig snap here and a wry laugh there. I held my breath to listen, exhaling slowly through an open mouth to keep from making any sound. Somehow, he’d always find me.
“Got you,” he said from a few paces away, and I tried to run. But he played sports and was so, so fast. Within seconds, he tackled me to the ground and I fell, screaming and laughing and genuinely, exhilaratingly, scared. When I was subdued, he found a weapon nearby. An imaginary gun or grenade launcher or L-shaped stick.
“Any last words?” he asked. I could never think of any, instead choosing to go out in stoic silence. He took aim, and fired.
After he killed me, we emerged from the woods and found a nearly full bottle of Jim Beam unattended on a picnic table.
“I dare you to take a drink,” he said, grinning.
“No big deal,” I replied, and climbed onto the picnic table. I twisted off the cap and gripped the rectangular bottle in both hands.
“Wait,” he said. He pulled his lips into his mouth the way he did when something concerned him.
“Don’t really do it.”
Not one to back down, I raised the bottle and gulped. It didn’t taste very good, but it warmed me all the way down, like what I imagined the Holy Ghost felt like. I sat the bottle down and screwed the lid back on. When I looked up, Bub seemed like he was going to cry.
“Please promise me you’ll never do that again, Brit.”
In the distance, the adults laughed loudly at something.
“Okay,” I said, and climbed off the table.
“Promise,” he demanded. “Your mom—”
“I promise.” I reassured him, cutting him off so couldn’t say what he was afraid I might turn into.
I sat the bottle down and screwed the lid back on. When I looked up, Bub seemed like he was going to cry.
To me, one of the most frightening horror tropes is the slow procession of the inevitable—something you can see coming but cannot stop. Jack Torrence’s dwindling fight against possession. The bent-neck lady from The Haunting of Hill House. The unrelenting march of the creature from It Follows. It’s the force you rail against and pray about, and then one night when you’re in your late 20s, you jolt awake at 2 a.m. with the sense that it has finally caught you. Straight up in bed, one arm outstretched. Just another nightmare you can’t remember, so you lay back down and wait for your heart to slow. You’ve just fallen back asleep when your phone rings.
Before you answer the phone, you know someone is gone. Over the last few years, three of your loved ones have become past tense through a phone call. You run through names and faces in your mind, trying to anticipate the news, but somehow you don’t guess Bub.
“It’s my brother,” says your little cousin Ammity when you answer. “He’s been shot.”
You think of the times you all watched horror movies together, and how you and Bub leaned in, and Ammity covered their eyes, begging to watch a comedy or an animated movie instead. You think about the last time you saw Bub at Ammity’s graduation. He wasn’t making any sense, talking in a plotless loop, desperate to be understood. He passed out in the back seat of the car on the ride home with his neck at an odd angle. He couldn’t be roused to go inside, so you made sure the windows were open. And you kept going outside to make sure he was still breathing and try to get him to drink water. And he opened his eyes just once, gaze drifting around your face, and sighed, “Heyyyyy, cousin.” And you knew then that he wouldn’t outlast the decade, and there was nothing—no Final Girl moxie or armor or enchanted blade—that could change it.
After he’s gone, you try watching those old movies, but every time someone shoots Michael Meyers or T-800 or Imhotep and they keep going, unscathed, you want to scream. Every throwaway death feels impossibly cruel. All of these movies are about grief now that you are grieving.
That night at the campsite, after you drank the Jim Beam, you and Bub walked to the lake and sat on a pile of gravel to look out at the water. Your stomach was warm, but your head was clear.
He asked, “What do you think we’ll be like when we grow up?”
But when you think about it now, you only hear, “Any last words?”
Brittany Means is the author of Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways, a breathtaking memoir detailing her resilience and tenacity in breaking cycles of abuse and poverty. A graduate of Iowa's MFA Nonfiction Writing Program, Brittany is also an editor residing in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
