The Risk in Horror

Sunshine Barbito

“It’s the Millennium, motives are incidental”

This is what Randy tells Stu Macher and Billy Loomis in the video store, when the yet-to-be-revealed killers ask him what his motives would be if he were the slasher in a horror movie. Expert on the scaries, Randy knows that while a formula is usually at play, these kinds of stories don’t rely on the wittiest, most complicated motives for them to work. 

Horror is action. 

How Randy puts it, “There’s always some stupid bullshit reason to kill your girlfriend,” he says, “That’s the beauty of it all! Simplicity!” While Loomis and Macher breathe down his neck, our Final Boy in Wes Craven’s original Scream, Randy says, “Besides, if it gets too complicated, you lose your target audience.” 

In other words, your target is your audience. 

This Halloween season, as I started my watch of classic horror films and got to see some new ones, this line from Scream rang in my ears. Target audience is still something to consider; we want teenagers and nostalgic thirty-somethings to see these movies. What I’m talking about, though, is creating an effect, a feeling in your viewer. Rather than presenting the audience with clever material that needs to be explained, you want to give them goosebumps, race their hearts, make them cover their ears and eyes, and give their stomachs a roller coaster. 

A good horror movie makes a terrifying scenario come alive for the viewer and brings them to the edge of life itself. Your audience—victim—should feel they’re Laurie Strode, Nancy Thompson, or Rosemary Woodhouse—because, really, the audience is always the Final Girl.

Good writing is taking risks. And what could be riskier than attempting to scare cynical, overstimulated, self-involved, desensitized adults? They’re mostly gonna laugh at you. Really, what could be scarier than attempting to communicate to other humans the stuff of life that is unspeakable?

You know that feeling after you see a good scary movie in theaters, and you emerge onto the sidewalk where you and your friends bounce reactions off one another. Back in the real world, have you ever looked over your shoulder to see if the bad guy was after you? Have you ever checked the back seat of your car before taking off?

Recently, my friends and I found ourselves at the movies, to see the latest of A24’s new trilogy series, Pearl. When we left the theater, all we felt was relieved that the movie had finally ended. Nothing within Pearl sparked fright in my friends and I, but we did wander onto that Williamsburg sidewalk terrified: terrified that a script as uninteresting and unpaid-off as that could be read, greenlit, produced, and then released to the public, while each of us toiled over our own first drafts. 

In my apartment, however, we’ve screened several movies just on my projector, which left each of us afraid to ascend the stairs for another drink. The horrors and slashers that have recently kept me up scared and gagging, include Halloween (1978), Halloween 2 (1982), Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Nightmare on Elm Street 3 (1997), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Scream 1 and 2 (1996, 1997), and The Grudge (2002)—plus its OG version, Ju-On, (1998).

The first Halloween is iconic for synthesizing the slasher formula and for speeding up the plot, while slowing the killer down. Literally, Michael Myers walks slow as hell. Such a simple and practical decision made all the difference. If horror is about chases and the threat or act of destroying the body, then the payoffs must lie in the physical body; this means practical effects are everything. 

I remember the shift in movies when in high school, Interstellar and Avatar were released, and everything was CGI. Those three letters hung in the air for a couple of years, CGI. What was it? American film got trapped in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. Our ability to digitally create any image—the biggest explosions—blinded us to the effect that varying the textures within films can have. Stop-motion, for example, has a completely different mood and feeling than cartoon animation. 

There’s a reason why The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline are clay while the werewolves in the Twilight movies are CGI. 

That’s not to say that it’s always wrong to use digital effects, most movies do. But it seems to me that the advancement of movie technology has watered down innovations, specifically in horror. Think M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. The creatures that the townspeople fear are made from fur and claws and teeth; bones and hair. It’s revealed later that the elders of the community fabricated the creatures, not just the legend of the monster is made up, but the actual physical monster is nothing more than a foraged costume. 

You can feel the smoothness of those long white claws; you can smell fur and hear snorts. Hooves and snouts are scary because, mythologically, the animals with these characteristics equal the devil or perversion or sin. 

A more recent Shyamalan movie, Old, begins with a very corporeal concept. By “begins'' I mean the idea of the movie; when you see the trailer or hear someone summarize the plot, you begin to write your own version of it in your head. It’s a writer’s challenge to meet some audience expectations and subvert others. Old lost me immediately because it’s color-graded in that gray, video game-looking way that everything is now, to make sure the audience knows that whatever’s going right now is serious, okay! It is purple-gray, after all. 

Most of Old happens digitally. As the island’s curse starts to ravage each character, the rapid aging happens either off screen, or clearly in post-production. Such an on-the-body concept—age and wrinkling and puberty, and loss of vision and hearing—but without anything like the creatures in The Village, made by human hands to scare other humans, makes the idea lose its momentum. 

Robert Eggers’s The Witch is scary for a lot of heart-reasons. If you’re not considering your own relationship with your mom and dad while you watch that film, then lucky you? But what makes The Witch so terrifying are all the practical effects, the particular and hungry setting—food desert—and the fact that unless you’re Eggers, you don’t understand every single word of the dialogue. But that doesn’t change a thing about how that story makes you feel. 

You get it because the story unfolds in action, objects, sounds, and symbols.

When we first meet the family, they’re before a counsel being banished from their Puritan colony. As they’re taken out of the colony’s gates stacked on top of each other in a little wagon, Native Americans walk into town. The Natives wear dead bunnies flung over their shoulders from a recent hunt; thin, dirty white and limp, these prop kills look like real dead animals. The imagery there is a family being banished from folks it seems they should live amongst, as perceived foreigners (though of course Natives aren’t really the aliens here) enter through the closing gates. 

The perceived foreigners bring food. 

The family wonders how they’ll find food. 

This is just a moment. The Witch is not a movie about the conflict between Native Americans and settlers. But imagery, props, decisions like this matter and have an effect and a story they stir-up in the viewer. Because you could argue that everything that transpires from the banishing on, the banishing itself, it all stems from the fact that William, the father, took his family out of England. He brought them here on a ship. He was foolish enough to believe that the luxury promised with religious freedom and virgin land was going to take care of his family for him. 

There’s a sort of curse that comes with being an American settler. 

Life in the 1600s revolved around animals. Life still revolves around animals, but not in the same way. Of course, in America, most of us don’t keep sheep or goats or pigs or chickens for meat and eggs. Most of us don’t have to milk anything or defeather anyone; other people do that for us behind closed doors. The uglier factory farming becomes, the less we know about how animals go from animals to burgers and breasts. 

A black Billy goat the kids call Black Philip sort of stalks and pants. Thomasin, our witch, squeezes the udder of a Nanny goat and blood spurts out. In what she thinks was just a dream, the mother, Katherine, breast feeds her dead baby, who turns into a crow that pecks her chest and nipples bloody. In real life, we’re afraid of breast-feeding-women; of where to put our eyes when a baby hungry-cries in a restaurant, so the mom rightfully pulls out her breast. 

All these things happen with real animals or real props. At the height of the conflict between dad and daughter, Black Philip plunges his horns into William's gut. William takes the horns in his hands, struggles with the beast. That’s corporeal as hell—being attacked by an animal, and fighting it.

There are millions of perfect moments in The Witch, like when a witch uses a mortar and pestle to smash and grind up the dead baby’s body parts, which she then rubs over her naked body and her broomstick. But toward the end there’s that scene where Thomasin has just killed her mother and she wakes up alone and lost. Finally, she urges Black Philip to speak to her. This creature that’s been panting and snorting the whole film, he speaks now in a human voice, asking Thomasin, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” 

Again, we’ve got desperation leading to greed, to foolishness, to the trading of the human soul for anything more delicious than work and hunger and a mostly-all-dead family. Black Philip’s hooves pace behind Thomasin, and on the other side of her, we don’t see it, but we hear the change from hooves on wood, to a man’s boots and the jingle of jewelry. We then see Black Philip like a kind of satanic pirate. 

A lesser writer or director would’ve lingered here, elaborated on Thomasin’s emotions as she decides whether to sell her soul or not. But Eggers knows a decision like this isn’t so flippant. Next thing we see, Thomasin has signed the book because she’s following Black Philip, again a goat, into the woods, naked. So many objects so close to home, like farm tools and milk, become the most metaphorically heavy. It’s all stuff actors can touch and use during filming. 

Think Michael Myers’ mask in the first movie. It’s just a Halloween mask, plain, blue-gray, nondescript. The more modern these movies get, the more realistic Michael’s mask becomes, and the audience starts to recognize it as his face; it wrinkles. But wasn’t the point of the mask to separate killer from victims?

You lose authority when the audience is aware that what’s happening on the screen isn’t real. What is “real” in the movie world? Of course, fiction is fiction, but do you remember the final Twilight movie? How every villain and good guy of the series faces off in one epic end-all war, werewolves and vampires going at it, bloody and brutal. Then, at the last second, they reveal that the entire battle was just a dream; none of it really happened and none of the consequences of the war remain. What a lame payoff after years of anticipation. 

Dreams are hard to get away with, which is what makes A Nightmare on Elm Street so incredible. While Freddy Krueger only exists within the teens of Elm Street’s dreams, the consequences of the havoc he wreaks are tangible outside their dreams, too. Freddy is less a ghost than he is a being trapped between our world and another, capable of re-entering if you pull him into it with you, upon waking. He existed once as a pedophile killer, who was lured to a boiler room by the then-teens of Elm Street and burned alive. Now, he plagues the psyches of the kids in town as a kind of generational curse. 

In the first Elm Street, Nancy Thompson goes to sleep so that she can dream-fight against Krueger. She asks her boyfriend Glen (played by Johnny Depp, in that crop top with his belly button out) to stay awake so that he can keep watch over her. Glen holds his little TV in bed with him, headphones on, listening to a record. His mother bothers him to go to sleep, and our hero’s boyfriend, he does just that. Nancy asked him to do one thing for her, and Glen goes ahead and drifts off into Freddy-Krueger-Land, instead. 

We cut away, but whatever murder-method Krueger uses against him turns hunky Glen into a chunky-red-blood-reverse-tsunami, that shoots into the ceiling. 

Back in Nancy’s bedroom, she tries desperately to get her boyfriend on the phone. Little does she know, Glen’s been turned to food-colored corn syrup. Finally, her landline rings. We zoom into her face, and she listens nervously, hoping to hear Glen’s voice. 

Freddy’s voice comes through the receiver and goes, “I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy.”

At that moment the mouth end of the phone turns into the lower half of Fred’s face, a tongue comes jetting out from between his burned lips and licks Nancy’s mouth. 

As kids we’re taught how strangers are danger; if, like me, you grew up in a school with a severe dress code, you were taught that boys and men want to molest you. The bottom of Freddy Krueger’s face on the phone, it’s made from clay. A makeup artist painstakingly recreated the burn scars and detailed a wet looking, pink tongue to lick Nancy. It’s a crass and violent moment, that’s scary in a murder-way and a rape-way. 

When I was little and my dad would take me to John’s Video Palace, it was the cover art on the DVDs in the horror section that scared me. Too young to actually watch any of them, I didn’t know the context of the horrifying imagery in the Saw movies or Hellraiser. That people could even think up and create these scary characters so allured and terrified me. Before ever watching these films, I feared the big worm in Tremors, Jason and his ski mask, and the baby carriage on the cover of Rosemary’s Baby, with that slime green light glowing behind it. 

A picture is a thousand words, so it seems to me a good movie should be overflowing with them. When Rosemary hears a baby’s cries and sneaks out of bed to search for little Jenny or Andy, her husband, Guy, appears in the apartment to grab ice for the party next door. Rosemary holds the kitchen knife and holds her breath. She ducks into their unused nursery room to hide from Guy, and she bumps a baby-less bassinet, sending it into a creaky rock. To stop the noise without giving herself away, Rosemary reaches out and taps the tip of the knife against the cradle to stop it from moving; talk about using your objects to tell the story! 

The dream sequence in Rosemary’s Baby is less that and more a semi-conscious sequence, since she’s been drugged by the chocolate “mouse,” but not all the way. Every image and texture are used in that uncanny way dreams use our memories and senses to reflect things back at us. Rosemary is being stripped naked. In the druggy-dream, she’s naked on a boat, which means she’s cold and exposed. Her good friend Hutch is there but he doesn’t speak, he’s far from her in that way, as in real time, her husband Guy is disappearing from her by offering her to Satan. 

The physicality of everything that happens has a consequence in the dream, every touch and echo track and accumulates meaning. When Lucifer does appear, it’s his furry, long-nailed hands we see petting Rosemary’s body; her boobs. He looks werewolf-ian. You can feel the scratch of his claws and the roughness of his palms. How does Satan-fur smell?

Another thing to consider is what not to show your audience. For instance, it would’ve cheapened the ending if Polanski had shown us what Rosemary’s baby actually looked like. The decision he made to show only Rosemary’s reaction tells us everything we need to know about this son of Satan, while keeping the focus on her, the final girl, and mother of the anti-Christ. This allows each audience member to picture their own version of the little devil. 

The Ring makes the mistake of showing us the cursed video right when Rachel’s (played by Naomi Watts) character gets her hands on it. The movie opens on two teen girls swapping stories about the tape, and then a reveal that Katie (played by Amber Tamblyn) did in fact watch the tape. There are a few scares where the phone rings, but it’s just Mom on the other line, not a ghost. Katie dies, her body horribly mangled in a rapid decomposition way; mystery thrives in this first scene. 

Any and all mystery gets resolved when Naomi sits down, and we watch with her what looks like a bad student film. It’s a lot of received imagery. Received text and imagery is the stuff we’re familiar with: clichés. Like a man in a mid-life-crisis buying a Porsche and dating young. In The Ring tape a nineteenth-century woman stares into a mirror, there’s a well and bugs and a tree. The video looks like they slapped a sepia filter on it and called it a day. 

The rest of the movie is the protagonist being fed information about some lady way back that couldn’t have kids, so she adopted some kid that seems to be the villain but isn’t, but is, and then she finds the kid in the well and holds her and then the kid’s body decomposes, then we think the movie is over, but when she returns finally to her son, Watt’s character finds out from him that the girl in the well actually is the killer. 

The Ring gave us imagery and then assigned meaning to it, rather than letting imagery metamorphize and accrue meaning, the way Rosemary’s Baby does. 

What do you see at the end of Rosemary’s Baby when, instead of showing the baby boy, Roman Castavet tells Rosemary to look at the baby’s eyes, then Laura-Louise shrieks, “And his feet!” like a giddy child?

Another filmmaker that knows what to show and when is the creator and director of Ju-On and its American version, The Grudge, Takashi Shimizu. We cut away from a lot of violence in both movies, to see the victims reaction, then return to the victim in quick shots, glimpses really, of gore. The movie starts with Yoko, a young caregiver. She goes to the cursed house to look after an elderly woman that’s seemingly suffering from extreme lethargy. When Yoko hears creaking, she does the one thing characters in horror movies should never do, but always do: she goes upstairs. 

Picking up trash on her way up, up toward the sound, Yoko wears headphones around her neck. She approaches a closet and opens it up, cobwebs tear and float. Yoko gets herself into the attic and uses a lighter for light. We follow her as she looks around, investigates, then a louder creak, and boom, lightning, there’s the Grudge-girl with her long silk-black hair and open mouth. The sound of water getting sucked down a drain gurgles and gasps out of the ghost. 

Next thing, poor Yoko is snatched, her legs kick and her shoe flies off, and then they disappear from sight, up into the attic. 

Later, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character finds the same closet all taped up. She does another thing you should never, but always do in a horror movie, which is un-tape or open or release something from confinement. 

In The Grudge, when the police find Matthew and Jennifer dead, posed in each other’s arms in the attic of the cursed house, they find something else, too. One detective asks another where he thinks that came from. He points the flashlight ahead, and for half a second, a lightning-fast beat, we see a severed human jaw. 

Later, Yoko’s boss is leaving the office late, when he spots her walking zombie-slow through the building. Bewildered, her boss follows Yoko. The sound of dripping liquid echoes behind her. The pay-off after we cut away from the scene where the ghost snatches Yoko, is that her boss starts after her down the stairs, but he slips. Her hair covers her face, but of course what’s dripping from Yoko is thick, sticky blood. When she finally turns around to reveal herself, we get another lightning-shot of gore; Yoko’s lower jaw is missing, a limp tongue hangs out of her head. 

The opening storyline gets resolved, the jaw in the attic gets resolved, and we get this incredible on-the-body texture, because if there’s enough blood to drip like that, someone is bound to slip on it. The filmmakers kept track of their objects and opportunities for practical effects as a means of storytelling. 

In Black Christmas, directed by Bob Clark (also responsible for A Christmas Story) the slasher basically gets invented. It begins with someone outside the house, his eyes are the camera, and we hear his breathing. One of the first instances of this, where the perspective is whoever is stalking their prey, appears in Peeping Tom. The audience sees the world through the killer’s camera, as he sees significant things, like his victims. 

When do we literally see through a character’s eyes in movies anymore? When does the monster get to be the camera? It’s a lot of binoculars, and lots of gun-scopes with a digital bullseye overlaid. In Halloween Kills or Ends or any of those recent films, do we ever spend time in Michael’s perspective where it seems like he is our eyes? In H20: Twenty Years Later, we don’t get that; it feels like a violation of genre and the promises attached to it. 

Maybe the best use of this perspective shift is in Silence of the Lambs, when Jame Gumb turns out the lights on Clarice Starling. He slips on his night vision goggles and suddenly we see her not only through the villain’s lens, but in that eerie, fuzzy night-vision-green. Clarice panics, she holds her gun in front of her and her eyes go wild-wide, even in the pitch black. She’s scared, we get to see our hero scared because we get into the killer’s head, literally, into his sockets. 

Switching up the perspective via practical effects like breath or the outline of a mask or the night-green of James Gumb’s goggles is not only innovative writing, but it’s also camp. Camp in slashers can get distracting. Like how in the third Friday the 13th, within the first few minutes, the funny fat guy character is shoving chocolate in his face, then the red-herring character cuts him down with a chainsaw. At some point, you have to ask yourself if what you’re writing is worthy of the story and the characters in it. It’s risky to write horror!

Friday the 13th is famously frenzied in terms of its plot. You might remember how Jason isn’t even in the first movie. The killer turns out to be Mrs. Voorhees, Jason’s scorned mother, seeking her revenge against the camp counselors who were “making love” (her words, not mine) when they should’ve been watching young Jason, when he drowned in the lake. We don’t actually get the hockey mask until the fourth movie. The mythology mostly goes that he emerged from the lake a monster and he continued to age in the forest surrounding camp Crystal Lake. 

Sometimes the way to save yourself from Jason is to wear his dead mom’s sweater or shave your head and make him think you’re him, reincarnate. This all sounds campy and interesting in theory, and maybe it’d work better for me if it wasn’t portrayed by the glasses-kid with the burned ears from Stand By Me, wearing a bald cap with patches of wig hair glued to it.

A great example of effective camp and risk taking in horror is Carrie. How intuitive to use high school, an innately scary time for us all, and put superpowers and an evil mother to it. It heightens the experience we all have; the struggle that erupts when becoming oneself, yet still being someone’s child. That texture of sound-echo that’s used in that movie is camp and it’s horror. 

Think her mom’s voice ringing in Carrie’s ears, saying, “They’re all gonna laugh at you,” like shame is a fate worse than death. 

It’s called defamiliarization, or Russian Formalism. Taking something universal and not holding one mirror up to it, but every mirror you own. Rather than just read for information on witches, Rosemary gets the message from Hutch that the “name is an anagram.” Rather than use pencil and paper to try rearranging the letters, Rosemary uses the scrabble set her and Guy played with earlier. Ghostface in Scream loves to play games, not just stalk, and kill for the sake of it. The call comes from inside the house rather than outside of it. 

In Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, a group of teen suicidals and addicts and bad-dreamers find themselves in a psychiatric hospital together. This one is jam-packed with practical effects. A heroin addict encounters Freddy in a dream, and he holds his fingers up, each one turned into a syringe. What’s scary about drugs? It’s the gluttony for pleasure, the greed for luxuriousness that makes addiction so sick. 

Our final girl Kristen, played by Patricia Arquette, goes to turn the faucets on in her sink. The handles wrap around her hands and become these clay extensions of Krueger. Knives sprout from the tips of them, and the hands bend Kristen’s back like playing mercy as a kid. 

A giant worm version of Freddy tries to swallow the protagonist, a very Beetlejuice moment. A girl is pulled into a TV when it sprouts arms and draws her in. They pulled out all the stops in that sequel, and took risks not only in the writing, but with their props and effects. At some point, Freddy slinks into a room by appearing as a stop motion puppet on strings. Nothing about that movie is familiar in an obvious way, but it’s all uncanny. 

Back to why Pearl sucked. 

Pearl promised porn and slashing, it promised a character who dreams of dance and spotlight, and maybe most easily, it promised an alligator. We get porn for a moment, when Pearl meets a man who has a full-time job as a projectionist, amid a war and a pandemic. I won’t get started on the pandemic storyline, but what I will say is that it feels condescending that the writers thought they could show me face mask imagery and I’d gag and bow down for their idea to incorporate the most ubiquitous thing in the world in their movie. 

But even when Pearl sees porn, and the man dressed from the evening-wear section of Forever 21 tells her that it’s an easy way to get famous, the girl who’s supposed to want fame more than anything else does nothing with that information. She could’ve offered to show him her body right then, see if she was good enough. She could’ve started to touch herself and show him what a show she can put on. 

Instead, Pearl takes the clipping from the roll of porn-film, loses it on her ride home, then humps the scarecrow. The clipping, had it stayed with her, could’ve burned a metaphorical hole in Pearl’s pocket. It could’ve been the thing the audience followed as they waited for the mom to find it. Rather than creating an “I knew it!” feeling in me, all I felt while watching Pearl was stupid. I felt not in on the joke, because the joke was anchored to nothing. 

Why didn’t the scarecrow come to life while she humped it? Why did Pearl hump the scarecrow in that Sex and the City way, where Samantha’s hips pelvis is always so far away from the guy’s pelvis? Why did the pig just rot passively, rather than get devoured by the main character that people keep saying is “so deranged” and why the hell did Pearl keep taking baths with her dad, instead of forcibly having sex with him like a really sick person might, in front of her projectionist boyfriend, to prove to him she was capable of being a star?

At the very least, why didn’t she ever dance until her audition? Doesn’t a dancer practice? Why didn’t the alligator eat anyone? What was the point of it?

I’ll stop now because Pearl isn’t worth any of our time. It was boring and relationshipless, both worse sins than M. Night resorting to CGI. 

So, what can we learn about ourselves via horror? My parents are paranoid types. Small as germs or combustible as a left-on stove, Mom and Dad worried a lot about us kids getting sick or leaving a burner hissing gas. When I first lived on my own, I realized about myself that I worried too. Even in my studio apartment, every creak was an intruder, every funny smell poison, every date I had was Dahmer or Gacy Jr; Manson-esc but Bundy-leaning. 

People like to call it anxiety now, but in order to survive beyond it, I’ve started to call it writing. 

A great writer once told me that on the page, you are God. That if you’ve got a story about roadkill, don’t forget that, if it was worthy of the story, you could bring that deer back to life. You could make it walk, decomposing and shaky. You could make the dead thing wobble-leg to find wine, make it lap it up with a blackened tongue. God, creator; reinvention is key to communication, because we don’t all experience the same things at the same time in the same era, with the same histories and futures. 

Humans are alike in their uniqueness. That dichotomy is difficult to capture. 

So, this Halloween season, consider what’s really scary to you, and what is just writing. Then, write the really scary stuff. Watch the Twilight Zone and don’t watch Pearl. Remember that on the page, you’re God; not an easy thing to be. Consider when and where Texas Chainsaw Massacre shows gore, and when it holds back. Please, God, watch Black Christmas. 

The horror genre wasn’t invented in 1978. The scaries live in us. As Randy says in Scream, “Motives are incidental.” 

Think about what scared Edgar Allen Poe; “The Tell Tale Heart” gives a writer that fears shame, guilt, sin, and God. “Annabel Lee” gives a man that fears time. These things, thematically, are vaster than chainsaws and steak knives, yet sometimes a knife is all you need to communicate fear of abandonment or pain. 

Scary exists, whether we like it or not. 

Carve a pumpkin, light a candle. You don’t need to fire up the Ouija Board or go full witch, but find a way to honor this scary season that’s specific to you. Rome fell when its people neglected to celebrate holidays, holy days. Whether you’re trick-or-treating or, like me, simply watching movies, pay attention: celebrate what makes your skin (or what’s underneath) crawl. Just because Mia Goth stars in it, doesn’t mean you have to like it. 

Stay safe, kids. 

And don’t let the bedbugs bite.