The year: 1986. The place: Rural Vermont. The boy: Me. The event: Ghostbusters. The result: Chaos.
I had been dying to see Ghostbusters for what felt like my entire life. All of my friends at school had seen it, and the marketplace was flooded with 1st grader appropriate Ghostbusting merchandise. Every book order form was filled with Ghostbusters stickers books, posters, I-Can-Read books, and junior novelizations. It was quite clearly the coolest thing on the planet, and I had not seen it.
Finally, salvation! Our neighbors down the street had come into the possession of that most magical of devices, a VCR! We did not own such a thing, but I knew what it was. It was pure happiness. And when new movies would come out, they would get them and invite us over to watch them. Back in the day they would release VHS movies for hundreds of dollars, which is how the video rental stores came about. Nobody could afford to buy all those new releases, so people decided to rent them out. Brilliant. And after a year or two, they would drop the price down to $20 or so, and that was how I came to be watching Ghostbusters for the very first time, two years after it had been released in theaters.
I loved it. My friend had a younger brother who had seen it before, and who knew when to leave the room. As Ray slowly approached the spectral librarian, he ran. She got scary, I screamed, and he ran back into the room, ready to watch them all run out of the library. Smart kid. This was easily the scariest thing I had ever seen. And yet I loved it anyway. I was convinced that I was going to have Zuul nightmares, but overall I was thrilled to have seen, for the very first time, what was to become my lifelong favorite movie.
As I lay in bed that night, thinking about the film and completely missing the point of half of the jokes (thank goodness), I may have slowly drifted off to sleep. I’m still not sure. Was it dream? Some kind of terror-induced hallucination? I will never know. But I got up out of my bed, looked out of my window, and clearly saw the least scary ghost of all time, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, stomping down the street towards my house.
I freaked out. Of all the things in the movie to worry about, that was not the one that I had put at the top of my list. And here it was, coming to destroy me. I didn’t know what to do. I looked out again, and there it was, still coming for me. So I got back into my bed, shut my eyes, and tried to go to sleep. Giant monsters have a much harder time finding you when you are unconscious. But it was no good. I was too scared to sleep. Back to the window I went, and there he was. He was definitely still stomping around, although now that I think about it, he didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Huh. Well, anyway, first grade Tenor Dad did not notice this important point, and went back to hiding under the covers until, at some point, he fell asleep.
Or was I always asleep in the first place and this was just a dream? As I said earlier, I can’t be sure. It didn’t feel like a dream, but when I woke up in the morning there had been no news reports of giant spokesmarshmallows in the area, and I found no trace of sugary residue anywhere nearby. So whether or not it had been a dream, it had certainly not been real. Or at least it was only real to me.
After that I swore off of scary movies. I wouldn’t watch Gremlins, or Gremlins 2, or any other movie that seemed even remotely frightening to me. But I’m sure glad I saw Ghostbusters. Because I’ve seen that movie dozens, if not hundreds, of times since then, and nothing scary has ever since happened as a result. Except maybe my dance moves whenever I hear the theme song…
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