I think a week or so of lost sleep counts as “impact,” no?
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In my first year of college, the school held an overnight movie event. They put up a big screen in the gymnasium—this was 1979 or’ 80, so I mean a screen—and had us stretch out in sleeping bags and blankets across the floor. They must have shown four or five movies, though I don’t remember them all; I know we saw Norma Rae, and I have a vague impression that we saw some version of The Love Bug.
But the last movie was Wait Until Dark.
I mentioned in my #day1 post that I lived a pretty sheltered life, especially when it came to movies, so I don’t think I’d seen any horror films, or even thrillers, up to that point; the closest I’d come was Sleuth, which my parents liked so much they took me to see it as a young teen—even though it was rated R!
So Wait Until Dark was a new experience for me. It’s a great movie, a real slow burn of consistently building tension. But it also has a classic jump scare, set up with a false sense of security and punctuated with a dissonant scare chord, that sent me ducking under my blankets. A little embarrassing, perhaps, though Wait Until Dark appears on a good number of “Best Jump Scares” lists across the Interwebs.
Dawn was just breaking as I crawled into my bed in the dorm room. I figured I’d fall asleep with no problem, having just been up all night, and feeling pretty hollowed out. But I didn’t sleep… that movie kept playing in my head.
And I don’t think I got a restful night’s sleep for at least a week after that.
This is part of a series, echoing the “10 Day Movie Challenge” that I got sucked into on Facebook:
Every day I must select an image from a film that has impacted me in some way, present it without a single explanation and nominate somebody to take the challenge by starting his/her own post and selecting someone to continue.
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