“There was absolutely no way of knowing the trouble we’d run into.”

32. Midnight on Beacon Street – Emily Ruth Verona

Amy is a babysitter now, in 1993, but this nonlinear narrative also covers her being babysat by a character who shows up at this current babysitting job dating Amy’s boyfriend’s terrible shithead older brother.

Amy is not exactly cool as a cucumber when taking care of anything. She has high anxiety and panic attacks, she clearly underestimates her own looks, she doesn’t have a lot of suggestions for sullen young teen Mira because she totally understands wanting to be in your room with a book all night, and she loves horror movies and is trying to get her boyfriend to at least watch them with her. Tonight she chose Halloween and Night of the Living Dead.

I have to say though, that they reused leaves to make California look like Illinois in the fall and that’s “funny” is a very weak argument for why someone who likes arthouse movies should watch Halloween. I mean, the music is awesome and drives the tension completely is a better one for someone who is into arty movies; Halloween is well done, that’s another one. Also, they really should have done more of a deep dive about her video store because I don’t know how a high school kid in 1993 without the internet would otherwise know about Italian horror from the 1970s like Torso. I think it’s her video dealer and I wanted to know. It took me forever to get to Italian horror and I was younger than Amy in 1993, but my way of finding exploitation and drive-in sorts of movies were the horror shelves at Mr. Movies where I would see the covers. They didn’t have Torso, but they did have I Spit on Your Grave in a huge clamshell and I will never forget seeing it, or actually seeing it once I was old enough to drive and bought my own VHS so I could see it. My first Italian horror was Cemetery Man, a different sort of Italian horror, but great nonetheless.

Anyway, the kids Amy is babysitting for tonight are Ben and Mira, they have a very vivacious single mom, Eleanor, and she usually stays out pretty late. The usual stuff of slasher set ups is here, including a very bloody scene at the beginning that we have to get back to, like breather phone calls and a rash of burglaries and unexpected visitors. We do get Ben’s perspective, complete with kid versions of words like “insomac” that no one in his life was able to figure out was “insomniac” for some reason and I thought those could have been more condensed or edited out completely in some instances as they give information that’s not important to the ending more than they do anything else. Sparing is caring.

My other issue besides “too much kid perspective” in this short book was that there are two important incidents that could potentially lead to the bloody situation at the beginning of the book and she chose to go with the one that means the most to the babysitter instead of the kids as the endgame. I don’t think that was the right choice. The antagonism could have come earlier and played into how incapable of dealing with a real threat Amy was in a more tense way. But, at least this wasn’t mostly a literary fiction interpretation of what a slasher or straightforward horror could be. That I appreciate.

 

This is Pere and Merri’s version of a home invasion. They’re in Danger Crumples’ home, with his stegosaurus, Stephen, pictured. Near the end of his life, I did actually have Peregrine sit with Danger Crumples for me and I’m pretty sure they didn’t watch Halloween or any Italian horror.