The Mothman Prophecies

When I was a kid, probably around eight years old, I discovered a show on NBC Wednesday nights. Unsolved Mysteries. I watched it one night while my parents were bowling and I was instantly hooked. The first story I ever saw involved some sort of alien abduction; the first I'd ever heard of the phenomena. It creeped me out like nothing had ever creeped me out, so I turned it off after that and went to bed.

I recall waking up in bed that night in a cold sweat, convinced that the aliens were coming for me. I could not wait until the morning; I had to escape my bedroom. They knew where I was and were waiting for me to close my eyes or pull the covers up over my head then they would pull down the sheets and expose me completely and TAKE ME AWAY.

Try explaining this to your parents at 2 o'clock in the morning.

Needless to say, Robert Stack and his Unsolved Mysteries were off-limits to me from then on, but I'd already been hooked. I had to know more about the creatures that looked nothing like E.T. I used the library to my advantage to feed my fresh addiction, reading anything and everything I could about aliens, UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot...you name it. If it was the realm of the 'crazies,' I was in on it. No matter how creeped out by it, no matter how hard or lonely it was to get to sleep at night (I had learned my lesson and dealt with the fears without the aid of my parents), I kept reading.

The X-Files premiered in 1992. Guess who became addicted.

Over the years, I gradually lost interest in the 'paranormal.' Mulder and Scully got stale and paranoid, and the Cigarette-Smoking Man made no sense to me anymore. I stopped reading about little green men.

The Mothman Prophecies captured perfectly that feeling I would get in my bed at night when the fishtank filter might have masked the sound of a window opening and the nightlight cast shadows just large enough to disguise a gray. Within the first 10(?) minutes, a certain tension is set and doesn't let up until the credits roll.

Scared, for me, does not begin to sum up my feelings in the theater tonight. Terrified begins to scratch the surface. And they weren't cheap scares, either. The tension is so complete that the scares may be understated, yet evoke greater responses than anything that's come out of the teen-slasher genre in the past decade. Visuals are manipulated to present to the audience abstract shapes that just might be the creature hiding in the shadows. The sound is constant and overwhelming, inhuman.

Sneak previews exist to generate word-of-mouth promotion for new films. A select audience, it is hoped, will tell friends that, yeah, it turns out this flick is worth the eight bucks. I cannot express enough the fact that yeah, this flick is worth the eight bucks.

What's that in the shadows?