Ah!!! Raspberries!!!

Over this past weekend I had the opportunity to play Apples to Apples with my brother, Mr. Crompton, his girlfriend and my girlfriend Adriana. For those who don’t know how the game works, you have seven cards with different words, names or phrases. One person draws a card with a descriptive word and your job is to pick a card from your hand that matches the descriptive card the closest. Sometimes it doesn’t work out as well and you have a descriptive card that says “handsome” and your closest card is “Danny DeVito.” I’m not saying Danny isn’t handsome but I think there are better cards out there. So, whoever gets seven of those cards first wins.

I was at six cards and my girlfriend, who I know like the back of my hand, was drawing a descriptive card. It’s all anonymous so you can’t pick favorites, you have to go off the card alone. Her card read “creepy.” I know that she has some unusual phobias so I sorted through my cards and came to a halt at a card that read “Red Raspberries.” Most people wouldn’t think about using this card because… they’re red raspberries. They aren’t going to grow teeth and eat you and use your bones for toothpicks. I knew that she has a fear of textured things like raspberries and hates things that have holes in them along with bubbles.

To end this story, I won with red raspberries and Mr. Crompton and his girlfriend were blown away because, like I said before, it’s red raspberries. I don’t want to single her out because we all have weird phobias that other people would find ridiculous. For the sake of this column, I called my dad to see if he had any weird fears and he couldn’t think of any. He noted that he was afraid of snakes as a child, but who isn’t. I’m not sure if he really wasn’t afraid of anything or it just “slipped his mind.”

This got me thinking… what makes people afraid of things like that. I on one hand hate most movies that are stop-motion animated. Tim Burton does quite a few movies like that. They have characters made out of some sort of clay and move the character fractions of a millimeter then take a photo. They do this until they have the characters making smooth motions. Movies like this seem like they would take ages to make, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

Another activity I did over the weekend was watched a few movies. I watched Annabelle which is a horror movie about a doll that was possessed by a girl that was in the Helter Skelter cult. The doll haunts a family and torments them throughout the movie. That one has a couple of scenes where I might jump… but nothing that gives me nightmares. The movie I watched before that was The Boxtrolls, and that movie is a perfect example of what will send chills to the core of my body. The first movie I remember really freaking me out like that, besides Child’s Play, was James and the Giant Peach. Even with movies like Child’s Play, I would ask my mom or dad to turn it back after screaming my lungs out, only to repeat that process over again. I wish I could tell you why I’m freaked out by movies like that but I can’t. I’m sure somehow it was Mr. Crompton’s fault.