“Your problem,” a friend of mine said to me recently, “is that you have no imagination.”We were discussing summer movies — horror movies, in particular — and because we are both in the entertainment industry, we were talking about the box office, which lately has been very good news for the kind of movie I’ve spent my whole career championing. The latest horror releases are doing well, people are coming back to the theaters, and I’m happy about it. I’ve been a genre-bore for years. I have told anyone in Hollywood who will listen — and to their great shame, no one in Hollywood listens to me — that genre movies are the way to go. Crowd-pleasers. Raunchy summer comedies. Spooky horror pictures. Give the people what they came for.
And this isn’t an aesthetic thing, or a taste thing. I just don’t find them scary. I don’t buy them. I don’t think there’s going to be someone chasing me with an axe, or some supernatural, superpowered something infecting my brain. I’m not afraid of ghosts or ghouls or psycho killers or Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th. Horror movies just aren’t plausible to me.And that’s when my friend resorted to the ad hominem insistence that I don’t have an imagination.Which is a wicked lie, and I told her so. “I have a very vivid imagination.” I sniffed. “A very vivid, often terrifying, imagination.”
