Paul Gadzikowski

We saw the Fright Night remake the last day it was in the theaters. I saw the original in the 80s. I don't usually go in for horror, but I seem to recall context of recommendation by a friend since passed away who was a film student. Then we went to see the new one because David Tennant is in it. (Also it was nice to see Anton Yelchin can pronounce a V when he wants to.)

There was a fifteen or twenty minute sequence in the second act that made me very uncomfortable. It had nothing to do with horror special effects, of which there was a not inappropriate amount. I'm speaking of the sequence when Yelchin is the only person (left) who knows that Colin Farrell is a vampire, and is either afraid to tell people or is disbelieved when he does; even when he goes to Tennant who is a Vegas stage magician whose schtick is vampire lore and who ( spoiler )

I have an aversion to stories or scenes when only the protagonist knows something fantastic and s/he is either trying to hide it or to show it and everyone around thinks s/he's not sane. I was surprised at how intensely uncomfortable I was made by those twenty minutes of that film. I'm sure it's a convention of horror films and this may be why I don't go in for them. However, it's also a trope in comedy. I think of it as "nightmare comedy".

The epitome, the acme if you will, of nightmare comedy is the Looney Tunes cartoon One Froggy Evening, in which a construction worker discovers a time capsule containing a frog that performs song and dance routines, except when anyone but the construction worker is looking.

Another example of nightmare comedy is the Tom Cruise film Risky Business. This isn't a case so much of the protagonist knowing more that everyone else than of simply everything going wrong for the protagonist that can go wrong, but it presses the same buttons for me.

The reason these two films stick in my mind as examples of the nightmare comedy trope is that they're favorites of billroper, who loves the trope. After I noticed this about him, I noticed most of the personal stories he tells are couched as this trope. The only example of that which I actually recall now (not having lived in the same city as he for a coupla decades now) is a tale of his first cat, Smudge.

He once described an occasion in which he was scooping Smudge's catpan. Smudge looked on with apparent confusion that her territory marker was being obliterated. Once he was done, the cat stepped in and, so to speak, reasserted herself. He only patiently waited till she was done and then scooped that up to discard with what he'd already collected.

And that's why to this day I think of billroper when I clean a catpan.