Avert your eyes

Last week, my boyfriend took me to the movies.

This was remarkable for a few reasons, not least because we can rarely agree on what to see, assuming there’s anything we both think might be worth seeing.

We love watching movies, but lately there’s been a real dearth of things we feel like spending $25 to watch in the theatre, and the good folks at Blockbuster haven’t seen our faces for months.

I was optimistic about Jennifer’s Body, the Diablo Cody-penned horror comedy about a high school hottie-turned-flesh-eating demon who happens to have a taste for cute boys. I’m not usually a horror fan, but the reviews I read had led me to believe the “horror” would be more silly than scary; plus, my boyfriend likes Megan Fox. It was about the closest we get to perfect agreement on choice of film.

As it turned out, we did agree perfectly — that Jennifer’s Body was a pointless waste of cash.

We sat through the first hour and fifteen minutes in dumbfounded discomfort. I was ready to leave after watching Megan Fox vomit a voluminous stream of black ferromagnetic fluid; I can’t handle puke — even poorly computer-generated images of puke. But I stuck around to find out if the painfully drawn-out scenes of Fox’s one-dimensional victims walking into obvious and implausible traps might result in me feeling even slightly entertained.

As the fictional town’s token emo kid was being lured towards his gory death, my boyfriend leaned over and whispered the words that had been on the tip of my tongue for an hour: “We could always just leave.”

I nodded my agreement, but at first, we just sat there. Having never walked out of a movie before, we weren’t sure of the etiquette. Should we wait for a break in the action? Should we wait for the quiet dialogue to be over so we wouldn’t disturb our fellow moviegoers?

Finally, we stood to leave, crouching as low as possible as we moved between the seats.

There was no one else in our row to step over, but my boyfriend kicked a plastic bottle, which clattered noisily down the stairs.

For a moment, all eyes in the theatre were on us.

As we walked into the brightness of the lobby, we traded feeble jokes about how terrible the movie had been, as if trying to reassure each other that leaving had been the right decision. I felt awkward, almost guilty for not enjoying the movie.

A couple of days later, a friend who noticed my grumpy Facebook status about the flick asked if we had demanded a refund from the theatre. The truth was, it never even crossed our minds.

I’ve sent plates back at restaurants when the food was sub-par, and would never keep new clothes that didn’t fit properly, but I’d never considered my rights as a consumer of entertainment.

The problem is, as one celebrity blogger I enjoy puts it, paying admission at the movie theatre is like casting a vote for the type of films you want to see more of. All the times I stayed home while my boyfriend and his buddies went to see the latest high-octane action-thriller, I was quietly stating my preference for fewer explosions, more plot (not that my vote counts for much against the obvious appeal of watching sexy leather-clad actors blow stuff up in high definition for two hours).

Jennifer’s Body didn’t do well on its opening weekend and revenues have dropped steadily since, but it still made millions of dollars. Most people who go to movies and don’t enjoy them tell their friends to avoid them, but how many films have become moderate hits instead of major flops because those people shrugged and kissed their $25 goodbye?

There’s no accounting for some people’s taste in media — consider the television show The Hills, whose whiny, illiterate protagonists are preparing for a sixth season of fake catfights and breaking down in fake tears at their fake jobs. Perhaps if more of us tuned out, turned off and spoke up when presented with sub-par entertainment instead of sitting through it and laughing about it later, we’d be presented with less of it.

Money drives the entertainment business; I plan to be more discerning with mine in the future.

(Photo: Megan Fox in Jennifer's Body, from Flickr)

Ghost stories

It's amazing how a train of thought can completely jump the track.

I did not intend to write about ghosts today. I didn't even plan on thinking about ghosts today. But a hilarious news item on CTV, scoped in a moment of boredom, has taken me on a 45-minute journey deep into the shadowy territory of the paranormal.

The news item in question was about two men who have been charged with trespassing after firefighters had to rescue them from the roof of the Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton. While exploring the long-abandoned building with their friends, they somehow thought it would be fun to try to scale down the outside of it, and wound up getting stuck.

Apparent fun-ness of rappelling down the outside of a building without equipment notwithstanding, my first reaction to this story was: "exploring the Charles Camsell Hospital in the middle of the night WHAT?!"

As I mentioned to Laura, this building is creepy as all get-out. When we first moved to Edmonton, my boyfriend and I stayed with a friend of his who lived just down the street from the hospital. It was late when we arrived, so I wasn't able to see much of the city during the drive from the airport, but I did see the hospital — a yellow-brick monolith plopped in the middle of quiet suburbia, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and signs warning would-be urban explorers of guard dogs that like to snack on trespassers. Not one of the building's hundreds of square windows has its glass intact.

Even in the light of day, I felt the urge to quicken my step when walking past the hospital. That had more to do with being warned that it was a popular hangout for crackheads and gangs than any suspicions of paranormal activity, but the decrepit appearance of the building, which has been defunct since '96, didn't make me feel any more comfy.

Laura's response to all this was "I bet it's haunted."

A quick Google search produced satisfying results: this guy says it's haunted, this guy implies it's haunted and has photos of the interior that certainly make it look like an appropriate setting for an Amityville-style paranormal throwdown.

The hospital reportedly has a checkered past. It housed a psychiatric ward, and a secondary structure, which no longer exists, served as a quarantine for tuberculosis patients in the mid-20th century. Darker stories suggest that Mengele-esque experiments were carried out on Aboriginal children there.

A place with such sad and morbid connotations as a hospital — especially a decrepit, abandoned one — is a perfect breeding ground for ghost stories.

Someone allegedly recorded a woman's scream on the fourth floor of the building, and if you click the second link I posted above, you can read through the debate around a photograph that purports to show a masked figure peering around the corner in the basement of the hospital. (I could totally see it, but darkness and the suggestive power of fear can tend to morph something as innocuous as peeling paint into a ghoulish apparition.)

I don't know if I believe in ghosts, but I do believe that a place can seem to exude a palpable atmosphere of sadness and fear when it is known to be the site of a distressing event.

So far, my only encounter with a "ghost" was quite a joyful one. In the summer of 2003, I worked at Restoule Provincial Park in northern Ontario, a place that really lent itself to ghost stories because of its rich history. The remains of a root cellar in the midst of a thick grove of pine trees stood testament to the first family to homestead in the area, and an archeologist had discovered evidence of an Iroquois fishing village on the banks of the Restoule River.

The more experienced park employees told of a spirit who wanders the forest by night, swinging a lantern, looking for his hunting party. A few people claimed to have seen the ghost of a small boy wandering the fire tower trail at dusk; some said they could hear the frightened sobs of a lost child.

I wrote these stories off as good campfire fodder, but then, one night, I had a strange encounter.

In August, I had come down with a bad cold, and, not wanting to bother my roommate with my constant coughing in the night, I decided to set up a tent in the staff campground and sleep there until I was better. This worked well, and so on the night in question, I set out from the staff house with my little table lantern and headed down the dirt road to the campground. I soon found I didn't need the lantern; the moon was so full and bright it cast shadows.

As I walked down the hill towards the group campground, I saw a silhouette a short distance in front of me, walking in the same direction. My first thought was that it was another camper, but the silhouette, although human, seemed insubstantial somehow, more shadow than solid flesh.

I turned on my lantern. There was nobody else on the path.

I didn't feel afraid or intimidated, just oddly exhilarated. I feared nothing that summer but the toe-eating muskies of Stormy Lake — but that's another story.

And that's where this train of thought disembarks. Ghosts — are they real? Do we want them to be? Are they gentle? Scary? Both? What say you? Is Leduc haunted? (Apparently New Sarepta is). Leave your comments.

(Photo: Casper! Via)