Sunday, February 21, 2010

Fear Journal

As a child, I had a rather unusual fear of red jello. I know this sounds like an irrational fear, but it was pretty real to me. When I was four years old, my parents thought it would be a brilliant idea to let me watch the 1982 horror film, Poltergeist. I suppose they got the ghosts in this film confused with a certain other friendly ghost. Anyways, earlier today I was doing research on the film to learn about the red jello, but it turns out that there actually is no jello in the film, so I'm not sure why I associate the two with each other. Perhaps I was eating red jello while I watched the movie, although I can't remember ever eating red jello. All in all, whatever the reason, I had a legitimate fear for red jello.
In the book Lord of the Flies, the boys in the novel fear "The Beast" in which, there actually is no physical beast. Since they believe that there is a beast, the boys are always on their toes and end up accidentally killing one of their friends. This relates to my childhood fear red jello because in both cased, we could not get hurt by what was feared: there was no such thing as "The Beast" and jello is completely harmless. I probably couldn't even choke on it if I tried. To wrap this up, my childhood fear of red jello and the boys' fear of "The Beast" are similar because there actually is nothing to be afraid of.