The other night while channel surfing I ran across "The House on Haunted Hill", the original 1959 Vincent Price classic. I love this movie....and one of the reasons why I love it is because it scared the you-know-whats out of me when I was around 10 or 11 years old. For some reason skeletons turned me into a snivelling scardy cat hiding my eyes and not ever wanting to go to bed.
Watching it now I see how simplistic and silly all the effects were..the rat skeleton bubbing up in the acid, fully intact and perfectly bleached. The completely connected anatomy class human skelaton that emerges from the vat (I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen this chiller thriller....) completely undid me as a child, and causes chuckles now.
So I got to thinking, how different is that from what frightens me now?
Well, putting myself and my work out for sale at The Heart of California Bead & Design Show had me nearly paralized. There is so much outlay of money before a show, without any guarantee of income. I'm still pretty new at selling my instructions and kits, so much of what I do right now is testing the market. I had similar feelings before BeadFest Texas this past week.
But doing what scares me, and getting to the other side of the fear (a la shutting the lights out and getting to sleep) goes a long, long way to conquering it. Both shows were very successful, great fun, and worth all the effort. Looking at the fear from this side I can see that much of what I was afraid of was just as silly and simplistic (and fake) as the 1959 special effects.
I won't tell you to go jumping into doing what scares you the most...our fears can often be good signposts for us....but I can tell you, that for me, looking at the fear from the other side, like watching a campy old horror movie, is a lot more fun!
ps...if you are an architecture fan, the movie was filmed at the Ennis Brown House in L.A. designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennis_House, and there are some cool pictures on the official website here: http://ennishouse.com/. If you are in the Los Angeles area, it is a fun sight to see.
And also, credit where credit is due...the original HOHH poster image is from the Wikipedia site, and was designed by Reynold Brown -- who did a lot of other iconic horror-movie posters.
