I was scared of fairy tales (them being the Grimm original version at bedtime and not the Disney honey toasts on TV), I was scared of the skeletons sculpted in the Rome churches my mother took me to visit to improve my culture (I had a very hard family boys…), I was frightened by darkness and until puberty slept with a little angel on my bed, holding a candle shaped tiny light bulb in his clay hands.

I have to say I was never scared of real life and I am not now that a hard teenage time and adult life grew me out of any “fantastic” fear: I do not fear blood, deathbeds, wounds, diseases, animals (well, I’m not really excited by snakes, but I wouldn’t say I “fear” them) and so on. I was never good at fighting, but if a woman or a kid is mistreated I am not “frightened” by guys twice my size and thrice smarter in punching.

The only one thing that still frightens me is the idea of dying whilst driving my moped (the only thing with an engine I ever drove in my life).

And what scares me is not the idea of death in itself, God forbid, but the fact of it being sudden. A wrong turn, a stupid bitch driving and speaking on her mobile at the same time… Sbam! And goodbye Johnny. And I think this fear resumes very well the Platonic idea of what fear is for me: the unexpected.

As for real life goes, deep in my twenties I was still frightened by the most stupid things possible, all sharing the fact of being “sudden”: a champagne cork popping out, fireworks and (feel free to laugh to tears) entry phones, door phones, intercoms, whatever thing that, after me ringing, was bound to produce a voice without me knowing the precise moment it would have come out.
Crazy uh? Yes, definitely, I agree.

Nowadays I open champagne bottles myself (very rarely because I can’t afford them) and in front of a door phone I behave as a real man should. Only the moped crash syndrome survives.

And….

The fear I still have watching thriller-action-horror movies with “sudden” as a key word (which is to say 99%). The hand of a serial killer popping out of a curtain? Jean Claude Van Damme bursting out of a wall? A zombie falling from a ceiling? Make it “sudden” and I will scream, even if I actually was in the movie and even if I am the killer or the zombie (I could never achieve a Van Damme hero acting job and humbly admit so).

Three of my unforgettable “sudden” shocks in a movie house?
The shower scene in “Psycho”.
The popping out of the baby monster from the guy’s belly in “Alien”.
Carrie’s hand sticking out of the tomb at the end of the movie.