Here’s the thing about horror movies: I love ‘em. I always have and always will, and if there’s ever a day wherein I stop loving them it will leave me unsure of what to do with myself. Freddy, Jason, Michael, the girl from The Ring, Jigsaw, Pinhead, the folks from The Strangers – these have been the staples of a life spent in love with things that scared me.

So when the rumblings about Paranormal Activity were calling it one of the most deeply troubling and frightening movies in years – if not ever – it piqued my curiosity. Critics were losing sleep over it, the reports said. Viewing audiences were reduced to screams and tears. This movie reached you on a level at which you weren’t ready to be reached and played at the very deepest of a very natural, very common fear.

To say the very least: I was skeptical.

When I walked into the theater at midnight on Friday, I expected something that might make me jump once or twice. Maybe the plot would bring me in or the acting would kick things up a notch and I could walk out having experienced some decent scares, that sort of thing.

I was wrong to be skeptical. I left the theater terrified, and I only managed to sleep once I saw the sun coming up – a solid five hours after the movie had ended and four hours after I got home.

Paranormal Activity was actually made about three years ago and has only now started to see a decent release. Even so, it hasn’t reached more than 35 cities. Most of these places are college towns, where crowds are guaranteed to be active at midnight showings and word of mouth spreads like a dry brushfire. Written, directed and filmed at a budget of just about fifteen thousand dollars, it’s the single-camera “found footage” story of a couple experiencing – you guessed it – paranormal activity and looking to record the happenings so that they can at least have documented proof.

It’s a simple concept, and the plot really doesn’t try to get any more complicated than that. We have a couple. They’re cute. They bicker. They’re “engaged to be engaged.” They’re being haunted by something. They decide to film it. That’s all there is to it.

We know right off the bat that something went wrong, because the very beginning of the movie features a title card that thanks the families of the couple and the San Diego police department for allowing Paramount to distribute the footage. It’s a very subtle way of escalating the tension and anticipation, and it works like a charm. Furthermore, the first half hour or so of the movie is actually pretty light in scares. The audience is sucked in to the daily meanderings of this very natural, endearing couple. Micah – the man of the house – is funny, and he trades regular barbs with his girlfriend, Katie, as the movie unfolds.

It’s all part of the sucker punch.

See, what’s haunting this couple isn’t a ghost. It is established very early on that the problem isn’t the house, it’s Katie. She’s being tormented by something. The notion of “well, we’ll just leave the haunted house” is immediately dispelled and the audience is left to be immediately unsettled by the idea that whatever is plaguing this couple is going to stick around. It’s referred to as a “demon” by a psychic the couple brings in, and though the audience gets a good chuckle out of it the first two or three times it eventually becomes apparent that what’s going after this couple isn’t a typical ghost but is, in fact, something malevolent.

Let’s back up a second and talk about what makes a movie scary. When you find a film truly scary – when something sticks with you and makes you sleep with a light on – it’s because you can’t help but picture what happened in the movie happening to you. What makes “found footage” films so effective is that they remove that element of separation. In watching this movie, you know exactly how the haunting feels and looks. You can’t separate yourself from it because you’re living it right alongside the protagonists.

Part of what makes this film excellent, I think, is the playfulness of the opening hour. Much like the demon that’s haunting Micah and Katie, the movie doesn’t do anything outright horrifying for a while. It gives you time to settle in and be comfortable. You’ll be creeped out by a door opening and closing on its own or a random batch of footsteps here or there. You’ll think maybe this isn’t going to be so bad. As things move on, though, it picks up. The demon starts becoming more and more brazen and you, as an audience member, are glued to it all. The haunting builds and builds until the final half hour, which is where the sucker punch comes in.

There are no plot twists. There is no “gotcha!” moment. The final half hour – in conjunction with the hour leading up to it – is straightforward horror at its very best. It’s what earned this movie its reputation, and it’s what sent several women out of the theater crying at each showing I went to. I won’t spoil a thing. I will simply tell you that you will not understand the hype until those crucial final minutes. Further, you will not fully understand the depth of the movie’s strength until you go to tuck yourself in at night.

Word has it that Steven Spielberg took a copy of Paranormal Activity home with him from the studio one night and returned it the next day in a garbage bag. His reasoning? It was haunted. He wanted nothing to do with it.

When Paramount screened the movie for test audiences, they were alarmed by people walking out early. When asked if the movie was that terrible, the people who left early responded almost unanimously: no, it wasn’t bad at all – it was just too scary.

You hear these stories and you think surely they must be overblown. That’s what I thought, anyway, and I’m sure many others had the same opinion before going in.

I’ve never been more happy to be completely wrong. This is the scariest movie I have ever seen.

It is in a very limited release right now, so you have to look up times online – they won’t be in the paper unless you happen to be in a city it has come to. Do it. Trust me.

When my mother asked me if I knew a Paula Mulder, I originally thought it was because I had received an odd piece of mail or something similar. I told her I had never even heard the name, and then went off to Google it in the hopes that something would turn up. This is nothing new for me; I’m a journalist at heart and when something like this comes up I’ll look into it to the best of my ability.

What I found was heartbreaking. Paula Mulder, 21, and her mother, 48, had been shot dead in their Egg Harbor Township home. They lived no more than five minutes away from where I grew up.

The news this morning revealed something even more unexpected: the accused murderer was Nicholas Nigro III, a 25-year-old kid who used to be on my bus stop.

Several years back, another kid – I call them kids because it’s hard to believe we’re anything else – from the bus stop was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years in prison. He was 20 at the time.

I knew the latter pretty well, though I would never make the stretch to say we were friends. He wasn’t a bad person. Made a lot of questionable decisions and always found himself in trouble in one form or another, but I never made the assumption he’d end up in prison for the death – accidental as it was – of another human being. I am presently glad to say I didn’t know Nick more than by name and face.

It’s easy to look back on the past fondly and think about when things weren’t always so incredibly complicated, and I suspect we’re all guilty of doing it once in a while. Lately, though, as I run what feels like the millionth Google search for anyone by the name Ron Bybee – another bus stop veteran who graduated the year before me and simply disappeared – and hoping maybe I’d be able to finally re-connect with my best friend of more than half a decade, I find myself thinking more and more about exactly how fragile our lives can be. One small set of circumstances one way or the other, one mistake, one good choice or one bad choice and suddenly the future looks far different from what we may have been expecting.

I’ve thought a lot about Jade Benecoff – one of my closer friends through high school and, prior to that, art classes at Cygnus – getting into a horrendous car accident right down the street from where she lived and being reduced to … well, I’m not sure what. I haven’t been able to talk to her since. None of our mutual friends have, either, as far as I’m aware. I have no idea where she is or what she’s doing. Don’t know if she needs constant assistance or has found a way to live on her own. Don’t know if maybe she managed to fully recover. Couldn’t tell you a single thing about her past that day, only a few days after senior prom, when she was broadsided on a blind corner.

She was a phenomenal artist. Would’ve pursued that, I assume. We always sat next to or across from each other in our art classes. Since that day – since she was no longer around to spur me – I’ve more or less given up on art. I still draw cartoons, and every once in a while when my mind drifts I’ll catch myself sketching something, but by and large it has become something I “used to do” when it used to be something I planned on doing for a living.

How does stuff like this even occur? How does my best friend – a brilliant guy with limitless potential who could’ve gone to any college in the country if only he had the money and motivation – become someone I haven’t seen or heard from in more than five years? How does another good friend become a practical recluse after a tragic car accident and how have I gone five years without speaking to her? How do two kids I shared a bus stop with end up being charged with the deaths of fellow human beings?

What the hell happened?

I’ve remarked a few times to friends and family that it’s weird getting older because you start noticing that people you grew up idolizing have changed, moved on or even passed away. I’m only 23, and yet it feels as if I’ve already lost – through lack of communication or any other circumstances – so many people.

I guess the lesson to be learned through loss and widening gaps of time and geography is that you should never – under any circumstances – assume that anything is permanent. Never assume that the friendships you have and maintain are capable of surviving without effort once the real world comes calling. Things happen. Some are tragic, some less so. Either way, you need to be prepared to handle these things as they occur in order to keep in touch with those who mean the most to you.

Knowing some of these things are inevitable doesn’t make it any easier, though, and when I look back on some of the circumstances my fellow classmates and friends have had to deal with, I get overwhelmed at how much it all just seems like such a crapshoot. What if Jade had been only seconds earlier or later pulling out of that blind corner? What if I had made sure to keep in touch with Ron? What if I had actually helped out with any number of the mischievous activities some of the kids on Ivins were up to? Where would I be today if I had chosen different people to emulate?

I miss Ron. I miss Jade. Lord help me, I even miss the Ivins Avenue troublemakers.

What’s the best course of action when you feel terrible just for growing up happy and relatively care-free?

Maybe I’m old-fashioned and somewhat cliche, but I don’t see any flaws in the argument that much of the ‘modern art’ we see nowadays has little, if anything, to do with art. It’s not a terribly easy argument to make, though – try to look for a definition of the word and you’ll see vague description after vague description talking about the expression of creativity or a mirror to nature.

Regarding the definition of pornography, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said “I know it when I see it.” Increasingly, I’m growing to feel that way about art. I am by no stretch of the imagination an expert on the history and development of art, but I consider myself more well-versed than the average person. By no means does this give me the authority to say with any confidence that something is or is not art, though I have to confess that it is not at all rare for me to have raised an eyebrow when confronted with attempts at modern art.

So when I saw Ohio artist Richard Whitehurst building ‘The Rape Tunnel’ and calling it a piece of art, I can’t say I was entirely surprised. This man also created ‘The Punch You in the Face Tunnel’ – and is currently embroiled in litigation with a young woman who he punched in the face after she entered the tunnel – and seems to be running with the definition of modern art as anything that expresses an idea or concept.

The idea’s pretty simple: enter The Rape Tunnel, get raped. I’m not entirely sure how Whitehurst plans to get away with such a thing, though when asked about his plans for what goes on inside the tunnel he said the following:

“I want to make it clear that I plan to make the experience as unpleasant as I possibly can to anyone who dares to crawl through the tunnel. I will try to the best of my ability to make them regret their decision.”

The words of an unhinged man? Quite possibly. The words of a man who completely misunderstands the very concept of art? I’d definitely say so. But here’s the problem: Where, exactly, can we draw the line in saying what is and is not art?

I’d like to pause very quickly and assure you that I in no way condone, support, endorse, approve or enjoy the idea of something like this existing and continuing to exist under the guise of art. That being said, I would like to know exactly what the boundaries are in terms of what we would call art and what we would just call derogatory nonsense. Can we call anything that expresses an idea ‘art’? The man who put a Bible in a jar of urine and watched as it made him (in)famous was certainly expressing something – you can’t take that away from him, much as you may want to – but if the application of that expression is so grotesque or off-beat or requires no true talent whatsoever, can we truly call it art?

For those who would take the talent road, I’d ask you about some of Jackson Pollock’s works. The abstract expressionist movement was full of people who simply flung paint around or produced minimalist works that almost anybody could create, so what, talent-wise, separates some of these painters – Pollock excluded, as he actually did exhibit quite a bit of talent when he wasn’t just throwing paint in every direction – from some of the modern artists we so readily scorn today?

It’s possible to go back to Caravaggio or Leonardo and point out their obvious technical prowess. They’re legendary masters of the field for a reason, and nobody questions their genius or ability. We can even go back to Dali or Magritte – gentlemen who created works that don’t make a whole bunch of sense on the surface – and praise them for their abilities and their talent at expressing abstract ideas through surreal or oddball concepts. Tell an art scholar that any of those four weren’t talented artists and you’re likely to get slapped in the face. Tell them that Whitehurst is an artist as talented as any of those four and you’re likely to need a helmet. Is that right? I think it is, but I’m sure there are plenty of people who disagree.

Maybe the talent of modern artists – ones who would turn a toilet on its side and call it a work of expression – doesn’t lie in the actual production of pieces we would normally consider art. Maybe their talent lies in expressing things in ways we never would have thought to express them. I have trouble buying that, though, because it’s very easy to warp things however you want them to be warped when you’re dealing with the purely theoretical.

For example, watch this: The Rape Tunnel is actually a very intense look at the difference between consent and lack of consent. By entering the tunnel, you’re expressing your freedom of choice and willingness. Thus, should you enter the tunnel and get raped – which seems likely, given its intent – you have consented to that rape and as such have not truly been raped at all. It’s a complicated and intricate look at people who are, at their base, complicated and intricate.

I don’t agree with a single damn thing I wrote right there, but it could very easily be taken as a valid argument in support of The Rape Tunnel. This is why it is so difficult to attack the notion of what is or is not art: it’s incredibly easy to defend almost anything, so long as you’re capable of twisting ideas and words around enough. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, and if someone placed a piece of dog feces on a sparkling china plate and spent the next four hours telling you exactly how they thought it was a legitimate work of art, the odds are that something in that four hours of idiocy would actually end up making sense.

Once that foot is in the door, you’ve lost. And that’s why we’re finding it so difficult to figure out exactly where to draw the line.

More importantly, it’s why some idiot in Ohio has constructed a tunnel in which he plans to rape people.

Note: It’s important to note that there aren’t many details out there regarding this project, so there’s a chance it’s a hoax. Regardless, the majority of these points stand.