What’s your scare threshold?

Halloween is now less than two weeks away and the stores are filled with candy, costumes and all the decorations you can imagine that will turn your Home Sweet Home into a Haunted House of Horrors.

Or not.

Some can do without Halloween, whether they don’t enjoy it, don’t have kids to beg them to go out trick-or-treating, or they just don’t believe in it.  And that’s okay.  It’s not a season everyone has fun with.

Personally, I enjoy Halloween.  When my boys were little, we had a lot of fun carving pumpkins, decorating, dressing up and going out trick-or-treating.  I also love scary movies, although I really don’t care for really gory films.  You know the ones…no real plot, cardboard characters and plenty of gore for shock value.  I can watch scary movies anytime I want all year long but it’s just much more fun during this time of year, especially when a few cable channels give me plenty to choose from with their 30 days of Halloween fright fests. 

Besides the movies I can choose from if I feel the need to watch a scary flick, I also enjoy watching two of my favorite shows which both started a new season recently and are perfect for this time of year.  We’re talking about The Walking Dead and American Horror Story.  Zombies…that’s a given when it comes to what might frighten people, real or not, but my new favorite scary character?  I’ve never had a fear of clowns but the clown character in American Horror Story beats them all, hands down, even Stephen King’s clown from his novel, It, and that was a clown that kept some people up at night.   

Of course, if I enjoy scary movies, I also enjoy books of the horror, thriller or supernatural genre.  Stephen King and John Saul are two of my favorite authors.  I can’t count the number of novels by both authors that I’ve read more than a few times.

While mysteries are actually my favorite genre when it comes to reading, and writing, I decided to take a chance and write my own ghost story, 1313 Psycho Path.  It was a story I wrote for my boys for Christmas last year and because we liked it so much, we decided to publish it for others to enjoy.  For me and what I’m used to reading, it’s not all that scary.  But I really enjoyed writing it.  And so far, others have enjoyed reading it; except for the few I heard from who couldn’t make it past the first few chapters.  I have to admit, it makes me feel like I accomplished a great trick when I discovered I can write well enough to actually scare readers, even if their scare threshold isn’t as high as mine.

So what’s your scare threshold?  Do you enjoy Halloween?  Do scary movies and books thrill you or do you avoid them because they keep you up at night?  Whatever your threshold, I hope you are enjoying the season, whether it’s bursting with Halloween delights or completely fright free!