 I wasn’t known for my bravery as a kid. It was something of running joke in my family that you could get me running scared from any given room with the slightest hint of anything eerie, dangerous, or mysterious. Even now, all grown up with two kids and a pregnant wife, I’m still the butt of regular laughs between my parents when they remember me fleeing the television set when the minor chords of Sesame Street’s Alphabet Jungle theme song began. Or doing the same at the start of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, or even screaming in terror to go home while watching The Goofy Movie and Pocahontas in theaters. With a familial reputation as easily frightened throughout my childhood, it would be a reasonable inference to assume I stayed away from all things horror for a good, long while. And yet, I was drawn to it. Often unsupervised with a TV/VCR combo and an extensive collection of movies on good ol’ VHS, I have a formative memory of putting in Poltergeist at the way-too-young-age of six. I scared myself senseless watching Are You Afraid of the Dark? before my parent’s decreed it time for light’s out. I was a glutton for punishment, playing The Ring and The Haunting in my personal DVD player’s built in screen, playing the movies on mute while reading the subtitles and wearing headphones in an effort not to tip my parents off to the fact that I wasn’t bold enough to face these films with any volume. Despite my skittishness, I continued devouring horror content because somewhere in me I understood the underlying premises to be fiction. I knew, at the end of the day, I would not be encountering Freddy, Chucky, or Jason as I laid vulnerably underneath my Batman sheets trying to fall asleep. In those moments, my thoughts never drifted to worrying about being murdered by Michael Myers or tormented by the same Leprechaun who terrorized Jennifer Aniston. No, in those moments I was petrified about the boogeymen my father had led me to believe were real. See, my dad was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness—that pesky sect of Christian-flavored zealots that show up at your front door from time-to-time. If you don’t know, the Witnesses are pretty heavy on fearing the devil and all things “Satanic Panic.” While my dad never brought me to a weekend religious service or took me around door-knocking for Jesus, he did subscribe to their worldview and taught me of a world that took their theological belief system as equally factual and fundamental as anything I’d be tested on in school. Anxiously, I recall asking my father at a young age, “can demons, or satan himself, get me while I’m sleeping?” Instead of putting me at ease, my dad nodded at what he took to be a poignant question and affirmed, “they may want to target you while you’re alone, and without my protection, yes. But if that were ever to happen to you, just call on the name of God and command them out.” Now, this was of no great comfort to me, because in addition to painting a picture of a universe with a particularly nasty adversary, the Jehovah’s Witnesses taught of an angry, judgmental God who would one day put the world through The Great Tribulation before He annihilated the entire world—sparing only the faithful and baptized believers within the world’s only true religion, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, naturally. I worried about being among the enemies of God during those final days. I had once asked my father if I could know I would be safe if that time came about during my own life, which I had been repeatedly told was a pretty sure bet. My dad had responded with something along the lines of, “well, let’s hope we can get you baptized before that day comes. But none of us will ever truly know until the end passes and by God’s mercy, we don’t.” So, I would lie sleeplessly in bed a quivering wreck. Not afraid of monsters or murderers, but of both the devil and the hero I was supposed to rely on to rescue me. I’d pray for protection while fearing I wasn’t righteous enough for those prayers to work. Or, worse, I’d be getting the attention of a God who was even more powerful than the devil, but that hated me just as much. By the time was around 9 or 10, I was mercilessly made fun of by my parents for putting my fingers in my ears while in a public screening of 1999’s X-Men, during a particularly tense scene where Sabretooth could pop out at any moment to attack Wolverine. This was a sort of one-two punch with the opening night of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, in which I tapped out and asked to go home after Voldemort slayed Harry’s parents in a flashback sequence. The ruthless mockery finally struck a nerve, and maybe my pride, and I vowed to stop letting movies and TV shows that had me spooked get the better of me. It worked. Like magic, I never found myself so much as startled by a jump scare or squeamish over gore again. That fingers-in-the-ears-fight-or-flight feeling never returned. And while it wasn’t too long after that when I let go of the beliefs I had been taught by the Witnesses, courtesy of my dad (who would follow suit a decade or so later), I can’t say the all-consuming dread of unseen terrors brought upon by those beliefs similarly made a permanent exit from life. There were two scenarios since in which I felt the familiar existential panic of an invisible antagonist. The first was during sleep paralysis, a propensity towards which I developed as a teenager and still endure occasionally. In this state, I would wake up trapped in a body I could not move with visions of hellish creatures populating my bedroom or sitting on the foot of my bed, often prodding at me, and hearing murmurs of other-worldly voices ridiculing me or wishing me harm. The second was during a quintessentially “bad trip” after dropping acid as a twenty-something and walking around the streets of Philadelphia (which, honestly, is already a bit of a harrowing experience while sober). Both my night terrors and drug-induced psychotic episode shared a common theme: my rational brain understood an underlying cause for what I was witnessing. I was either caught between a dream-state and consciousness or experiencing the (as-advertised) effects of a psychedelic substance. It should be a straight-forward, open-and-shut case of dismissing my perception of reality, and yet, in both situations I could not convince myself I was witnessing something manufactured by my own brain. While I apprehended it was the most likely, perhaps even the only plausible explanation for what was happening, I still found myself panicking that my altered state would never end. That I was undergoing a real-life, mystical event. I could attempt to describe in vivid detail some approximation of what I saw and heard and felt, but it would do no good. The obvious assumption would—and should—be that I am relaying something of no more significance than a nightmare. I even grasp that as the truth in the most rational part of myself. Yet, both experiences brought me back to feeling like that scared little boy awake in bed, hoping tonight was not the night that either the devil or his creator decided to act upon their contempt of me, that tomorrow would come, and that things would eventually continue on as normal. These experiences are something that cannot be transmitted from person to person through a story. They can hardly even be relayed through a common understanding of shared experiences. They are as unique as the individual going through it. Like death, it can happen with others, but it is experienced truly alone and exclusively within one’s self. Yet, what I can do is paint a picture of a feeling. This is exactly what I attempted with my feature film debut, The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord: an existential horror thought-experiment of a movie that tries to make you as unsure of what you’re witnessing as I was during one of my many bouts of sleep paralysis or at the peak of my bad acid trip. In this film, a young woman’s boyfriend suddenly claims to be channeling God during a remote weekend get-away intended to be romantic. As God, the man claims his girlfriend is going to die before the end of the trip and she’s destined for hell unless she believes what is happening and worships the entity claiming to be in conversation with her through the vessel of her partner. The boyfriend repeatedly slips in and out of this persona, begging her (as himself) to run from him and get him help but pleading with her (as God) to stay and accept what appears to be happening. The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord doesn’t ask you to be afraid of a slasher or a monster or a cataclysm. It doesn’t try to startle you with loud noises or make you avert your eyes with scarring imagery. That’s not what lingers with me or keeps me up at night. Those are childhood fears that I’ve put away. This film tries to get you to experience the grown-up dread of not knowing which way is up, what is true, or why you’re feeling a sense of impending doom. It tries to nag you with “what if you’re in danger?” while making sure you’re fully aware that you have no rational reason to believe that to be so. It wants you to recall a time in your life where all signs point to there being nothing to worry about, yet something in you is hyperaware that you don’t have the information or perspective to truly let your guard down and feel at ease. It’s not the fear of corporal harm that brings about my insomnia. It’s the omnipresent sense of “something’s not right” during moments that should reasonably appear safe that I can’t shake. I’m not trying to scare your conscious, animalistic self. I’m trying to unsettle your soul. I want you to watch the entire movie, unsure of where I even got the audacity to call this a horror film, only for the next time your roommate or spouse is out for the night, you to find yourself unable to shake an oncoming existential crisis brought on by moments we’ve depicted on screen replaying in your head. Yes, I used a framing device familiar to me and I want to take a look at something I grew up intimately familiar with that can either be infinitely beautiful or truly terrifying depending on where you are and what you believe when you’re exposed to it. But the ominous feeling I’m trying to invoke should be universal for everyone who’s had that human moment of doubt that they’ve missed something vital to their security or anyone who has had to make a decision with too big of a consequence for how little information they feel like they have. As someone who grew up afraid, I’ve learned that much of our fear is a choice. We have to make the decision to move forward believing that there is nothing hiding under our bed, and it’s ridiculous to live in the dread of such nonsense. And while that is something I feel I’ve accomplished, I am often reminded that when it comes down to it, the decision to let go of fear is just that: a choice. The one anxiety I worry is impossible to vanquish is the lingering question that repeats itself every so often while I’m making that choice to believe that there’s nothing out there to actually fear: “But what if I’m wrong?”  BIO: Jared Jay Mason received his Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, which now sits collecting dust somewhere in his parents’ house. Since abandoning his academic pursuits, Jared has been a performer, stand-up comedian, produced playwright, award-winning screenwriter, Nicholl Fellowship semi-finalist, and feature filmmaker. He now resides on the outskirts of Los Angeles with his wife, son, daughter, and cat. THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE DAY OF THE LORDLINKS: The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord is now available to rent or own on iTunes, Amazon, VUDU, Google Play, The Microsoft/XBox store, YouTube, and on DVD. GENIUS LINK TO VARIOUS PLATFORMS: https://geni.us/GreatAndTerribleDay RENT ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlYoIKKvafc BUY ON DVD: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Terrible-Day-Lord-DVD/dp/B09NSZBPGP/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2ZX73PNCC2RH3&keywords=the+great+and+terrible+day+of+the+lord&qid=1640668163&s=movies-tv&sprefix=the+great+and+terrible+day+of+the+lord%2Cmovies-tv%2C136&sr=1-3 You can follow The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord on: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegreatandterriblemovie/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thegreatandterriblemovie/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DogAndPonyPics Or Jared Jay Mason personally at: https://twitter.com/jaredjaymason TODAY ON THE GINGER NUTS OF HORROR WEBSITE
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