Primal Scene: Parents (Bob Balaban, 1989)

Today's the day: The sixth and final issue of Be Not Afraid is now on sale at comic shops and digital retailers. I love this comic, and I'm so glad I got to make it, so please do grab the issue at your local and (if you prefer) catch up with it digitally through Penguin Random House or Google Play.

Also: This Friday, February 27, the DILF World Tour continues at Symposium Books in Providence, Rhode Island, where I will be speaking with the fantastic Erin Vachon. More details here at the link.

Dead Teenagers is still coming in March from Oni. DILF: Did I Leave Feminism (in both book and smell form) is still right here.

I saw Parents in my head years before I ever saw it. It was one of the horror movies I read about in my mom’s Roger Ebert Video Companion, so that I could get scared without violating her ban on R-rated movies. The three movies I most wanted to see, based on the criticism of Roger Ebert, were Altered States, Child’s Play, and this one. Having now seen them all, this is the movie that least resembles my expectations.

Based on the infallible testimony of the Video Companion, I knew that Parents was a movie about children whose parents were hiding something. I knew there was a scary scene where everyone’s parents gathered to discuss the secret — I imagined a Satanic rite convened in a living room after the kids were asleep, inside a circle drawn on the floor in blood. I knew this conspiracy, somehow, involved feeding a boy his own pet rabbit, who was probably sacrificed at the ceremony in question.

That bloodstained living room and the late-night circle of parents (were they Satanists? Aliens? Some other, more terrible kind of monster?) seeped into my bones; I knew, logically, that I’d never watched the movie, but the shape of the thing, the night gathering, the sacrificed pets, was something I would have sworn to in court. Several stories I’ve written as an adult — most notably Contagious, which I wrote for the first issue of Boom’s Hello Darkness — were written in response to Parents. I say in response, because I was definitely paying homage to an actual story, without fully realizing that the original story was also something I’d made up, and that it had never played anywhere but my own eight-year-old imagination. 

Well: About a year ago, I found Parents streaming on Tubi. There is a scene of parents socializing late at night, but they’re playing bridge; nothing ominous or culty happens. The story about a boy having to eat his pet rabbit is Ebert’s — it’s a personal anecdote that he drops into the review, not a part of the movie. Looking back at that old review, I now realize that Ebert didn’t even like the movie. I remembered him giving it a rave. 

I also realized that Parents is a good movie — better than Roger Ebert gave it credit for, though not as perfect as the elementary-school version of me wanted to believe — precisely because it understands how these childhood fears operate; how kids grab on to a shred of the truth, or the emotional core of a situation, and then expand on it, using their own imaginations and what little they know of the world, until it becomes a story they can comprehend. It understands how truth and fantasy can bleed into each other, and how the fantasy is often truer than what adults will call “true.”