Spooked Out

Editor’s note: Ron Nagasawa is on vacation. This column was originally published Oct. 14, 2010.

As we count down to Halloween in the Nagasawa house, our 13-year-old daughter seems to be on a kick to get scared. Ever since she was a little girl, she’s been unusually brave about stuff like that, probably because she’s smart, confident and rooted in her religious beliefs.

But whenever we go to the movies these days, she wants to see the scariest movies out. Her mom and I will allow anything within reason, and I usually end up taking her and a friend, as my wife can’t handle horror in any shape or form with the exception of doing my laundry.

Now I receive daily requests to take her to the Haunted Lagoon, the Haunted Plantation and basically any haunted house on the island so she can get her scare on. I figured it’s kind of like riding roller coasters for her – the scarier, the better.

So we’ve been perusing websites for these haunts, and I have to admit they look pretty scary. They seem to have taken this whole The Grudge movie theme to new heights. Since that is based on Japanese “obake” (ghosts) movies I get “creeped out” because that’s what scared me as a kid.

Then the scariest of all her requests came up. I looked at some footage on YouTube and never saw so much screaming in all of my adult life. The main character had this hair thing going on over his face and he made sounds that sent chills up my spine.

That’s right, I had to take our daughter and a few of her friends to the Justin Bieber concert. “The horror, the horror.”