All the Mundane Things I'll Never Do Thanks to a Childhood of '90s Horror Movies

Final Destination 2 gave me an unshakeable fear of driving behind trucks carrying anything in their bed. Logs, ladders, you name it, I’ll change lanes.

Thanks to Scream, I’ll never own a house with floor to ceiling windows looking out onto a beautiful backyard. That’s where boyfriends get murdered. (Sure, that’s why I’ll never own a beautiful house.)

And Jada Pinkett Smith’s death in Scream 2 made me afraid of immersive horror events (like haunted houses). All it takes is one psycho getting hired at a hay maze and suddenly you’re dying in front of a crowd of cheering spectators.

Thanks to Urban Legend, I always get in my car super fast, lest anyone hiding underneath tries to slash my ankles.

That goes double for checking my backseat for murderers, though that’s not limited to Urban Legend. Pretty much all horror movies— and just existing as a woman— have ingrained that instinct.

Both Ghost in the Machine and Unbreakable gave me a fear of being trapped under swimming pool covers.

I probably wasn’t going to anyway, but Scream made sure I’d never try to exit a garage via the dog door.

Urban Legend 3 (Urban Legends: Bloody Mary), plus that one Scary Stories book convinced me that any pimple was actually a spider’s nest of eggs buried in my face.

In a realization that’s two decades too late, I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t have watched so many horror movie sequels as a child.