I’m reading AJ Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically, and I am loving it so far. I read the following passage a few nights ago, and it made me laugh so hard because it reminded me of why my greatest fear is what it is — and it seems like something I would say or do:
“Thanks to my OCD, I’m prone to weird little rituals, like touching the shower head four times after turning off the faucet. Or opening my jaw into a yawnlike position whenever I look in the mirror. Or making sure never to start a conversation with the word you because when I was eleven I saw an Eight Is Enough episode in which an estranged father’s first words to his son were ‘You doing all right?’ and the relationship went sour after that — probably not because the father started his sentence with ‘you,’ but you never know.”
- AJ Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically
For the record, my greatest fear is being kidnapped at a gas station and being buried alive. This fear comes to me from watching a French-Dutch thriller called L’homme qui voulait savoir (The Man Who Wanted to Know) or Spoorloos or The Vanishing. It’s about a couple, Rex and Saskia, who are on vacation. They stop at a gas station, and Saskia gets abducted and subsequently buried alive. Rex goes on a hunt to find Saskia and figure out what happens to her, and he ends up getting buried alive, too. Terrifying. This is also why I no longer watch scary movies — I literally screamed in class.
And yes, there is an American remake featuring Jack Bauer himself. I doubt Kiefer’s version is as gripping, but you could give it a try. Incidentally, my high school French teacher, one of my favorite teachers of all time, used to let us watch French thrillers in class at Halloween, so this story is seasonally appropriate. (The only other one I remember watched was Diabolique, which is also mildly terrifying. And yes, there’s an American remake of this one, too; this one features Melissa Gilbert and was once seen on Lifetime. You can guess which version is better.)
