I was watching a horror movie the other day and I got to wondering.  What do these crazed murderers do with the majority of their time?  For example, take the inbred cannibals from the Wrong Turn series.  Sure, they can run around killing and eating people a few times a year, but that can take up maybe a few weeks.  And I am inflating this number for torture and unnatural acts.  Still, these hill people have a good 48-49 weeks on their hands.  Of course, some of that time is spent committing incest and sharpening their machetes.  Even so, there is a lot of their lives that remain obscured from the moviegoer.

I wonder if any of them paint?  Perhaps they favor landscapes or pictures of birds.  After all, they spend all of their time in the backwoods.  It would stand to reason that the subject of nature would be dear to their hearts.  They may also have other, more practical, hobbies such as crocheting or whittling.  Who knows?  I guess I would just like a little more insight into the inner lives of these characters.  It is easy to see them as one dimensional, cannibalistic torturers.  But they have hopes and dreams and an aesthetic instinct.  At our core, we are all just people.

In the same vein, do you ever wonder what happens to kids after the movie is over?  Specifically, I am talking about Eliot from ET.  I am glad ET escapes back to his planet.  Good for him.  Eliot, however, is left on Earth holding the proverbial bag.  I mean, the government isn’t going to just let him off the hook.

Not long after ET escapes, Eliot is taken into custody- say, Guatanamo Bay.  There he is held for years, questioned and probed and drugged in an attempt to squeeze every bit of alien information from his adolescent brain.  Years later, he is released back to society.  Unable to cope, he has problems with drugs and alcohol.  He tells and retells his story of ET and his subsequent incarceration, leading to a stint in the Psych ward.  He is released once again, only to fall back into the same cycle of self-destructive behavior.  Rather than being put into an institution, Eliot goes into hiding into the Appalachian Mountains.  Alone in a cabin in the woods, he finally makes peace with himself by taking up cannibalism and incest (I forgot to mention that his little sister was equally traumatized and went with him).

This is called bringing the story together.  Double Pow.