I was a scared kid. Although I loved my grandmother’s house,* it was haunted with unforgiving horrors at every turn. In the kitchen, the wood of the cabinets was stained so that it reminded me of a snarling elf. A lamp in her guest room put off a shadow that recalled Freddy Krueger’s outstretched hand. When the door to Ma-Maw’s room was half-closed, it looked like the silhouette of Anjelica Huston in The Witches, a film whose trailer so irrationally scared me that my mother almost put me into therapy. And in my mind, the air vents of my grandma’s house housed an entire network of toothy Gremlins waiting for me to go to sleep.

No one seemed to understand this. I was seven. Couldn’t I differentiate between fact and fiction? Didn’t I know that none of this was real? When we went to the mall, why wouldn’t I leave my parents’ side? How could I possibly remember that snatch of news footage about a shooting there?

How could I be so well-adjusted in other ways, only to collapse into tears when the next-door neighbor dressed like Pumpkinhead for Halloween? I had a preternatural memory (still do, apparently), I read way beyond my grade level, I could “talk like an adult.” So why was I so paranoid and afraid? What was wrong with me?

I went to a summer camp that same year, and I spent most of the week dreading an event titled: “VIDEO- GREMLINS.” I broached the subject with the only person I knew there, a boy called Casper whom I introduced to my mom as “my Black friend.” He had already seen it and told me there was nothing to be afraid of. There were even some Gremlins who were good guys. But I was unconvinced.

Part of me knew that a summer camp for kids wouldn’t program inappropriate entertainment. After all, they had already showed both Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which, at the time, I saw as the epitome of all artistic progress. I should have just trusted them. I should have played Tecmo Bowl on coach mode for as long as they would let me, then bravely sit in front of the video and close my eyes if I had to.

But, knowing that, to an imaginative kid, closed eyes are the Gremlins’ playground, I chickened out. The camp was split into Group A and Group B. When Group A was swimming, Group B was ushered into the movie room, and vice-versa. Hatching an unassailable plot, I convinced a camp counselor to let me go swimming twice. Perhaps he knew that, rather than wanting to enjoy a beautiful day, I was really just scared of the Gremlins. Either way, I put my ability to talk like an adult to good use. To this day, whenever I get sunburned, I’m reminded of 1984 Joe Dante holiday action-comedies.

Eventually, I grew out of a fear of Gremlins and moved on to a crippling fear of failure and death. It happened naturally. But no one seemed to understand where those fears came from, especially after I had been raised in such a sheltered existence. They didn’t understand that what helps a child to entertain himself is what also helps to terrify him. When people are adults, we talk about their difficulties as “their demons,” personifying the things that keep them up at night. We dramatize the same “overactive imaginations” we patronize children for having. We easily forget that intelligence is a two-way street toward light and darkness.

*- When my parents came to pick me up, I would often hide from them in hopes of staying at Ma-Maw’s.