June's Exhumed Essay
With school out and kids free to run amok, summer seems like an appropriate time for me to unlock what I thought would be a controversial essay when I wrote it: Your Kids Don’t Need to Be Protected from Fear.
Your kids don't need to be protected from fear
A lot of people ask me how I got into horror. For most people, their introduction to horror was a movie — Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Thing are common answers. I can’t remember my first horror movie, though I think it might have been
In my new book, Morbidly Curious, I have a whole chapter on how kids are morbidly curious—perhaps more than adults. I open the chapter with a story of my time as a Mad Scientist. Here’s an excerpt below:
I had a summer side job as a traveling “Mad Scientist” while working on my master’s degree. I was basically a discount Bill Nye. In addition to my traveling show, I would also lead weeklong science workshops at summer camps. The workshops would last a couple of hours each day and would cover a variety of topics. The kids would engage in hands- on learning in chemistry, biology, forensics, entomology, meteorology, and more.
The kids at the summer camps varied in age, but most were between five and seven years old. If you’ve ever been around kids that age, you know that their attention span is about as long as a grain of rice, especially when they’re at a summer camp with ten or fifteen of their friends. As someone who at that point had taught only college students, I found teaching young kids to be a bit of a learning curve.
My plan was to teach a lesson for maybe half an hour or so and then let the kids play a game or have some free time. This way, I could fit in four or five lessons each day while keeping the kids entertained and engaged.
As a twenty something with no kids, I didn’t know a lot of games that could be played indoors with a group of children. The typical camp classroom was too small for anything like tag or hide- and-seek. Sometimes we would have access to a gym and could play games like capture the flag. However, many of the summer camps didn’t have this luxury. This meant that I needed to find something for a group of kids to play in a room the size of a classroom that would keep all of them engaged and entertained. It needed to be something that was easy to learn and easy to play. One game kept coming to mind, but it was a pretty morbid game. However, with my other options exhausted or unavailable, I was running out of ideas.
I gathered the kids after their first lesson of the day and told them we were going to try a game called Mafia. I asked them to grab their chairs and arrange them in a circle. Mafia has several gameplay variations and optional rules. However, the basic gameplay is pretty much the same in all variations. The game centers around a town where there is a small number of killers who secretly murder a townsperson each night. It’s the job of the townspeople to figure out who is doing the killing and bring them to justice.
The kids loved this game. After they had the hang of the gameplay, I decided to let some of the kids play the part of narrator. The game narration can be as plain or as fantastical as you want, and much of the narrator’s imagination comes into play when the town wakes up and the narrator tells the people what happened that night. When I was the narrator, I kept the story as simple and family friendly as I could: “So- and- so was murdered by the mafia last night.” I was already worried that I would be getting confused calls from parents whose kids told them they murdered their friends today at mad science camp, so I didn’t want to push my luck.
However, my narration was apparently too tame for the children. When the kids started narrating, the game became much more morbid. The town quickly descended into chaos and began to resemble scenes from the most terrifying horror movies. Murder weapons became more creative, kills became comically exaggerated, and the townspeople’s excitement at hanging the accused each morning was palpable. Young kids were more morbidly curious than I had expected.
If you enjoyed this excerpt, you’d probably enjoy the rest of the book. As a reminder, if you pre-order Morbidly Curious, simply take a screenshot of the pre-order confirmation and email it to MorbidlyCuriousBook@gmail.com to receive a free 3 month subscription to the paid version of my Substack.