Torre DeRoche - The Worriers Guide to the End of the World: Love, Loss, and Other Catastrophes—through Italy, India, and Beyond

W HEN I WAS a kid, I killed everyone I loved in a hundred creative ways. At night, in bed, I would craft tiny horror films in my imagination, casting my sisters, friends, and pets in the leading roles. I spared no gory details of squirting blood and shrill screams of agony when the monsters came. It was awful, but I couldnt help it. Id count the dead instead of sheep until my eyelids grew heavy, often wet with tears from so much self-inflicted personal tragedy in a single night.

You dont need Sigmund Freud to unravel this psychological snafu: My dad was a horror movie film writer, and death and terror were my familys life as much as rolling hills and fresh air might be to the children of a farmer. But instead of learning to squeeze milk from a cow, we were taught to milk nightmares from our minds.

So skilled at his craft was my dad that Quentin Tarantino, master of depravity, once said: Almost everything that Everett DeRoche has written is one of my favorite films. They were our favorite films, too, and we were proud to belong to him. Dads professional accomplishments were displayed all over our homeprops and concept sketches, awards and films posterswhich meant, in order to go to the bathroom at night, my five sisters and I would have to sneak past giant images of a murderous chimpanzee (Link), a killer pig (Razorback), a monster in a lake (Frog Dreaming), and deranged hospital patient (Patrick).

I learned to hold my pee in.

We followed in our fathers footsteps and developed macabre fixations of our own, making Dad proud when wed dress up for Halloween using film biz tricks to get our makeup looking hyper-realistic. One year during my teens I went as a character from a movie Id been haunted by since age four: Regan from The Exorcist. I dressed in a soiled nightgown with sheaths of lacerated skin hanging off my face, lips chapped and oozing. My youngest sister went as a woman who had given herself an abortion with a wire coat hanger, and my mother made a fabulous Lorena Bobbitt in her leopard-skin robe, knife in one hand, severed penis in the other.

We looked striking among all the sexy kittens, sexy lollypops, and sexy witchesso astounding, in fact, that all the sexy things were too scared to talk to us. Its obvious that nobody else knew how to Halloween properly.

We fit in nowhere, but that didnt matter. We were the Brady Bunch meets the Addams Family, tight-knit and lovingly bonded by our morbid interests. As a self-sufficient society of eight, we had each other. We were scared, sure, but we were scared together, for fear is powerfully bonding.

Despite all the fun we were having, there were side effects to our lifestyle, and not even my dad was immune to the consequences of his own creations. One time he took us camping in the Australian bush, and sometime in the evening, not long after night had fallen, a loud, guttural snort came from the inky blackness. We all knew what it was: a giant killer pig! Spooked by his own cult classic, Dad turned wide-eyed and rushed us inside the camper, locking the door behind us. As an American who had emigrated to Melbourne, he was unfamiliar with the sounds of Australian fauna; in the morning, we worked out that it was not a murderous Razorback but the mating call of a koala.