"Midnight Movie" a poem by Shenan Hahn

(This is a poem that Shenan wrote to kick off YVIAHMMAOIHTNQ:Y2, and I think it rocks. Not that I wasn't already jazzed about this month, but now I'm jazzed AND I have a poem that expresses said jazzing.

I like that, besides the overt references it makes, it also evokes John Goodman's speech about horror movies from Matinee, as well as makes what I believe to be an accidental reference to David Cronenberg's Videodrome.

Shenan also wanted to note that this started off as a sonnet, but then she needed an extra stanza so now it's some original form which we'll call a Shenan-sonnet or a "Shonnet." She also requested suggestions for a better title, but I think this one works fine.)



Imagine that first scream- before Fay Wray,
before the queens of Halloween, The Blob,
the jazzy giallo chases, and the Day-
or many Days- the Dead saw fit to mob-

there’s one guy by a fire who on a whim
says, “Out there is a killer mastodon,
who used to be a man like you, or him…”
and boom, the horror tale is born, its spawn

of bloody hoopla letting people tempt
the dread of what’s beyond that blaze, assured
in sticky popcorn safety as the reels
are flickering, as if we’d somehow dreamt
ourselves new flesh, its monstrousness a lurid
form caressed in grisly circus zeal

until we exit and the casualties
and killers we’d become are shrugged away,
or melt as we remember sunlight, moan
again, more distantly, at memories
of narrow odds we overcame to slay
the mastodon to a filet mignon.