The most boring ghost story

Everyone has one, right? I got into videogames when I was about twelve and we lived in the country. We moved back into town when I was seventeen. This is important because of the time frame. My memory works pretty poorly with placing incidents chronologically, but I remember sitting in my giant room on the second floor with a balcony and windows in three directions like it's still happening.

And that's where I read my videogame magazine. I read a wide array of magazines and comic books sitting in my room, well, mostly comic books. But this was one of two or three magazines I bought for a heavy penny because they were in English. British or American, I couldn't tell. (My English wasn't that good, and I hadn't really figured out the distinction between "US" and "UK". Circumstantial evidence suggests this magazine was American.

So I'm probably older than fourteen but definitely younger than seventeen, on the sunlit wooden floor of my room reading this magazine full of personality and jokes. I read it a bunch of times, I can't remember the specific occasion, but I certainly remember the place, the mood. I remember the characters of the writers better than what games they were actually writing about.

And, more to the point, I remember this full page movie ad on the inside of the back cover of the magazine. You can probably picture the ad if I describe it. It's a picture of a movie theater, seen from about where the screen is. The picture has a cold, desaturated, blueish dark hue. The seats are almost empty. There's only two or three people there as far as you can see, sitting side by side. One of them is wearing a rabbit suit with a weird gleaming hard mask for a face, almost skeletal, with long crooked ears pointing almost straight up.

Well, we moved a couple of times and some time later I sold almost all of my comics and magazines to a second hand store in vast heaps and I never saw the picture of the spooky movie theater with the spooky man in the rabbit suit again. Not until I got Donnie Darko on DVD when I was 22 or 23.

That's the ghost in this story, do you see? The movie. I'm haunted by a ghost movie beloved as a cult classic all over the world. I'm rather fond of it myself as a movie and weirdness enthusiast. I like that it's different. I like what they tried to do with the extranarrative website, and I like how the story makes perfect sense if, and only if, you read The Philosophy of Time Travel. I try to ignore the special edition with the make-everything-dull director's commentary as well as the unnecessary sequel.

It's a great movie, and I don't see any need to make it more special with a, let's face it, completely ridiculous real world time travel story, as perfectly unprovable as it is unbelievable and pointless. It's just that it happened.