Issue the Fifth: Fear Itself
by Renée Rigdon and Zabet Stewart

When we began putting this issue together, we asked ourselves, "What really scares us?" When you are up to your eyeballs in knitted gore all day long, you find that less and less really bothers you. But the things that do still bother you don't just bother you, they freak you out deep down. We've decided to share with you the things that really bother us and our designers. Check the blog frequently between now and October 31 to see everyone's responses.

Renée says:
Have you heard the things that go bump in the night? Bumps don't scare me. Freaky dead girls do. Let's look at the history. There are probably thousands of ghost stories about some freaky dead girl hitch hiking then either murdering the car's occupants or disappearing right when they reach their destination. There are the twin freaky dead girls from The Shining, did those girls not creep anyone else out? And though neither The Grudge nor The Ring were terribly frightening, it's hard to ignore that Samara from The Ring was way freakier than the boy in The Grudge. Even in the less than stellar Gothika, the shining creeptastic bit is the girl who possesses Halle Berry. It's always the little girls that have the desire for blood in their eyes, and they often get what they want. Show me a crazed serial killer with a machete all you want, it's the freaky dead girls that will have me running for cover.

Zabet says:
This is stupid, but the thing that has scared me all my life is Bloody Mary. When I was in Montessori school, another kid told me all about Bloody Mary one day during naptime. For those of you who don't know, the thing about Bloody Mary is that you say her name three times in a dark room while looking into a mirror. (Mind you, this greatly predates the Candyman movies.) She's supposed to then appear holding a bloody knife, and possibly kills you and your entire family.

Now, somehow, in my 5-year-old mind, this translated itself into a fear of Bloody Mary under my bed. Don't get me wrong, I'll avoid looking into a mirror in a dark room just because it's creepy, but I don't really associate Bloody Mary with mirrors. Under the bed, however, is the scariest thing I can think of, though as I've gotten older the fear is less about Bloody Mary specifically and more about what could be hiding there. As a child I would take a running leap onto my bed to keep from standing next to it, ankles exposed to Gods only know what. As an adult who loves scary movies, I will swing my legs up into my husband's lap at a movie theater when the under the bed scenario begins to play out on screen. If you visited my house, in my bedroom right now you would find a mattress on the floor so that there is no under to the bed at all. My imagination is too vivid to allow such a dark and fertile place as under the bed to exist in the room where I lay sleeping and vulnerable every night.