Lessons Learned From Horror Flicks

• Chances are, you've just wasted your money on a movie ticket.

• Sex is bad
  • You're especially screwed if you just were.
  • "Loose" girls die first. Pretty girls are next.
  • Don't shower or bathe when cameras are rolling. Nudity is a siren's call for monsters.
  • White, flowing gowns or tear-away clothing is almost as bad.

• Movement is a bad idea.
  • Never go down into the basement to check out that noise
  • When fleeing, never go upstairs
  • Let's not go into the ventilation system one by one
  • One by one, or all together, we're not going into the sewers.
  • If you are being chased through a field, you will fall
  • Staying in the same spot isn't too hot either.

• Children shouldn't play with dead things
• Lock your doors after dark
• Evil never dies
• Nobody living alone far off in the woods or 20 miles from the nearest town ever owns a gun -- not even a .22 rifle to plink at the durn squirrels trying to get into the attic
• If you own an axe, kitchen knife, or poker for the fireplace then you are going to be its victim, courtesy the Bad Guy
• As a general rule, don't try to solve puzzles that open doorways to Hell.
• In fact they won't actually "be right back".
• The big bucks star has reached the end of his/her career: Joan Crawford, Tony Curtis, Olivia de Havilland, Virginia Christine, Ida Lupino, etc.
• Monsters in the desert are due to "isotopes"
• Whatever happens to fruit and meat will eventually happen to you
• Unlike everyone else in the world, villagers have torch lights and pitchforks
• Don't have a happy, sunny time because it usually leads to something really bad around the corner. The number of butterflies and rainbows seen is proportional to the number of monsters that will come. (Disney movies exempted.)
• If the dog senses something strange, don't follow; if it runs away in terror, join it.
• If you are responsible for this situation (or could have prevented it), you're dead. Don't give up all hope, you might be able to sacrifice yourself to save someone else.

AntiPatterns:

General Forces: You're a moron, otherwise you'd never:

• Say "Let's split up and search for whoever killed 12 of us so far!"
• Back up slowly into a dark room without a flashlight
• Ignore it when the new house you just moved into tells you "GO AWAY!"
• Bend over and check to see if the killer is really dead
• Ignore the scream and tell your girlfriend, "It's just your imagination"
• Neglect to read the ingredient list on that new brand of cat food you got for Fluffy

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Wiki illuminates horror flick physics.

Reading about the TortoiseAndHare alg. and watching a Friday the 13th movie on the same day lead me to this AhHa moment regarding why the ever so slow moving psycho, in this case Jason Vorhees, always catches up to the running-for-their-life victim. If you accept that the psycho is the tortoise and the victim the hare, it becomes obvious that all trails in horror flicks contain cycles.

Is that why they all seem so repetitive?