It being October and all, I figured I'd pay the month o' fright a little tribute of my own. I was thinking tonight and came to the conclusion that if I ever make a horror film I will call it "The Side of the Road," a title at least as creative as the title of recent fright films that give away the entire plot in the title. Yeah, you know what I mean.

There are, of course, the normal scary things on the side of the road: the straggly hitchhiker/killer, dismembered animals, and so on. But those won't make an appearance in my film. No, I will focus on the truly frightening.

Have you ever been driving along when all of a sudden--there, in the road ahead of you--is a single shoe? I have always wondered how that happens. Does someone hold it out the window and accidentally let go? Or is the shoe thrown out the window in anger? Does it fall off of the owner's foot that for some reason is hanging out the window as the car zips down the freeway at 80 mph? It seems just as likely that the shoes have appeared for some far less innocent purpose, far more frightening for being unrevealed.

The other day I was driving to work and noticed along the side of the road 10-15 brightly colored stuffed gorillas. There was a cobalt blue one with red ears, a magenta gorilla with orange ears, and so on. Not one was the same as the other, and there they lay in a single file line against the median. Creepy, right?

They reminded me of The Wigs. Last year, on three seperate ocassions, my car found itself haunted by a wig. How the same wig managed to track me down three times still baffles me, but there it was. If I ever make a horror film, it may just be staring The Wig.

And if it's not overkill, the horror film would also involve The Baby Shoes. A few years back enroute to Sacramento from So Cal, I drove through a quarter mile stretch of freeway littered with hundreds and hundreds of identical baby shoes. I'm sure there's a logical explanation behind them, but they definitely would make for a good clip in a horror film of the caliber of the Shining. Just thinking about it now makes my skin crawl.

Finally, and perhaps the scariest of them all, the representation of all that is wrong with suburbia and the folks who care more about their perfectly manicured lawns and the wax job on their Lexus than the status of their souls: the sign-twirler. Seriously. Driving through my over-grown suburban town on a Saturday afternoon, I find myself wondering where these people come from. I can understand the teenage boys rocking out with the Mr. Pickles' Sandwich Shop signs...but the middle-aged women salsa dancing on the corner of the major intersection nearest my house? Down-right terrifying. Or the man who bears his midriff each time he raises the sign for the smoothie shop: definitely shudder-worthy. What if it turns out that these sign-twirlers are capable of reproducing like rabbits?

Oh, man. I'm freaking myself out. It looks like my film will never grow beyond infancy--it's way too frightening for me to stomach.