Nowadays, the average American has a few basic fears: being attacked at strip clubs by members of the Indiana Pacers backcourt, the fact that our Secretary of Defense is determined to carry out the unfinished legacy of Martin Sheen's character in "The Dead Zone," and, perhaps most discomforting of all, the nagging suspicion that the third Killers album will be even worse than Sam's Town.

Also, there's that whole terrorism thing, which will be a lot scarier if the science fiction writers of the world (who have never been wrong about anything) are correct in their prognostications that our society is entering into that precarious era when our personal electronic devices decide to rebel against their human oppressors. Needless to say, there are a lot of things to be afraid of in America in the year 2006.

There was a time when things were much more simple, and the only real thing Americans had to fear, if you believed Hollywood, was men in terrifying masks sneaking into your house and killing you while you sleep, especially if you were a teenager smoking pot or having sex in said bed.

This fear has largely dissipated in recent years; although I am not sure why, since to the best of my knowledge, medical science has yet to discover a cure for a pickax through the head. In preparation for this column, I offered up what I thought was a provocative hypothetical to a group of nine friends during our fantasy basketball draft last week. My question was simple: are you more frightened of an unstoppable killing machine with a chainsaw and a hockey mask, or the increasingly likely prospect of Nancy Pelosi becoming speaker of the House of Representatives? Eight people said Speaker Pelosi was the more frightening choice, one was non-committal (no doubt because he was still in shock over the set of circumstances that led him to take Joe Johnson with the eighth pick in the draft) and one told me to shut the hell up and reach for Caron Butler with my fifth-round pick (which I proceeded to do, with no small amount of joy).

Here's what I find discomforting about this exchange: these guys weren't kidding. A modestly unnerving reality (even for a group of solid liberals) is no match for an absolutely terrifying alternative that has little to no chance of actually occurring. And this upsets me, because I think we're starting to be scared of the wrong things, which is to say, reality.

I realize that this is not a new revelation. For years, under-qualified sociologists and lazy critics of the entertainment industry have fallen back on the maddening assertion that goes something along the lines of, "The horrors of the real world have surpassed anything any screenwriter or novelist could dream up." I've always thought this argument showed, at best, a lack of imagination. Look, it's a tragedy we haven't raised the minimum wage in more than a decade, but I would have a harder time sleeping knowing that a pack of velociraptors were descending upon the I-95 corridor.

I can still vividly recall being 10 years old, sitting in my basement with three of my friends at two o'clock in the morning, strung out on Surge and a two-pound bag of Tropical Skittles and watching John Carpenter's "Halloween." This remains the one and only movie that has legitimately terrified me. Other movies have disturbed me, forced me to question the relative importance of my own meager existence or made me reconsider everything I know to be true about life, love and death, but "Halloween" is the only one that altered my life to the point where I was genuinely afraid to close my door at night. That still strikes me as a major accomplishment.

Largely considered the first slasher movie ever (which is not exactly true, but whatever), "Halloween" sparked the trend of teenagers being murdered in creative ways in retribution for having sex, using drugs and, you know, generally living life.

When I was 10, the message of the movie hit me pretty hard, even though I wasn't having sex and my drug usage was only mild to moderate. Still, the movie affected me, if only because I grew up in Washington D.C., one of the handful of cities where being stabbed to death in your bed for no good reason is widely believed to be a legitimate and healthy fear. Also — and I swear on Jessica Biel's life that this is true — when I was six, I was diagnosed as having pantophobia (fear of mimes), which probably made me more susceptible than others to being terrified by a silent, white-masked mass murderer.

Looking back now, "Halloween" seems more like a cultural relic from a simpler, gentler time. It still is unnerving, what with Carpenter's creepy piano score, the presence of an allegedly sexy Jamie Lee Curtis, and Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey's effective use of the steadicam and shadows to heighten tension. Yet there's something fundamentally different about the movie in 2006 — it's not that scary anymore.

Interestingly enough, the fact that "Halloween" is no longer scary does nothing to hurt it as a movie, since it can now be appreciated on a totally different level, as a cultural relic from a bygone era when it was actually possible to scare young people by imparting obvious, intuitive lessons through violence and mayhem.

The movie itself isn't important, but the ideas it presents are indicative of a strange changing of the guard in American popular culture, a mix between the hysterical "The kids aren't all right!" ethos of the '50s and early '60s, and the youth-powered rebellion of the last two decades of the 20th century. Consequentially, the heroes of the film are an odd pair: the kindly old Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and the empowered, virginal Laurie Strode (Curtis). These two are forced to do battle with Michael Myers separately, and using the best their respective philosophies have to offer: for Pleasence, it's concern and vaguely official-sounding medical proclamations. (In describing Myers, Pleasence memorably intones "I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil!" which may or may not be an official medical condition.) Curtis responds by alternately screaming and kicking ass, which is indicative of the somewhat confused ideology of the movie.

Carpenter and his co-screenwriter Deborah Hill fall back on a kind of goofy, finger-wagging philosophy that must have been effective back in the '70s, since it spawned a whole sub-genre of movies where masked killers deliver essentially the same message to teenagers that their parents had been espousing, albeit with a bit more force.

The problem with the modern horror movie is that they have not evolved beyond the simple ideologies of their predecessors. The genre is not evolving with the rest of the world. The lessons presented in "Halloween" seemed relevant, since nobody had ever thought of packaging them the way Carpenter and Hill did. Now, it feels like everybody is reaching for a point — "Wolf Creek" tells us not to backpack across the Australian Outback (duh), "Hostel" tells us not to pull a Fredo Corleone with two mysterious Estonian women (double duh) and, finally, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" urges viewers to never enter the state of Texas (triple duh). The invaluable lesson from all these movies, it seems, is to never go anywhere and never try anything. And as a lesson, that sucks, mainly because it makes no sense.

Is it possible to scare modern audiences? Yes, but not the way we've been trained to expect. The best scary movies of the last five years — Brad Andersen's "Session 9" and Chris Nolan's "Memento" — are based on the concept of existential horror and the idea of losing your soul to something you can't really control. Both of these movies are built on the fragile, but achingly beautiful, notion that the real horror in life is losing yourself, or, most terrifying of all, never even knowing yourself. The ideas are weighty, and neither movie is able to totally exploit them, but they do a pretty good job. And, more importantly, these movies matter to our generation, the same way "Halloween" and all the slasher movies used to matter to a generation that was finding its way. Roosevelt said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and it's nice to see we still have some movies that take this sentiment to heart.

Ray Gustini is a sophomore majoring in English and journalism. What movies scare you? Let Ray know. E-mail him at [email protected].