Going up in an Irish Catholic household, I learned to fear most everything: my body, my thoughts, my emotions, my world. Through fear, my parents could better protect me, better keep control over me—their only child. Fear is love. Love is family. That's how the Irish think, at least. And although I was not far from being the bubble boy, unsuspecting shit still happened to me. I still got a bacterial infection from playing the recorder in a grade school Music class. I'm probably the only one to this day who has ever gotten ill from playing "Ode to Joy." Maybe I should have been placed in a bubble after all.

But I am reminded of that Family Matters episode when Harriet stays up late worrying about Laura because she broke her curfew and hasn't come home yet. Harriet decides to crash the party that Laura and her friends are attending to drag her daughter away. The next day, Laura goes on and on about how humiliated she feels because her mom made such an embarrassing scene in front of everyone. Maxine, plainly hurt by Laura's thoughtless rant, tells Laura just how lucky she is to have someone who is so concerned about her—no one was up waiting for Maxine when she got in that night, no one cared enough about her well-being and safety to go out looking for her.

Unlike that ungrateful bitch Laura Winslow, I'm not here to complain that I have two loving and overprotective parents, despite the fact that I'm now emotionally stunted at the level of a ten-year-old. I start out by saying this to somehow transition into the semi-related story of how I broke my mother's heart by not joining the priesthood. Long story short: Horror movies are to be blamed.

During my sinful summers as a boy, I used to spend most of my time with the cousins. My aunt would release us at West Coast Video or Blockbuster, and we'd pick out our babysitters for the week from the Horror section.

We'd then erase the weekly grace of receiving the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass by watching the body count mount and blood splatter in Child's Play, all of the Jason and Freddy movies, The People Under the Stairs, It, Dolls, Man's Best Friend, Puppet Master, etc. etc. Mind you, these secret showings all took place at a very early age, when I was at my most vulnerable.

Of course, Mom and Pop had no knowledge of the gore-filled, muggy nights in my aunt's basement; they wouldn't have allowed me to see anything more violently suggestive than 3 Ninjas. Like a soldier returning home from war, I did not talk about the horrors that I had witnessed after a week at the cousins' house. The memories were too much—that is, much too awesome. (Omission of truth is a venial sin, by the way.)

Accustomed to killer dolls and space mutants by the second grade, these supposedly "scary" movies slowly stopped being scary to me. The singing pizza in House IV could not faze me any longer. I still feared strangers and Protestants, but I'd totally take care of an army of mutant zombies just so long as they didn't offer me candy in a van. (Because I was taught Stranger Danger!)

Every so often, however, the odd horror film would come along that my parents would allow me to watch with them, and whether by proxy of their being present in the room with me, or as a result of my fear-ridden guilt releasing itself, I'd pee the bed afterwards. The following list of not-so-scary movies proves once and for all how much of a scaredy cat I am.

I think it would be fun to feature props from each of the movies that I talk about and also a related video game to tie everything together. I must have subconsciously targeted these movies, the ones that played with my mind the most, when I initially set out to collect movie props as a way of "owning" my fear. At least, that's what I've convinced myself to believe after buying such expensive junk.

As a preface on props: You haven't seen wealth, you don't know wealth, until you've met a serious prop collector. Look no further than the recent Debbie Reynolds auction held this summer that brought in twenty million in sales. Marilyn Monroe's "Subway Dress," estimated at one million, sold for over five million, making it the most expensive piece of entertainment memorabilia ever sold. But I thought the country was in a recession? No. You and I are in a recession. They are in a constant boom.

Prop collecting is mostly a hobby for the rich, and "serious" collectors will sniff you out to see if you have their kind of money. If you don't have the cash, prepare to be slighted and ignored. If you don't make at least six figures a year or work in the movie business and have industry contacts, then you have to forget about the iconic items and settle for shit like a dirty used sock (more on that later). In layman's terms, they're like a Kardashian: all ass and no class.

Many of these people rarely think twice about throwing down five, ten, fifteen thousand dollars on a single prop. I'll give you an example of the wealth.

One collector, on top of acquiring a new item for his collection nearly every day, buys hundred thousand dollar cars and exotic fish for his saltwater aquarium. He spent five thousand on one rare angelfish that you have to go several miles off the coast of Fiji to find. So he puts the specimen in his tank, and a common puffer fish that you can find in most pet shops for twenty bucks eats the fucking angelfish that very same week. If five thousand suddenly disappeared from my wallet, I'd probably have a heart attack. He, however, just laughs the whole thing off. You want to know why the rich want tax breaks? So they can refill their fish tanks. Just be glad that they don't collect vintage video games.

The point of saying all this is to stress the Catch-22 of prop collecting. The only way of ever being able to afford any decent props is if you cut out the middleman completely and contact the people directly involved in the movie's production and ask. From personal experience, though, many are offended if you contact them for that reason, and I've literally been told to fuck off in the past. This is prop collecting in a nutshell: Sit back and watch as the wealthy buy millions of dollars worth of marked-up props at auction houses, or be yelled at by propmasters for having the audacity to say that you love their work so much that you'd like to give them money to own a piece that they've made.

And where has my indignation gotten me? A broke ass attached to an even more broken man. At least I sleep easy at night. Well, except for the loose springs in my twenty-year-old mattress. Oh, and the occasional stomach rumblings at three in the morning.

In short, my life has always been a nightmare. Come see!