I once had a connecting flight cancelled and had to unexpectedly spend the night in an unfamiliar city. Just imagine the wild and crazy, and/or intensely romantic, possibly life-changing night that awaited me if I’d been starring in a movie.
The reality: I had a couple drinks in a hotel bar, went to bed, went back to the airport and got home half a day later than I’d expected. Not very interesting at all.
I’ve gone camping with friends, sometimes near lakes, and have yet to be hunted down and slain by malevolent monsters. Sometimes, I even go hiking at night.
No lost soldiers, no guns, no explosions, not even a bear.
On Saturday I was cleaning out the garage and looked out the side door’s window. I saw a chipmunk on the steps with a nut in its mouth. It put the nut down, turned to look at me, and then grabbed the nut back up and went in search of hole in which to place the nut for the winter.
So in real life? Not much really happened other than I was a foot or two away from a chipmunk that looked at me.
In the movies? It would totally be like this:
The other day one of my cats was staring intently at a blank wall. In the movies, a ghost would have been there. In reality it was a very tiny bug.
Real story: When my daughter was an infant, we went out one evening leaving her, asleep, in the care of a competent teenager. We came home to find all the lights in the house on and a strange car in the driveway. Inside the sitter and her sister and her mother were huddled on the sofa. They said there had been a strange thumping noise and the sitter couldn’t find the cause of it and was scared. All seemed quiet, so we paid and thanked the sitter and went to bed. A few evenings later we ourselves heard a loud, rhythmic thumping! Turned out the baby was rocking vigorously in her crib, causing it to thump agains the wall. In the movies, of course, there would have been a secret portal to another world, or an evil stalker.
Or your kid would have been possessed.
When we hired a new coworker, we didn’t get along at first. But after ten years of working together side by side on several projects…we failed to obtain a mutual respect for one another and still don’t get along.
Once, I was on a redeye flight from San Diego that had to divert to Ohio because Boston was fogged in. I just missed getting onto the first flight to Boston and had settled down for the 3 hour wait until the flight they rebooked me onto, when a gorgeous flight attendant waved me over to her. There was one more seat on the first flight, so as the solo traveler closest to the gate they gave it to me. Depending on the kind of movie, either I would have had wild sex with the flight attendent in the bathroom, or the flight 3 hours later I was actually booked on would have crashed killing everyone on board. Or both.
I’ve gone down into the basement dozens of times and nothing has ever happened to me. I feel cheated.
Whenever I ran into somebody in my car neither car blew up.
Any serial killers?
But if The Devil’s Grandmother didn’t meet any serial killer…that means she must be the serial killer!
Dun dun daaaa!
And her not even knowing she’s a serial killer would make sense! That would be the twist!
You keep telling yourself that, Typhoid Mary. 
Awww. No hijink-filled, cross country road trip with John Candy? Which would be a lot creepier now that he is dead…
I heard a noise out on the deck and went to check it out. I even said “I’ll be right back!”…
I came back. It was the wind knocking one of the deck chairs into the table.
Once will hiking in Hungary my girlfriend and I stopped by a Romani (Gypsy) encampment and asked directions to the ominously-named Rossz Nyári Erdő (Bad Summer Woods).
No one gasped, made gestures of warding, or whispered, “The Americans are going to the Bad Summer Woods! We should warn them.” They gave us directions and offered to sell us some palinka.
We spent the afternoon hiking around some pleasant woods, drank the palinka, and did things twenty-somethings in horror films shouldn’t do in ominous woods. We weren’t slain by demons or degenerate hillbillies (tough to find in Hungary). We weren’t followed home to Debrecen by the ancient evil we awakened.
There wasn’t even dialogue to the effect of, “So, what does Rossz Nyári Erdő mean in English, anyway?” “Is no literal translation. But the closest we have is…Bad Summer Woods.” Followed by the requisite gasps.
Once, while I was divorced, I met up with a high school friend who was also currently divorced. We had dinner together and chatted about our miserable luck in finding suitable marriage partners. At the end of the evening we paid the check, wished each other good luck and went our separate ways. The End.
Me and a friend were walking a pair of dogs in some woods that got more and more tangled and unprepossessing. We pressed on because I was convinced that there had to be a path leading to where we wanted to go (and turning back meant going the long way round). My friend said she was feeling bad vibes. We heard dogs howling madly … from behind a barbed wire fence. And then the owners came down and told us in a rather obnoxious manner that there was no way through and we would have to go back the way we came. My friend thereafter referred to the place as Bad Vibes Wood.
A few years ago, I got back in touch with an old flame from high school.
We did not subsequently wind up in bed together.
Not the one I’m talking about here, anyway.
That actually happened to me. We had wild sex. But I am male. The flight attendant was male. I do NOT swing that way. But gawd dammit it was Detroit and I need to get the frack out of there NOW.
My brother has told me the story of the night he and a neighbor out in the countryside were woken up by something making a huge roaring noise several times. They never found out what it was, but in the movies? Monster time.
The only reason you survived was that you weren’t having pre-marital sex!