See the red shoes?

The other day, my boyfriend played a psychological trick on me. I would have been pissed off, if I could have stopped giggling. Here is what went down:

He had gone to the video store earlier in the evening to pick out a movie. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t care. We got all snuggled into bed to watch it together and my loving boyfriend told me it was called “The River King” and it was about a clown ghost or zombie or something that lived in the river. Keep in mind that I hadn’t seen the cover or heard of the movie before. I was like, ok, whatever. The opening scene is a wide shot of the icy river with creepy orchestral music. Boyfriend gasps, the film cuts to the wintry forest, I’m like, “what?” and he says “didn’t you see the red clown shoes” and I know he is joking. We discuss “It” and “Killer Klowns From Outer Space,” and how creepy clowns are in general.

My nerves are on edge. Some kids find a dead body in the river. Creepy music plays, the forest is dark and bleak. The cops pull the body out and a splotch of red blooms magically on the dead guy’s bare chest. My curiosity is aroused, I want to know what is going on. I wonder aloud, “if it is a ghost clown, how can it kill people?” Boyfriend says, “I think it is a zombie.” I shiver and cling to him. Whenever the music crescendos, I cover my eyes. The kids lurking and disappearing in the woods give me the heebee-geebees. I ponder if they are somehow involved with the clown. The movie plods on, new plot elements are introduced; a boarding school, a loner, a girl, eerie photographs with ghostly smudges on them.

I am starting to think, “They really better introduce the clown character soon, or they’ll risk losing the viewer [as in Clown-Horror-Movie-Viewer]. They really gotta show some gore to make up for this lame beginning!” We kept watching because I was just waiting for the clown to make its appearance. The movie was boring. But I had my mind set on figuring out just what the damn river clown had to do with anything.

I was about to voice my concerns to Boyfriend when he confessed that there was no clown, that it was just a stupid murder mystery movie. After which, we both broke down into cackling laughter. The rest of our “River King” viewing experience was interrupted by insane giggling and references to big red shoes, noses and other paraphernalia.

I’ll confess I really should have known better, and certainly by the first clown shoes comment. But Boyfriend says stuff like that all the time, and what reason did I have to doubt him? The most interesting part of this experiment was that I was genuinely scared, I really did shield my eyes, expecting gore. And I held onto that idea for a surprisingly long time. We probably wouldn’t even have bothered to finish the movie if it wasn’t for the clown joke.

I still laugh when a think about it.
And I learned a lot about expectations.