While I am a huge movie buff and watch most of what comes out, it hit me within the first 20 minutes of HBO’s “Tsunami: The Aftermath” that I now have a movie genre that I cannot watch.  There are no spoilers here but one of the sub-plots deals with a family with a 5-year old daughter who are in Indonesia when last year's tsunami hit that part of the world.  The mom is on a scuba boat when the tsunami occurs and the father and daughter are on land.  When the surge of water hits them, he winds up losing grip of her.  When he regains consciousness, he can’t find her.  As he’s screaming for her among the wreckage, and knowing that, at least according to the episode guide, that she isn’t found in Part 1 (of 2), I deleted it off my DVR.  When I saw the details in the TV guide for the second episode and the summary says that the parents of this daughter begin to accept they might never find her, I knew there was no way I would have been able to stomach that episode.

As the father of a 3-year old daughter, this hits too close to home.  I can’t watch shows about missing children anymore, as my mind starts to race with “what if” scenarios that begins to scare me.  I know it’s simply a show but my imagination wanders off and I find my mind placing me in that scenario and I start to freak out.  Periodically my mind will wander to terrible scenarios like that and how they would play out and my over-active imagination always goes too far.  The mind is a fertile imagination farm and sometimes it overdoes what, in reality, is a miniscule chance that a scenario like the one you imagined would ever happened.

Horror films have never held my attention and are the other genre that I tend to avoid.  It’s not that I’m scared of them, they just “don’t do anything” for me.  A friend who I discuss movies with a lot made a good point.  Horror movies never really caught her fancy because the plots are generally sub-par and are simply vehicles to get to the next scary or gory scene.  The characters are simplistic and the stories, with a few exceptions, don’t stand the test of time.  Sure, the same generalizations could be said about comedies, but at least comedies, when done right, are watchable over and over again.