fandomhighdorms | Third Floor Common Room, Thursday Evening

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Third Floor Common Room, Thursday Evening

So, it had come up in conversation last week that Sabine either didn't like or just hadn't really been exposed to any horror movies. Which had kind of surprised Norman - not liking them was one thing, but it was hard to envision a life without ever having seen one before, given just how much of his own life had been spent parked in front of the television watching them himself.

So today, he'd ordered Chinese food (and apparently Ching Tai had messed up the order and sent him triple portions of everything), hauled out his movie collection, and made his way to the third floor common room, where he was perusing his options.

Well... there was Zombie Nation, Lonesome Dead, Doc Zombie, Brain Eater, Space Zombies, or the classic, My Baby Was a Zombie...

Norman grimaced a little as he looked the selection over.

"I really am Gothy Spice."

Sigh.

[OOC: Open common room! Links contain minor cartoon gore on movie posters that are totally ParaNorman canon.]

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It was partially Astrid's faint attempts to see if anything interesting was going on in any of the common rooms that evening before resigning herself to the roof for a good roof-moping session, which she felt she hadn't done in a while, that led her into the third-floor common room, but, if she were honest, it was mostly her free-food senses tingling a little. She poked her head in curiously, noted the people already there, the movie collection, the Chinese food that confirmed the suspicion she had from the hallway.

"Movie night?" she guessed.

"Movie night," Norman confirmed, and lifted one of the far-too-many-containers of Chinese food up in offering. "You're welcome to join us if you like noodles and don't mind terrible zombie westerns."

"I love noodles," said Astrid, who now that she had an invitation to do so, would be honing in on those immediately, "but I'm not familiar enough with terrible zombie westerns to know if I mind them or not. So I guess I'll find out."

She made a cursory look through the boxes before grabbing a bowl and fishing some food out into it.

"I didn't even know that there were zombie westerns."

"Oh yeah, they'll make zombie movies about pretty much anything," Norman replied, glancing at the other zombie movies he'd brought along. "... Really, pretty much anything. You're welcome to go through them if you want. Some of them are weirder than others."

And Astrid did want to go through them, moving closer and having a seat, taking a bite of food before reaching for a few pieces of the collection so she could admire the art. Loud, garish, tasteless, kitsch.

She loved it.

"Weirder than zombie westerns?" she asked. "But, I mean, I guess if there'd be zombies now, why not then? Maybe all the Bubonic Plague was really just a medieval zombie outbreak that history went and skewed with science."

"I mean... maybe," Norman replied, pausing to consider that over another mouthful of noodles. "With or without a magical element, do you suppose?"

He'd only been aware of the magical kind, himself. But most of his movies tended to skew toward science.

"Mmm, good question," Astrid murmured it a little as she tried to decide which she liked best; it was a toss-up between Space Zombie and Lonesome Dead. "I'd probably go with science, but it would probably be chalked up to magic."

"So, splitting the difference? A science that nobody can really explain yet, huh?" Norman looked a little bit amused. He wasn't going to explain why. Maybe he was just amused because they were discussing his favorite dumb habit, okay? "I like it. There's probably a movie out there somewhere with that premise, too."

"If not by now," Astrid shrugged a little, setting the boxes back down to get back to her noodles, "then some day."

She tried to look really thoughtful and introspective about it while taking a bite, but she mostly just wound up admitting, "I actually really want to see that movie now."

"I can keep my eye open for something like that," Norman offered. "If there's anyone out there who can find a really, really specific zombie movie, I'm that guy."

He had a movie about zombie babies in that pile. Zombie babies.

Well, one shouldn't expect the reanimation of brain-starved corpses to discriminate by age...

"I take it you're a fan?"

"A little bit," Norman agreed, smiling crookedly. "... A lot. I used to be more of one when I was ten, though. Zombie slippers, zombie toothbrush... that kind of fan? I've kind of grown out of it a bit."

A very little bit.

For, you know. Some reason.

Astrid was distinctly feeling that a thorough search of Norman's possessions might suggest otherwise.

"Why zombies?" she asked. Not in a mocking way; she was genuinely curious.

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"We're educating me," Sabine explained.

"Oh, sure," said Astrid with a small smile at her roommate, "take all the fun out of it by putting it in the context of education."

From the girl who would literally just stay in a museum all day if she could.

"Count me in on that, too, then," she added, eyeing the boxes for the movies a little closer. "I've never really seen any of this stuff before."

They...sounded...different?

"There's a zombie theme," Sabine said, unnecessarily, because of the boxes. "I've decided that the worse it is, the better."

"Hmm," Astrid drifted closer so she could pick up one of them and inspect it a little, "kind of like some of the old double-features my neighbor would take me to sometimes, but I don't remember many of them having zombies. Mostly giant apes and vampires."

Michael had been obsessed with Faye Wray, all the Golden Age starlets. As she flipped the box to read the back, Astrid idly wondered what he might be up to these days.

"Maybe we can do the... giant apes and vampires next," Sabine suggested, totally unaware that Halloween was a thing and these would be on anyway soon. "This is a giant gap in my knowledge of things here."

"Yeah," Astrid said, smiling faintly, "and there's plenty of time for all of it, I'm sure. Honestly, I don't know a whole lot more of this stuff, myself. What I do know is from my neighbor back home, he goes nuts for all this movie stuff, but he goes more for the older classics, the romances and the musicals. We didn't have a TV, so I mostly only got to watch things when I went over to his apartment."

"Was there a reason you didn't have one?" Sabine wondered.

Astrid shrugged a little. "My mom was always part of the it'll rot your brain crowd, even if she never expressed exactly that. And, I mean, for the most part, it's not like I missed it or anything, either. She always felt life was best experienced through actual experiences, and books in the downtime."

"She's not wrong, really. But sometimes it's nice to turn your brain off, too," she said.

And Sabine was learning a lot from TV, so that worked out for her.

"Yeah," Astrid agreed, "no doubt about that. And there's some really interesting stuff I feel I've missed, but then again, I've also just found out about YouTube."

Was that a faint smirk on Astrid's face? Should that be worrisome?

Probably.

Yeah, she noticed that smirk.

"Do I want to know?"

"Remember my Captain America puppet?" asked Astrid, as if Sabine could even forget.

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