“Get up, Laura!” my suitemates and I screamed as she cowered over in the middle of the path.

“They can smell your fear,” I told her as another deranged clown bypassed me to terrorize Laura once again.

After getting a good laugh out of Laura’s inability to function in a scary situation, my eyes bounced around the theme park as I absorbed the pure dread of everyone around me.  In the spirit of Halloween, my suitemates and I went to Universal Studios Hollywood for their Halloween Horror Nights theme. As horrifying monsters with chainsaws and bloody butchers roamed the streets of Universal seeking out their next victims, I watched with pure excitement. Their make-up, the costumes, but most importantly their commitment to instilling fear into every person that crossed their path re-sparked my love of theater and the entertainment industry.

While my acting days have been on hiatus since arriving to Scripps, I spent a lot of time up on the stage in high school. I love to perform and give people a show and so for a long time I thought that acting was the only component of the entertainment industry that I would be interested in pursuing. Interestingly enough, during my senior fall semester of high school, my college counselor noticed that my schedule looked a little too light for a senior and suggested that I take the screenwriting course being offered. Screenwriting? Ehh, I thought as I flipped though the course catalogue, but most of the good classes had been filled and it said that we would watch movies for a least one of the class meetings per week. So, “Why not” I finally decided and I enrolled in the course.

In retrospect, I find it interesting how many of the classes that I have decided to take on a whim have helped me to discover some of my life passions. I think that I loved screenwriting so much because it allowed me to combine all of my interests into one; it allowed me to write as well as thinking up ways to entertain people. I am also a psychology major because I love working with and watching the ways in which people interact with one another, which is also a huge complement to screenwriting because it will help you create more in-depth characters.

Taking that class opened up a whole new side to theater and the entertainment industry that I never even considered. I don’t know if I would ever be able to handle acting in the entertainment industry and I have always considered it a dream. But working behind the scenes, whether it is screenwriting or promoting a film or some other aspect of the industry, feels like it could become a future goal. Fittingly enough, the catch phase of Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights is “What fear fears most” and I often fear that I would not be able to make a career or a stable living off of working behind the scenes somewhere like at Universal or the entertainment industry in general. Art is so subjective and the hardest part of a screenwriter’s job isn’t in fact writing the screenplay but actually pitching it to a film corporation. We had to practice in that class I took in high school and I could feel my knuckles go ashen as I gripped my seat listening to my teacher’s superficial and stupid desires from the entertainment industry. “Vampires and werewolves are the craze right now so unless it’s got any of that you can just leave” he told my partner and I. While he did not believe that and was only trying to simulate what the experience would be like, I felt this knot of disgust sitting in my stomach. Despite my fears of being successful in the entertainment industry and its sometimes superficiality, another wise woman reminded me that fears are just “False Expectations Appearing Real.”