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I have to provide information quickly and accurately to patrons, but at times this can be challenging at the reference desk, especially when patrons ask me about subjects/topics I don’t know much about.
I had one male patron, who wanted to discover the world around him through movies that scared the shit out of him come to my desk. “Do you know of any really good scary movies? Something that’ll scare me so bad. I want nightmares.” Through my signature big smile, I asked him which horror movie has been his favorite. Now, I hate horror movies because of this exact reason- I can’t sleep after watching a good one. Of the horrors I do watch, I’d say I am a classical horror film type of girl- Psycho, Mike Myers films, A Nightmare on Elm Street, maybe because of Johnny Depp, but that’s not the point, the point is that I generally do not willingly pick a horror to watch by myself!
I concluded by his fav. movie that he liked what we catalog in our system as “slasher” horror. I have seen some gruesome stuff, so I first thought of what I already knew, starting with Wes Craven’s 1972 first film “The Last House on the Left.” This movie is just wrong. They torture the hell out of these girls, which is so not my thing, but I did watch it. This also is not technically a slasher type film, so I only mentioned this one to him last, along with a precaution.
I searched solely for slasher films, and I already knew from other times the patron would share with me his music, video, and book selections that he liked world music, foreign films, and books in Spanish. I knew I HAD to recommend Spanish and Japanese titles like “Ju on” and a few others, which he admitted he had never heard before. He looked intrigued with the list, and thanked me over and over again, and I felt like I was on the right track, and I knew watching, reading, or listening to obscure things would come in handy at some time.
