Forget Freddie Kruger. Try this nightmare on for size: “When you’re sliding into home, and your pants begin to foam, diarrhea. Diarrhea.”

On and on. In a car in LA traffic. From a nine-year-old. “When you’re sliding into third and you feel a greasy turd, diarrhea. Diarrhea.”

That, my friends, is the opener to Ron Howard’s 1989 “comedy” Parenthood. I posit it’s the best horror movie ever made, particularly for anyone who has, or is planning to, breed.

The film uses a fabulous ensemble cast that includes Steve Martin, Mary Steenburgen, Keanu Reeves, and a young Joaquin (Leaf) Phoenix. It portrays one parenting nightmare after another, from spontaneous projectile vomiting to unplanned pregnancy.

Hide your eyes. You can’t look away. 

Take the “Don’t go in the basement”scene. 

12-year-old Gary Lampkin (Phoenix) tentatively tells his divorced mother, played by Dianne Wiest, that he wants to ask his dad if he can live with him. 

Wiest’s expression betrays all we need to know about how that conversation will go. Her jerk of an ex-husband isn’t in the picture for a reason, and Gary is about to find out why.

She gives Gary his father’s number and watches—with us, the cringing audience—as Gary shyly, bravely, puts the ask to his father. 

He hangs up. “He said he didn’t think it was a very good idea.” 

We feel more raw than the girl who was violated by a tree in Sam Raimi’s 1981 Evil Dead.

Then there’s Martin’s character, Gil Lampkin, the uptight accountant Little League coach father of three. It’s to his oldest son, Kevin, whom Gil has bequeathed his anxiety, and Kevin stumbles through the movie like the first kill in any Friday the 13th. 

For tension, I’ll take Parenthood’s pivotal Little League scene over the tracking shot shower kill in The House on Sorority Row (1982). A last-out fly ball to win the game gets hit directly to bundle-of-anxiety Kevin. The close-ups of father and son portray everyone’s panic. 

I won’t tell you how the scene ends because it doesn’t matter. The horror is there no matter what. 

Then there’s the jump scare. 

“You quit?” That’s Karen, Gil’s wife (Steenburgen) in a rare adult-couple-alone moment with her husband.

It turns out Gil’s boss (a deliciously evil David Duggan) humiliated him one last time by asking Gil to secure escorts for clients. 

It’s reasonable to walk out on a job, right?

Pause.

“I’m pregnant,” she responds. 

Have a spooky Halloween, all you parents.

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