For me, getting to rent some scary movies is a special event. My greatest frustration is that I often go to the video store, browse the shelves, and am completely clueless about the vast majority of the releases.

Certain things are right out. Anything that feels like an 80s-era slasher film is right out. Had my fill of that particular genre. Slasher films in general are not my cup of tea, so I can eliminate those fairly quickly.

What I'm left with, though, is trying to wade through movies that could be good, could not be. I'm a particlular fan of ghost stories, and so I'm always on the lookout for such. But for every "Devil's Backbone," a film I loved and now own, it seems there are three "Ghostwatcher"-level flicks. I consider that to be one of the worst films I've seen in recent memory, and I shudder to see there's a Ghostwatcher 2 on the shelves currently.

Don't get me wrong -- I love lots of types of horror, from religious-inspired fare to magical realism gone wrong to the "boogeyman in the dark" sort of flick. Ghost stories are just my personal favorites because the best ones tend to meet my highest horror film ideals.

I look for certain things in a horror film, wit and intelligence being paramount. Unfortunately, any film can seem to be witty and intelligent from the synopsis on the DVD cover. So sometimes, I'm forced to just try something out and see.

Sometimes, I'm rewarded. Most often, though, I am not.

Now, it's fun to laugh derisively at horror films, whether deliberately bad or not. But they do cost money to rent, and oftentimes I don't think to carry pen and paper with me to jot down names and read reviews later. That's my fault.

What do you guy do when you're in the Great, Vast Video Store of Life and need to rent a little fear? How do you pick the winners? I can't just rent everything, and half the time films disappear from store shelves and are never seen again after a few months, so it's hard to even go back and review films I might have passed on for one or another.

Brian