If Exams were a Horror Movie!

Written By - The Young Vision Ambassador, Taneesha Pradhan, The Winchester School - Dubai.

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If you’re a student, you’ve most definitely compared your life to a movie. Maybe it’s the familiar cinematic atmosphere in high schools or the mood lighting of monotony inside classrooms. Either way, there’s no doubt that this rollercoaster journey is almost worth making movies about! Exams are the most climactic scene every academic year. Whether it’s your first or last exam, the parallels you have with horror movies might surprise you…

No horror movie is complete without a build-up.

When you’re preparing for an exam, the creaking doors and creepy noises start settling in. Making notes and repeating equations in your head is the student equivalent to the smaller evils. It’s just like meeting the monster’s henchmen before you meet the real deal. While preparing for your final exams, it is a common practice to switch off your phone and lose all contact with the outside world (except when your parents bring you a plate of fruit). If that doesn’t sound like getting lost in a forbidden forest with no cell phone coverage, then I don’t know what does! It’s like a haunted area obstacle course that is leading you to your final destination- the exam hall.

After a fixed time of studying,

You get your first jumpscare- an unexpected chapter is coming for the exam. As the shocks die down, the unrelenting protagonist in you beats this temporary demon by rechecking your syllabus and making sure you’ve covered everything. Phew, that was a close one!

As the movie goes on,

We get closer to the big climax of this horror movie. The scene is set: you can hear the eerie silence of everyone about to receive their question paper, the occasional dread of things you think you forgot to learn, and the tick-tock of the clock, which is almost ominous in the way it never stops. Everything is fine until the ball drops and you get your second jumpscare- the unexpected question.

Sometimes, it feels like the universe decided to trick you

And grant you the exact topic that you were unsure of. This is your biggest fight: the monster that has been taunting you for ages. The vengeful spirit of this horror movie is whoever created your paper- why did they choose all the tough questions? All the tropes of your favourite scary flicks come back to you, and send chills down your spine.

But of course,

You live through it all. If there’s anything horror movies teach us, it is that the protagonist always lives till the end. Once exam season gets over, pat yourself on the back. You just conquered this hurdle as the final character that always remains standing. This is something to be proud of. After all these ups and downs, there are no more screams to be heard. The evil has been defeated and your happy ending is right around the corner. As much as exams might share similarities with horror movies, it’s never the end of the world.

This is just one part of the most eventful film there is- the movie of life. The endings of movies are sometimes open-ended, so it is up to your interpretation to make it the best you can. After all, art imitates life, and life imitates art.