Face Your Fears: Solution
By Jasmine Florentine and Kevin Hwang
Answer:
REGARDLESS
Solvers are presented with 10 video clips from a number of animated films. Each film has a section or sections blacked out, with screaming overlaid. Each blacked out section corresponds to the appearance on screen (or the explicit verbal mention) of a particular terribly frightening thing. The movie clips in order and their corresponding blacked-out scary things are:
| Movie | Scary Thing | Video |
|---|---|---|
| Osmosis Jones | Cartoon-logic X-ray scanner | |
| Shrek the Third | Shrek’s baby projectile vomiting | |
| Up | Carl’s balloons lifting the house | |
| The Emperor’s New Groove | Fly being trapped in a web and eaten by a spider | |
| The Princess and the Frog | The frog prince | |
| Fantasia: Night on Bald Mountain | Chernabog the demon opening his wings | |
| Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs | Tornado made of pasta | |
| Aladdin | Aladdin wishes for Genie’s freedom | |
| Zootopia | The train Judy takes into the city | |
| The Lion King | Pumbaa eating a worm |
Each of the 10 scary things corresponds to a specific phobia (clued in the flavortext via “My psychiatrist says I have problems”) which corresponds to the length below each video:
| Scary thing | Phobia |
|---|---|
| X-ray | RADIOPHOBIA |
| Vomiting | EMETOPHOBIA |
| Balloons | GLOBOPHOBIA |
| Spiders | ARACHNOPHOBIA |
| Frogs | RANIDOPHOBIA |
| Demons | DAEMONOPHOBIA |
| Tornadoes (or hurricanes) | LILAPSOPHOBIA |
| Freedom | ELEUTHEROPHOBIA |
| Trains | SIDERODROMOPHOBIA |
| Worms | SCOLECIPHOBIA |
Reading the first letter of each phobia yields the answer,
REGARDLESS (or, alternatively,
REGARD LESS, a potential strategy for dealing with
scary things in a movie).