The next time you go to the theater to watch “Saw 8: Have Audiences Really Not Noticed We Keep Releasing the Same Movie Every Year?,” take a look around at your fellow audience members.

Are you surprised to see so many children in a movie that has been rated R for sequences of grisly violence that would make Mengele blush?

Whether they’re sneaking into the crowded theater or convincing an adult to buy them a ticket, youngsters are watching some of the most gruesome, depraved horror films this side of “Beautician and the Beast.”

Most discerning adults are rightfully upset about this. Not only are kids becoming increasingly desensitized towards violence, they keep talking during the movie!

On the other hand, there’s much that can be learned from horror films; knowledge that isn’t taught in schools.

Here are some life lessons that I learned from a childhood watching horror movies:

There is nothing honorable about being killed by a zombie.

The odds are stacked against characters in a horror movie so there’s a good chance they’re going to die.

Don’t fret, though. Death scenes are often the most memorable part of a horror movie. In a way, you can bleed your way toward immortality.

There is nothing honorable, though, about a death in a zombie movie. Being killed by a shambling, near-brainless ghoul is plain embarrassing.

“Oh, no! It’s a zombie! Let me power-walk away from the danger.”

Stopping while you scream, gawk, apply logic or shoot bullets uselessly will be ill-advised.

But wait, what about the zombies that can run really fast?

Today’s zombies have been upgraded into the Undead 2.0 by filmmakers with attention deficit disorder. Nowadays, if you want to have a rave in a graveyard you have to worry about having your brains eaten by a track star.

Always take note of increasing body hair.

Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers by night may grow a wicked goatee if bitten by a werewolf.

Have you noticed the sudden ability to sprout a 5 o’clock shadow at 8 a.m.? Do your legs look as if you rolled around in Robin Williams’ shower drain?

Sudden-mustache syndrome could mean you are transforming into a werewolf and need to find a way to restrain yourself before the next full moon. But before you bite a silver bullet, be warned: That fine peach fuzz that has sprouted up all over your body could mean something much worse than simple lycanthropy. You may have finally entered puberty and will need to be restrained 24/7.

If life gives you a curse — make cursed lemonade.

OK, you woke up from a five-year coma with the ability to predict the future of anybody you touch. You are now cursed to a life in which any form of intimate contact can lead to prognosticating your lover’s death. Boo-hoo.

Want to know what you can do?

Buy gloves with the money you’re going to make being able to tell the future.

Life, in a desperate attempt to teach humanity a good moral, is always cursing unsuspecting humans with vicious and life-changing afflictions.

You hit a gypsy with your car and now you find yourself shedding weight uncontrollably. Can anyone say “new diet plan”?

“I can show you how to lose all the weight you want in one easy step! All you’re going to need is a car and a gypsy.”

No two ghosts are alike.

If you discover that your house is haunted, you have the two very different possible outcomes: either your youngest daughter is going to be sucked into a TV or you’re going to share a very special moment with Patrick Swayze and a pottery wheel. How, then, do you know when it’s time to call the Ghostbusters?

The trick is to turn on the radio.

If you hear either sinister organ music or screeching nü-metal, you’ve got yourself a problem that demands Dan Aykroyd’s attention.

If you hear the pleasant crooning of a Motown singer, prepare yourself for a movie montage that will leave you weeping and in the warm embrace of a poltergeist-possessed Whoopie Goldberg.

Never judge a DVD by its cover.

The No. 1 thing that you can learn from a horror movie (besides the fact that sometimes you’re going to need a bigger boat) is that you can never judge a movie by its DVD cover.

In fact, a stroll down the horror section of any movie rental outlet will teach you that the cooler looking the movie’s cover is, the more likely you’re going to sit through some of the worst lit, poorly acted, clichéd-plot that crawled its way out of the darkest recesses of mankind’s imagination.

Even though you might pick up a copy of “The Gingerdead Man” and think “Wow, not only is there a picture of an evil gingerbread man on the cover, but Gary Busey is in it,” don’t rent the movie.

Any movie with the tagline “Evil never tasted so good!” is not going to be a winner. Chances are, it’s going to make you violently ill and leave you a cynical husk of your former self.

If you’re looking at the cover of a movie that features some kind of sinister-looking scarecrow carrying a scythe and the number “666″ digitally added into a cornfield behind it, you are probably looking at what 99 percent of the film’s budget went into.

Do yourself a favor and put the movie back on the shelf and walk away.

More then likely, the only thing scarier then the fact that somebody actually greenlit the movie is going to be that there’s somebody waiting behind you who really wants to rent it.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a Ghostbuster.

Riding high off of the release of the second movie and the wonderful Real Ghostbusters cartoon that was airing on Saturday morning television at the time, I was obsessed with all things ghostly. I would go to the library at least once a week to check out a new book on monsters, taking copious notes about the type of beasties I would be up against in my new job.

I formed clubs with my friends at my school dedicated to the furthering of arcane knowledge. During lunch, we would sit on the jungle gym set and discuss the types of ways one might become a werewolf or practice our séance skills.

Eventually, I acquired an authentic Ghostbuster jumpsuit, a neighbor agreed to lend me his replica Proton Pack and containment unit if I asked, and I now possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of supernatural creatures. The only thing standing in my way was the complete lack of ghosts in my neighborhood.

My career goals have always been a bit lofty. As a kid, I was unhampered by reality when choosing a profession. A few years after my flirtation with ghostbusting, I decided I wanted to become a vigilante like Batman. I didn’t have the athletic skill or the patience to train and hone my body to become an unstoppable crime-fighting machine so I did the next best thing — I designed a killer costume.

Taking arm pads I had bought for football (the fact that I only played football in 7th and 8th grade should give you a sad idea of how old I was at this time), a homemade ski mask, cameo pants and my favorite t-shirt, I was almost done with my homemade vigilante costume. I was only missing a few ingredients. First, I needed a trademark — some kind of distinguishing feature that would become my calling card. Looking around my room, I settled on an African Safari hat my grandparents had given me as a gift. The final piece of my costume puzzle was technology. I grabbed a broken walkie-talkie and duct taped to my leg. Next I wrapped myself in a quasi-translucent white poncho. Why the poncho? In case it rained while I was fighting crime. Plus, I imagined that, when wrapped in the raincoat, I became translucent myself — kind of like the Predator.

So, decked in my vigilante costume, I prowled my neighborhood looking for criminals to bust. Back then; the street I lived on was still being developed. There were a lot of empty lots full of dirt and construction material. As I darted from wooden pylon to wooden pylon, hiding behind giant piles of grass still unplanted, I stalked my friend OJ.

Meanwhile, OJ saw me spazzing out in an abandoned lot dressed like a crazy homeless person and decided to see what I was up to. Surprised at being discovered despite my cloaking technology, I took a page from the Bible of Batman and decided to throw a smoke bomb. Not having any smoke bombs, I instead grabbed a handful of grass and threw it on the ground to distract from my exit. OJ took this as an invitation to a grass war and soon we had begun throwing handfuls of sod at each other. Our behavior drew the attention of an elderly gentleman who lived across the street. He poked his head out of his door and yelled at us to stop our shenanigans. We were creating a mess with all the grass and were nothing but common criminals, he shouted.

Surprised at being yelled at by an old man, I beat a hasty retreat back to my house before a real crimefighter showed up to bust me. I had set out to become a vigilante but had only succeeded in becoming a common criminal. And that, my friends, is the story of my life.

Read more tales from my childhood

I have always known what I wanted to be when I grew up.

When I was five, I wanted to be a paleontologist. I couldn’t pronounce the word (I’m not sure I even can today), but I knew that I wanted to discover dinosaurs for a living.

It was my heart’s desire to chart and list the varieties of the great thunder lizard. I bought books on the subject, collected plastic models and filled my head with countless possible recipes for cooking brontosaurus eggs in preparation for a lifetime of dino-hunting.

But then it happened.

One day, I was told that dinosaurs were, in fact, extinct. It seems that they had been for quite some time now. My fantasy of having a pet triceratops disappeared along with any future plans of playing with fossils. What was the use of studying dinosaurs if I would never get to meet one — and then subsequently eat it?

When I was six, I wanted to be a ghostbuster.

I didn’t care if modern science and my teachers told me that there were no such things as ghosts, I would spend my life proving these naysayers wrong by discovering spirits and then busting them.

I had daydreams of an adulthood spent traveling the country discovering the unknown … and then destroying it. I would encounter monsters big and small, prove their existence to a previously skeptical world and then wipe them off the face of the earth with high powered proton beams, crucifixes or silver bullets.

But as attractive as my idea seemed, there were still lingering doubts that plagued my mind.

What if I spent my life looking for ghosts in vain? What if I did find a ghost? What if the ghost was really scary? What if I peed my pants?

What finally deterred me from my grand ambition of ghostbusting was not fear, though, it was the empathy I developed as I grew older. No longer feeling the drive to eat or kill everything I perceived as a threat, I put myself in the ghost’s shoes. Did I really want to take these poltergeists away from their unfinished business on Earth and lock them up in an ecto-container for the rest of their afterlife?

That didn’t seem very nice at all.

I decided that the dead had the same rights to afterlife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Every subsequent year, I flirted with a new future profession. During the course of my childhood, I considered being everything from a FBI agent to a secret service agent, an artist to a history teacher, a costumed vigilante to an investigative reporter.

It may not seem like I had any real grasp on my future back then — I was changing my mind more then I changed my underwear. The thing is, when I locked onto an idea of what I wanted to do with my life, I locked on with the strength of a pit bull.

When I decided I wanted to be a secret service agent, I was sure that one day I would take a bullet for the president. There was not a question in my mind. I had already started researching which part of my body would be the best to absorb gunfire.

When I was in high school and visions of filmmaking danced through my mind like celluloid sugarplums, I had no doubt in my head that one day I would be a hot shot movie director. I knew for a fact that the day would come where I would have to give an award speech so I started working on it between studying for finals.

Now things are different. I’m not sure what I want to be when I grow up. The funny part, though, is that to the world at large, I’m pretty damn close to being a grown-up already.

I have a full-time job in an office. I own a suit with a matching tie. I brush my teeth and comb my hair.

Sure there a few things missing from my life that separates me from being a full-fledged, due-paying member of the real world, but sometimes I feel that I’ve already grown up and I’m not any closer to knowing what I want to be. I’m not living a life of adventure or excitement on a daily basis. I don’t have a pet dinosaur or an arch-nemesis. I do not have anything near the life I thought I would be living five or ten years ago.

Does that mean I’ve failed? Have I missed the mark and become something I’m not supposed to be? Or was I way off as a child? Were my hopes and ambitions wildly inappropriate and illogical?

I like to think the answer lies elsewhere. I like to think that I’m just not done growing up. I haven’t reached my final destination. I may be going to a steady job with steady hours and I may find myself paying bills and taxes, but I’m still in the process of growing up.

Who knows what I’ll be when I get to the end of my youth. Hopefully, it will involve dinosaurs.

Read more of my thoughts on life.