My Horror History – attempted reconstruction

So a question that sometimes comes up is “how did you get into horror?” I participate in a number of Facebook groups and people repeatedly compare the earliest horror they saw, often in the context of debating what’s alright to show to their own kids and at what age. I know some saw and loved The Exorcist or listened to their parents watching Nightmare on Elm Street when they were five or six and just immediately fell in love with it and never looked back. That wasn’t me. As I mentioned when I wrote about Nightmare, I remember as a kid just being really wigged out by Freddy’s omnipresence before I was ready for him, but I was always into what might be termed ‘horror-adjacent, kid friendly’ stuff. I didn’t want to be scared but I did like monsters. But I really didn’t want to be scared. I remember I had this collected works of Edgar Allen Poe and I sometimes would turn it backwards on the shelf because old Edgar’s face was just a bit too intense for my young imagination. Or there was one night I remember when I was home alone and I was listening to my record of Thriller (on vinyl, not because I was that hip but because I’m that old) and Vincent Price’s rap just really got to me and I had to turn on all the lights and lock the doors.

But somehow, eventually, I did get into horror, to the point that here I am, trying to stay on top of my weekly publication schedule on this here ‘horror blog.’ So I thought it might be an interesting exercise to try to recreate my journey. How did I get here? What were the touchstones along the way that got me from that kid who had to turn books around to this “adult” who still gets spooked by shadows when going to the bathroom in the middle of the night…but one who also loves horror flicks?

Earliest Memories

Well, I know I always loved Halloween from the very beginning. I loved the spooky but not too scary atmosphere and we always threw a big Halloween party at our house. I loved imagining a costume and dressing up, though sometimes my imagination was stronger than the ability to pull it off – I vaguely remember a Hobgoblin (from Spider-Man) costume one year that was essentially just my snowsuit with a cape. I also remember early work with gore effects when I dressed up as a skateboarder who’d had a terrible accident and was all bandaged and bloody. Also, I know I watched the behind the scenes feature for the Thriller video every time it came on TV – it was surely my introduction to the very idea of special FX makeup – and somehow, maybe at some amazing thrift store, my parents even found me a child sized version of Michael Jackson’s jacket – the red one with all the zippers (technically, it was the costume for the Beat It video, but close enough).

I loved the Halloween specials that would air every year (The Garfield one, where he’s chased by angry pirate ghosts, really creeped me out) – it was a special occasion when they would come on TV.  Certain kids films that had some scary moments really left an impression as well – The Last Unicorn, The Secret of NIMH, or Return to Oz, for example. I also remember some animated piece with a lot of seals and sea lions and a lot of them died brutally, though I don’t remember why – that left some scar on my soul, whatever it was.

Past that, as mentioned above, I liked monsters, but I didn’t need to be scared by them. Whether on The Munsters or The Addams Family re-runs or in a movie like Little Monsters (1989), I could appreciate how they were cast as misunderstood outsiders – monstrous but ultimately sympathetic figures – their weirdness worthy of celebration – because we’re all weird and feel threatened by the so-called ‘normal people.’ I don’t exactly remember watching the old Universal monster movies when I was a kid, but I feel like they could have been on TV some time (I think I must have at least seen Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein – which still holds up as a great horror comedy), but I loved Young Frankenstein, and I feel like I had an impression of the pitiable position of Frankenstein’s Creature, the Wolfman, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. On the other hand, I do remember being scared by real life anecdotes. At some point in Elementary School, I was into reading about the occult and mysterious things and I remember some book that detailed brutal acts attributed to Vlad Tepes which really shook me. I was not ready for historical descriptions of enemies skewered on pikes or children thrown to pits of hungry dogs. Still, I did enjoy a fun kids vs monsters adventure like Monster Squad.

I also did have an early appreciation of the gothic and enjoyably morbid. As mentioned above, I really clicked with Poe in perhaps 4^th grade (and remember memorizing and reciting The Raven for class). I don’t think I fully understood him – some of the poetry especially was a bit beyond my ken, but I really got the mood of it all. Otherwise, I remember that my family had some book of Edward Gorey’s. It may have been The Gashlycrumb Tinies (which I love), or something else – the memory is blurred. I seem to remember the image of a python with the impression of a child inside. Either way, it was not my book. It was my mother’s or it had been a grandparent’s. Maybe especially because it was not really for me, I just loved it – like some kind of treasure. It was funny, and dark, and the art was captivating, and it really had this blackly comic edge which spoke to me, the language suggesting a children’s book, but it was not really a children’s book – at least not like others I’d had.

Gorey also illustrated the covers for some gothic mysteries for kids that I just ate up during late elementary/early middle school (I’m not 100% on the timeline). The works of John Bellairs (The Curse of the Blue Figurine, The Figure in the Shadows, and The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull, among many, many others) just captured my attention and I remember reading them outside on hot summer days and having a delicious chill that probably foretold the appreciation I would develop later for horror.

At the same time, horror films were still too much for me. Though I loved movies like Beetlejuice, Teen Wolf, Ghostbusters, or Gremlins (which I went crazy for – you’d think those green, clawed monsters could be a bit much for 5 year old me, but I thought it was just great!), I remember even just the trailers for actual adult horror movies on TV really getting under my skin. I can’t put my finger on which entries in their respective series I saw advertised, but I remember being really disturbed by ads for some Phantasm movie, some Hellraiser flick, Child’s Play, Pet Sematary, and Poltergeist III. It was also probably about this time that my grandparents got cable, including the premium movie channels and I remember stumbling onto moments from some Friday the 13^th that freaked me out, as did a zombie film I’ve never been able to identify, but it featured the army and it wasn’t one of the Return of the Living Dead movies. Also, the bit in Poltergeist II when Craig T. Nelson swallows the worm in the tequila bottle, gets possessed by Rev. Kane, tries to rape his wife, and finally vomits out a squirming, disgusting tentacle thing just kept showing up when I would channel surf. I mean, it was like it followed me around. Still not into horror movies, I really did not want to watch it, but it would pop up when I least suspected it somehow.

A Middle Period – Edging Towards Horror

In the Middle School and High School years, I grew to enjoy work that was closer to horror and would periodically watch a horror movie, but still was not a “horror fan.” Some time in Middle School I discovered The Toxic Avenger (probably inappropriate in a wide variety of ways, but custom made for an eleven or twelve year old) and went on a kick of cheapie b-movie, cheesy fare which was generally in poor taste and never actually scary, but which featured tongue-in-cheek and/or “so-bad-it’s-good” campy sex and violence. It was probably around this time that I discovered USA – Up All Night, alternatingly hosted by Rhonda Shear in a ditzy valley girl mode or Gilbert Gottfried in a very Gilbert Gottfried mode, which broadcast salacious, cheap horror movies, but all highly edited for TV (which probably meant that some had been so chopped up as to be nonsensical). I remember summers when I stayed at my grandmother’s place, staying up late watching b-movies with my uncle and just loving them in their ridiculous, low budget, over-the-top glory. Up All Night also featured solid, “real” horror movies, but I would skip those in lieu of fun fare like Student Bodies, Eating Raoul, Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, Return of the Killer Tomatoes, or Monster High. It’s a long time since I’ve looked back on this, but I expect that was a formative time in developing my love for this stuff.  These days, I still have a sweet place in my heart for this sort of campilly exploitative and yet loveably affordable work.

It was also during these years that I really fell in love with work with dark overtones. I bumped into Nightbreed one night on TV and was so struck by its utterly sympathetic, hunted monsters (who looked just amazing) and its one really scary figure – the totally normal human masked killer. In High School, I just adored The Crow and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and got really into the “White Wolf – World of Darkness” RPGs (Vampire, Werewolf, Wraith, Changeling, and Mage). They all engaged with horror concepts and characters, and sometimes, especially in Wraith – the Oblivion, a super fun game where you play a tortured soul who’s failed to move on after death and must endlessly wander the Shadowlands, they focused on the exact concept of Horror itself (I remember an Afterword in which one of the main White Wolf designers, Mark Rein-Hagen, included an essay on the difference between ‘terror’ and ‘horror’ – probably the first time I’d ever considered this distinction – it wouldn’t be the last).

Still, when trying out some “serious horror films,” I balked. I remember renting Candyman with a friend and after the moment when Helen wakes up covered in blood, we both checked out and needed a palate cleanser (maybe we ended up watching The Lost Boys that night.)  – I didn’t return to it again until years later, after college, watching it with the same friend, and that time we finished it, and I loved it (but was still unwilling to enter the bathroom for a couple hours – that was…not comfortable).

But no one was more influential in bringing me to the genre during this period than Clive Barker (who had, unbeknownst to me at the time, written and directed Nightbreed and written the story on which Candyman was based). While grocery shopping with my parents, I came across a discounted copy of Imajica (not horror so much as a mythological/modern fantasy), started reading it and was utterly intrigued. I brought it home and was hooked. It was so cinematic in its scope, so weird, idiosyncratic, sexual, mythic, magical, fleshy, and just absolutely epic, how could I not love it? Following that, I worked my way through his other non-horror, but still frequently gory and goopy works of weird fiction, such as The Great and Secret Show and Everville and eventually picked up a used copy of one of the Books of Blood (the collected omnibus of which I’ve been on and off revisiting for the last half year).

I’d read a bit of Stephen King before that, but not really his horror stuff, so this was probably my introduction to true horror fiction. And I loved it. It was captivating, the ideas were provocative, and though I could taste the ‘horror’ of it, it didn’t exactly scare me. I remember at the time thinking about how there was a big difference between reading and watching horror. When reading, I painted the picture myself and I set the mood – my imagination was part of the process and if I wanted to engage with the characters, the ideas, the themes, and the story, but I didn’t want to be scared, then I wouldn’t be (these days, I feel the same about any film – I have to want to and let myself be scared to actually get scared). But when watching something, it was more like a roller coaster and I had less feeling of control – just taken wherever the filmmaker wanted to take me and sometimes, I could be jostled around more than I liked. Eventually, having read The Forbidden (the source material for Candyman), and loving its exploration of the intersection of storytelling and belief, I was finally ready to revisit and embrace the film one day.

Becoming a Fan

During my college years, I saw some movies here and there, but didn’t really move forward much towards fandom, though one film did leave a lasting impression. While I’d enjoyed watching some ‘scary movies’ with friends (and also, on the horror theme, I loved watching friends play Resident Evil a lot, all screaming when zombies attacked, and really enjoyed this VHS board game, Nightmare (or was our version Atmosfear? I’m not sure.)), I still hadn’t been sold on just how good a horror movie could be. It wasn’t until a friend showed me Rosemary’s Baby during my Sophomore year that I finally got it, and came to understand how horror could be enjoyed beyond the level of screaming with friends at jump scares or laughing at b-movie schlock. Polanski’s film (which, it should be said, is very faithful to Levin’s book, such that Levin should really get some credit here) was just a revelation both in terms of the emotional and social impact horror could offer and in the simple, but masterful, film making that could be so effective. By that time, I’d seen plenty of startling moments and blood on film, but I probably hadn’t seen anything scarier than the scene when Rosemary is in a phone booth, desperately trying to make an appointment with her doctor and the camera just keeps moving around her, implying that every person on the street could be part of this mysterious Satanic conspiracy from which she is fleeing, that they could catch her at any moment. It genuinely blew me away and reframed in my mind what Horror could be.

Finally, after College and Grad School (where I did Performance Studies – a kind of theoretical intersection of performance theory and anthropology/sociology/(queer/post-colonial/gender/fill-in-the-blank)-studies, I relocated to Chicago and soon thereafter became a fan. I decided at one point, perhaps in 2002, to create a “midnight horror-show” performance (which as one review fairly pointed out, started at 11 and premiered after Halloween had finished – so it was oddly timed at best).

In preparation for this, I started doing research, watching horror movies like never before. I spent a lot of money in the video store in those days, just educating myself and working through the horror section as much as possible. I rewatched things I’d seen before and liked. I saw my first Argento films. I subjected myself to unpleasant watches like Last House on the Left, I Spit on Your Grave, and Cannibal Holocaust. I discovered films that I still love today, such as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. I tried to watch the entirety of the ‘canon’ of horror of the second half of the 20^th century. And at the same time, I read voraciously about horror. That included very approachable works like Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, his history of horror literature, but also denser theoretical work such as Carol Clover’s much referenced Men, Women, and Chainsaws.

I have wrestled with this, but I cannot remember exactly what made me want to do the horror show (which had the glorious title, Dreadful Penny’s Midnight Cavalcade of Ghoulish Delights – some things about it worked and some didn’t, and years later we revisited it with different successes and failures – someday I’ll write about those experiences). Had I already become obsessed with the genre (I don’t think so), or was it just a bit of a whim – something I thought could be a rich subject for performance (probably)? I feel like there is a key moment that my memory has just lost. But I think it wasn’t until I started to view the work through various different theoretical lenses that I really became a ‘fan.’ While I had enjoyed a good scary movie now and then and thought it was fascinating that this was actually something to enjoy, and while I had seen some really good films in the genre that were clearly “about” things, it wasn’t until I came to these theoretical writings in this phase of ‘research’ that I really fully embraced it all.

Finally I had a framework through which to enjoy the full range of work on offer. I could appreciate the high artistry of an emotional-psychological piece like Jacob’s Ladder. I could revel in the campy charms of an independently produced, low budget, but so very creative and lovingly produced movie like Phantasm. I could vibe on the blatant social commentary with gore of something like Dawn of the Dead. And while I could also go along for the ride with a simple, bloody slasher in which it didn’t feel like the filmmakers had really intended to make “art” per se, I could also see how it serves as a rich artifact of a time and a place and a psychological-sociological portrait that rewards deep reading.

Over the twenty years since then, I have gone through periods of being more or less of a fan. I’ve had times when I’ve taken a break and come back fresh. I’ve also had periods of greater intensity, such as one which started in about 2016 when I started listening to a variety of regular horror podcasts and which has culminated in this current project of maintaining this blog and really trying to produce some interesting thoughts on the subject each week.  Generally, that means watching movies and writing about them. But occasionally, it is something like this – just attempting a personal reflection about my own relationship to the work. So, thanks for joining me – this was enriching for me at least to take this stroll down memory lane – I hope perhaps it was somehow interesting for anybody else to read.