The question is laid before you—whence from your love of horror? As if it’s a bit of an oddity or ‘not normal.’ First, I don’t consider it to be an oddity—there are literally millions of people who love horror. We have our own bent natures, sure, but so do cliff divers. Second, it’s a bit like asking me why I love the color black. Or why I love BBQ but fungus—that stuff marketed under the only slightly more palatable name mushroom—makes my stomach churn. I don’t know. BBQ tastes good. Horror stories taste good.
They’re just natural to who I am. But as with any journey, there are things that push you along certain paths. They are often testaments of the era and times we look back upon with nostalgia, of youth lost but not forgotten. They may be things that “stand the test of time” or now evoke rueful shakes of the head for their absurd ridiculousness. But either way they have that nostalgic hold on you, a special place in your memory, because they helped shape your path and sparked that passion within. Before we bungled our lives with the notion of romantic love and tangled relationships, it was stories and imagination that fueled us. That gave us vision. These were our true first loves.
My earliest loves include memories of racing home after school to catch The 4:30 Movie when it was Monster Week. That meant Godzilla, from the time now known as the Showa-era. There were other themed weeks, like Planet of the Apes Week, which didn’t have nearly the hold on my imagination as rubber-suited men stomping miniature cities into atomic bits. I would come to love the social and philosophical commentary Planet of the Apes dished forth, especially the first movie, only when I was older (and it still holds weight today in my opinion). In its inception the first Godzilla movie, a black and white beauty, was itself an allegorical commentary on the dangers of atomic power but I don’t remember the nasty American spliced adaptation with Raymond Burr ever airing on Monster Week. Even if it had, allegorical commentary was not what I was watching for. I still love me some Godzilla mayhem though the movies have been much more miss than hit over the decades, especially the later Showa-era kid-centered ones which get very cornball. Even as a child when I saw Godzilla use his atomic breath to fly and fight Hedorah I thought “this makes no aerodynamic or physical sense”—not in those exact words, of course; in child tongue that translates to “that’s stupid.” But I kept right on watching. Because Godzilla. Unfortunately most modern Godzilla movies have been no better with some rare exceptions. I’m a big fan of Shin Godzilla, though. The subtitles come fast, so be prepared. But what a great work.
As I said this love came naturally, if inexplicably, to me. Myth, magic, and the darker side of things were all a magnet. I grew up in a tiny Midwestern town. Exposure to a wider world of experience was harder to come by then. Nobody in my family, a small nucleus comprised of parental units and one older brother, cared anything for horror, science fiction, or fantasy. There was no hard push along the path there. I am, however, eternally grateful to them for letting me find and be my own person and feeding my imagination with comic books and such. Outside of school I had one friend in walking distance which, consequently, made him my best friend, Dennis—except for when we weren’t. Then I had a dog. But we did seem to share the same love of myth and story, so we kind of fed on each other. Good times. And I can’t say I’ve found that kind of post childhood connection to this love of the macabre and fantasy with another, because adulthood introduces so many other complications. When you’re a child, it’s all much more real. More pure. Even if your head told you otherwise, your heart still raced with that visceral fear and longing, especially after the sun dipped below the horizon.
Now, straight up, I was not the verbose giant you are reading as a youngling. In second grade I was failing math and language at year end. There was talk of holding me back to repeat the grade. So I spent that summer with a tutor named Janice to get my skills up to par. Unlike my forgettable second grade teacher, who I look at in old yearbooks and wonder “who the hell is that?” Janice was awesome. Janice was a fucking teacher. A family friend, I still have a picture of her drinking a beer on our front step. And Janice knew how to bribe imaginative young boys. The tempting prize? A National Geographic chock full of dinosaurs (with a huge fold-out section!). I’d like to report it was something awesomely horror related, but having just passed the precipice of second grade not much of that was being served my direction. Dinosaurs were about as close as Nat Geo came to monsters, Godzilla and dragons, and in a child’s mind mythic reptilian creatures, real and imagined, live just across the street from the likes of Dracula. They were my gateway drug.
I got that mag. The mental blocks holding me back were demolished. I became a voracious reader, something my family still joke about in an approving way due to the number of books I accumulated. Unlike Louis in Interview with the Vampire I didn’t need to die to be borne into a strange new world of weeping shadows. I just needed someone to help me over an edge. I doubt Janice had any idea where she was sending me, but she is positive proof that sometimes all it takes is the right person to boost you over life’s barriers. I had always been a visually oriented child, but breaking that reading barrier allowed my imagination, my first loves, to truly be unleashed. By junior high I was reading Stephen King. The written word drew me in and I still regard it as the superior form of storytelling. But we are visual creatures, after all, and there’s nothing to quite match watching the written word brought to celluloid life.
My earliest theatrical “horror” film I recall seeing was with Dennis, when his older sister took us to see Jaws. I was seven and he was an elderly eight. The memory of my friend’s exit from the movie is distinct—it was right when the guy in the rowboat coming to help the kids is attacked and a lovely severed leg is shown sinking to the ocean floor. I didn’t see my friend after that, and it’s probably just as well he didn’t stick around to see what happened to Quint near the end. But I did. This movie, along with John William’s score, has definitely stuck as a first love.
William’s music would feature in anther iconic movie that would change my life forever. I can’t begin to overstate how influential Star Wars was to my imagination as a child. As soon as that dark clad figure with his pneumatic breathing stepped through that blown entry hatch, I knew who the biggest badass in the galaxy was. I was galvanized. Somewhere in those mixed up years between New Hope and Empire my dark little heart would write a short story (with illustrations!) about how Princess Leia leaves Luke Skywalker to join Darth Vader and rule the galaxy. It was epic. (I also wrote a story, White Death, about a surfer munching shark—can’t imagine what inspired that.)
I can imagine a childhood without Star Wars, but I don’t wish so—what a lesser world. Conversely, now in February 2022 , I can also imagine a world without the latest awful trilogy and a world where Disney wasn’t gobbling up properties and copyrights left and right and believe we would be much better off…best not to get rolling on that. What was great throughout every Star Wars movie, though, was the music. John Williams showed me how important a score/soundtrack was to cinema. I am, to this day, certain that what pushed the movie Halloween into popularity is the iconic theme. It’s pretty garden variety slasher stuff without it, although just having dinner with Jamie Lee Curtis would top my list of kick bucket dreams.
Another big first love was the movie Dragonslayer with the dragon Vermithrax Pejorative—since imitated, never duplicated. The sheer anger that came through that stoic, fixed reptilian face upon finding her dead progeny was palpable to me through the big screen. Yep, this dragon is ready to kick some ass. Dragonslayer wasn’t exactly light fair, it had a dark grittiness to it that resonated with how I viewed fantasy. And…was that a naked girl in the water?? Heart be still!
As I began escaping the years of radioactive monsters and man-eating sharks, darker worlds awaited, beckoning me onward and I began to soak my mind more in the world of horror and the supernatural.
My first love Dracula on the big screen was Frank Langella. Originally released in 1979, Dracula also starred Laurence Olivier and Donald Pleasance. Langella’s suave and sophisticated portrayal of the Count would embody how I imagined the legend for years to come. The guy really didn’t lose his cool until he gets hooked in the back and yanked into daylight—enough to ruin anyone’s calm state, right? For me, he was Dracula. And, given the movie’s somewhat ambiguous ending, he remained Dracula. Damn straight I was rooting for the vampire. Other vamp movies have surpassed this in my mind today—Lost Boys, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Only Lovers Left Alive, and Let the Right One In spring to mind, but Langella’s Dracula remains with me. (Trivia point, like Bela Lugosi, Langella never wore fangs in either his stage or movie portrayals of the Count.) Vampires, often visually alluring and intelligent, never scared me as a kid. That honor belonged to one thing—werewolves.
I don’t mean some guy running around with a fuzzy face called the ‘wolfman.’ No, I mean fucking werewolves. In a sterling example of how little either my parents (who just dropped me off and came back later, bliss!) or tiny town theater paid attention to what I watched, I saw An American Werewolf in London when I was maybe 13 or 14. And for the first, and really last time something truly terrified me, because there on the screen was the epitome of what I imagined a werewolf should be. And that howl, OMG. Had Dennis been with me he may have been able to get a little back for that Jaws scene, as a couple times I decided the guy working the ticket booth was probably lonely. And for a few months after, when I would walk home after dark from his house, I would move a little faster. Or run. Even so, I was consistently drawn back into the theater that night, even if it was to hang at the top of the isle peeking around the corner, and I saw the movie–well, most of it–to the end where werewolf David dies.
AWIL remains in my top 5 horror flicks, and definitely is my first love werewolf movie. There’s been a lot done with CGI transformations with our beastial furry fanged friends since, but nothing I’ve seen to match David’s transformation in that London flat. What an incredible piece of work. I have two wishes, which include a life size replica of that werewolf and another of the xenomorph from Alien.
While Darth Vader may have ruled the universe of my youth, in my teenage years Fred Krueger was the ruler of the horror-verse. The idea of a malevolent being that could stalk and kill you in your dreams was a powerful and wonderful idea to me. Freddy was far more interesting than a Michael Myers or Jason Vorhees. For starters, he could freakin’ talk. There might be something terrifying about an implacable, silent stalker that won’t stop because they’re driven by…whatever. But Freddy–Freddy had panache. Freddy had ambition. Freddy was the hip killer. At least as long as you kinda pushed back the fact he was first conceived as a child molester. But the original A Nightmare on Elmstreet also remains a first love.
The “franchise” movies quickly became pretty cookie cutter material for me. After the first installment, they became as much about finding interesting ways to kill teens on screen (the Nightmare movies were particularly creative in this respect) as whatever contrived story was cooked up to bring the baddies back (or, hell, these days you just reboot the entire thing). Thus the heady rush of teen slasher flicks gave way in my mind to movies such as Alien, The Thing, The Fly and more. For my world suddenly opened to a plethora of cinematic beauties.
You see, something miraculous happened when I turned thirteen. We got cable. And we got HBO. Many a night was spent watching television after the parental units had fallen asleep to see illicit movies and shows like The Hitchhiker, preceded by the big silver HBO logo floating in over a city to dramatic music. Parental controls? What’s that?? HBO was a huge boon to expanding one’s viewing repertoire when you lived in small town America. Here I would first see, for instance, things like Natasha Kinski’s boob shrink in Cat People when she turns into a panther after having sex. Exciting times when you’re a teen.
Those are just a few of my first loves. I know you have yours. Quite a few were left out, like Poltergeist and The Shining but we can only cover so much. The great thing is they will always be my first loves. People may come and go, but horror and fantasy, these worlds of shadow, of imagination, that’s for life. They are my constant. They don’t care if I discover new loves, they’ll still be waiting in the wings ready for me. To even inform me and provide insight about that new love I’m watching. Now, no, they won’t fix a cup of coffee in the morning or butter an English muffin for me, and I have to say that’s a lovely deal when you get it. My damn dog still won’t fix me a simple cup of coffee. But if you need something to curl up and spend a dark evening with, to let your imagination loose, be it a book or movie, your first loves will always be there waiting. Indulge.
Gemini Nights 