~serizawa3000

So before I went to Horrorfind, I was asking friends if they wanted to come with.

There were quite a few who answered "I'd love to go, but I can't." Other obligations, you know. Plus it's the weekend, and most everyone has plans for the weekend. My plans were for Horrorfind, of course.

But for every two or three "I'd love to but I can't" there would be a "I'm not into that horror stuff." Given my nature, I wound up dwelling on the "I'm not into that horror stuff" and while I made a mental note to charge a dollar from anyone who said "I'm not into that horror stuff" to me, I wound up questioning my own questionable taste...

Why am I into the horror stuff? For another, am I really into the horror stuff? Have I some street cred, so to speak? Am I a Monster Kid or a Gorehound?

When I was a kid, to me a "monster" was one of those fuzzy blue guys on Sesame Street. I do remember seeing some of the old Japanese monster movies from a very early age, so I liked Godzilla and Gamera and that clunky giant robot (that was simply called "Giant Robot" if I remember correctly), and that was where my monster fandom began and ended, for the most part. Anything else that might have been scary I did not want to see. I seem to remember Mom and Dad watching movies on TV but not allowing me (past my bedtime, for one), and then Mom would tell me about it the morning after. As a result, I didn't see Jaws until many years after I heard Mom tell me about it... For another, I could have probably done just fine without having to hear about The Omen.
I remember when I was in the second grade on Halloween, and my school (a Catholic grade school, no less) did a kind of Dracula thingy in the gymnasium (which also doubled as the auditorium) that freaked me out enough that I had to GET OUT OF THERE. I wasn't alone, luckily. Somehow I could handle seeing the trailers for Brides of Dracula ("His kisses turn ladies into monsters!") and Horror of Dracula but having a bunch of people come up the aisle with a blinky light-equipped skull was more than enough for me. From what I heard about it afterward from my classmates, yeah, Dracula appeared, everyone instinctively made crosses with their arms (like Peter Cushing and the candlesticks) and he was defeated. See, I didn't know that you could fend off vampires with crosses at the time... I probably would have been exsanguinated right quick... And if you've read the novel you know that Dracula goes after babies... Anyway...
Then I saw Creature from the Black Lagoon and I guess that was what really steered me onto the path of Monster Kid. There was still some stuff I was not terribly keen on, but I liked the Gillman. Thought he was cool. I was learning to swim at about the same time... maybe that was it... This was around the time when it was a regular thing to catch an old monster movie on TV on a Saturday afternoon... Sometimes I saw the whole thing (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, THEM!), or sometimes just bits of it (Invaders from Mars, Tarantula)... And sometimes I'd miss the film in question and hear about it from a friend (Zontar, the Thing from Venus). About the same time I was aware of Doctor Who, which was sometimes freaky.
At this early age, I was okay with monsters, but not necessarily blood... or unexpected weird things... like certain camera angles from Equinox... I seem to remember a few of the grown-up members of my family being into the horror stuff. Some of it I could handle... some of it I couldn't... and some of it I wound up watching before I was probably the appropriate age to be watching it (Alien, anyone? How about The Howling?)... I began to associate names with the monsters... Karloff, Lugosi, Price... Then I heard that Vincent Price was featured on the Michael Jackson song "Thriller" and eventually I saw the video for it... and the "making of" bits as well (A skeletal zombie with a TV announcer voice saying "Welcome to the making of 'Thriller'!" and John Landis telling a zombie to get back in his hole) and there was the stuff about makeup...
Time passed. Watched movies. Sometimes they freaked me out. Sometimes they didn't. For the most part I was interested in the monsters, and paid attention to the names associated with the creation of those creatures...
When I was fifteen, I wanted to see the remake of The Blob. It was rated R, so I had to see it with my dad. A curious thing happened... whenever something gruesome happened on screen, Dad would start laughing. After a moment, so would I. And so it went for most of the movie, save for a "jump scene" that got us both when we least expected it. He rented Predator, and we both watched it. I wasn't freaked out. Not even when the Predator deboned his latest kill. Thought the Predator was cool.
Around the time I was nearing my high school graduation, I started reading H.P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker. I'd been reading Stephen King from a fairly early age, oddly enough. I started watching some of the more recent horror movies, like Hellraiser. And so on. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was a little jarring after like a week of assorted Clive Barker films and oddball stuff like Grim Prairie Tales.
I didn't see The Exorcist until fairly recently (even though "recently" is still years ago). That goes double for The Evil Dead and its follow-up films (I saw them in reverse order... Army of Darkness first, then Evil Dead II, and so on).
Anyway. I figure I could keep going in this vein, or maybe do up a list of the horror movies I've seen...

I'm not entirely sure if I've answered the question... Just why am I into the horror stuff? Not just watching the movies, but reading about them, and, well, going to this horror convention for the past eight years? I figure I could say "I like monster movies" and leave it at that... but I don't know if that's enough. I do like monster movies. I much prefer monsters to crazed killers. Werewolves, aliens, zombies, swamp creatures, things with tentacles, things with claws and fangs... Maybe because monsters are "safer" than, say, Leatherface or even Norman Bates... You know where you stand with a monster, for the most part. You're either lunch, or an enemy, or of no great import. When you have some freaky guys trying to get their ancient grandfather to kill their juicy captive with a hammer, that's... uncomfortable. So, yeah, monsters. For another, with the exception of the Ginger Snaps films, Shaun of the Dead, Land of the Dead, and May, I haven't seen a lot of the more recent horror films. No Saw, no Hostel, and I didn't think Wrong Turn was extreme enough, if you can believe that... Not to mention I like my horror a little comedic... Think early Peter Jackson and American Werewolf in London...

(ASIDE) In the gorgeous book Hollywood Horror, there's a quote near the end from Boris Karloff... he said he didn't want to think of his work as horrifying. He didn't like the word "horror" and preferred to think of his work as something akin to the scary stories people used to tell around the fireplace... to amuse and entertain and maybe inspire a few shivers. But the more recent spate of brutal and realistic violence was truly horrifying... maybe because it was reflecting what was really going on... Karloff's last film was Targets, about a sniper who wants to line up an aging horror film star in his gunsights.

The book went on to say that for a time, horror movies were a psychological release valve, beginning with the gothic horrors of Frankenstein and Dracula and through the atomic and cosmic horrors of the Fifties and Sixties... but then, with the advent of pictures like Night of the Living Dead, the escape valve became clotted with blood... (OKAY, BACK TO THE POST ALREADY IN PROGRESS)

There's some bit of me that watches a movie and still asks "How'd they do that?" from time to time. I know a little about visual effects and makeup, but some bit of me is still the child who has no idea... The child who thought movie monsters were real... not actors in makeup, not men in suits, not little stop motion models or animatronic puppets... I went so far as to ask Greg Nicotero about the "pencil neck" gag in House on Haunted Hill, though I had an idea how it was done...

When I'm at Horrorfind, I remember why I keep going to it. It's like being with a group of friends/family you like but don't get to see as often as you could. Some of them you even know by name, and can get hugs from. Like-minded people. Not exactly the same where interests are concerned, but for the most part you can get along with them. Talk about this and that. First time I ever went to Horrorfind, Michael Berryman (of The Hills Have Eyes and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest) was a celebrity guest. When I spoke to him, I mentioned that I wasn't all jittery like I sometimes am at a venue where there's lots of people around... He looked me in the eye and said "These are your people." And some of the people are very nice in spite of being made up to look like they've been savaged, or having become famous by playing crazed killers in the movies.

Horrorfind was where I dared to show my sketchbook to Tom Sullivan (he did art for the original Call of Cthulhu RPG and The Evil Dead). He liked what he saw. Horrorfind was where I met the mysterious Mr. S. who also dug my artwork... He had a slogan... "Get in where you fit in." This is something I've been puzzling over since, well, forever. Do I fit at all? Where do I fit? How high shall I fly my freak flag? Mr. S said I fit, most definitely.

So yeah... I guess I am into the horror stuff after all... I think that's about as much as I can say about it right now. Figure I could do up a list of films I've seen for a future post. Not to mention I have more Horrorfind pictures I could post...