When I was eight years old my mom gave me and my two younger siblings a movie option: we could either see Disney’s re-release of Bambi, or we could see Halloween III: Season of the Witch. We jumped up and down chanting the latter option like we children were witches dancing around a bonfire. Then we went to the theater and actually watched the movie, scenes of Halloween masks melting the faces of children and killers claiming their victims with a cordless drill to the head. Twenty-something years later, I’d like to apologize to the moviegoers who were subjected to my vocal protests during the movie: my mom had the power to veto and she was not about to see her money wasted on those tickets. To this day, the theme song from that movie gives me the shakes.
We were not a normal family when it came to watching movies. Alice in Wonderland was followed with The Thing, starring Kurt Russell and a alien-infected dog whose head split open like a flower before a bagpipe-inspired mass erupted from the carcass. After Willie Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, The Shining. Hey, why not, right? Both movies have important morals for children to learn:
- adults cannot be trusted because
- they want to kill you
A childhood of scary movies produced a love for quality horror films. I still regard The Exorcist as one of my favorite scary movies but The Exorcist III has one of the scariest moments in horror for me. And that scene in Poltergeist III with Tangina in the elevator? Jesus Mary Joseph.
I didn’t have high expectations for The Ring when I saw it in the theater. How scary can a PG-13 film be? After watching that film, I covered every mirror in my apartment for a week. To this day I cannot look at a mirror when the lights are turned off. I don’t care how absurd it may seem to fear imaginary characters from horror films but undead young children are fucking terrifying. They just are.
For years friends have encouraged me to write about my life adventures. There are days when I have the necessary momentum to write about my job on Fire Island when I was 18, or my short-lived immersion in a yoga sex cult. But then I lose the inertia to sit down and write. I don’t have writer’s block, rather lack of desire to spend hours chronicling my life—nothing kills the spirit of writing like comparisons to David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs. I don’t want to write to be another gay man writing about his life, I want to transcend who I fuck*.
The other evening I awoke with a urgent need to pee. As I made my way to the bathroom I made certain not to look in any mirror. That’s when I realized, as I sat on the toilet peeing, an irrational fear at 35 is something worth exploring. Possibly in a horror story. I’ve watched enough scary movies to know how to write a good horror plot.
If you are also a purveyor of quality horror, what do you enjoy most? What should I absolutely avoid at all costs? Or should I just stick with what is tried and true and simply unload all of my family baggage into a book that could rival the length of War and Peace?
* Thank you, Erika, for writing that wonderful description about me.