About two weeks ago, I asked the horror blogosphere what made them get into horror. Due to external circumstances not limited to celebrating a friend’s birthday (with absinthe), celebrating my own birthday, and going to a casting, I haven’t answered my own question yet. But others have. Son of Michael May answers, and talks about his exposure to classic horror films, which is how a lot of people got started, I think. Sean T. Collins has an origin more similar to my own, with no clear defining moment, but a gradual discovery of the genre.

And with that, over to my own origin story.

Far from the archetypical teenager who covertly reads horror comics their parents would be appalled at if they knew, I come from a long lineage of horror fans. Well, at least one generation back. My mother, Edel, was and is into horror, although she’s a bit out of touch with the latest of the genre. In Norway in the 80s, there was a series of cheap paperback horror novels called “Casino Grøsser” (literally “Casino Chiller”, I never figured out where casinos came into the picture), little black paperbacks with a hole in the cover to show a tacky illustration on the first page, and the title in metallic green letters.

Most of them were cheap and pretty unoriginal, but there was also the occasional gem, Stephen King’s Carrie, and a book that from what I remember must have been Dean R. Koontz’ Phantoms were a couple of the early ones. I can’t have been much more than 10 or 11 years old when I started working my way through everything in my mother’s bookshelves that looked interesting. I read Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain around the same time, and also Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of Alien, long before I saw the movie, and it scared me to death, much like the movie did a few years later.

My mother was sceptical to video rental (and given a friend’s collection of uncut pirated VHS tapes his father had brought from Lebanon, she was probably right), so she never got a VCR. However, there were rental VCRs you could get from the rental places, and she was happy to get one of those and a movie once in a while. Early horror movies I still remember include Night of the Demons, early H.P. Lovecraft adaptation The Curse, aka. The Farm, The Outing, aka. The Lamp, and TV sci-fi horror series V. My mother also reluctantly let me watch The Omen and Cat People on TV.

The next big revelation was reading the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft at the age of 15 or so. I liked the more low-key stories the most, like Dreams in the Witch-House and The Rats in the Walls, but At the Mountains of Madness is also very influential in my love for the “slow reveal” and creeping unease in horror narrative, I think.

Around the same time, I started reading Clive Barker. Most teenagers start out with the Books of Blood when they read Clive Barker, which I think are imaginative and interesting, but not great. For some reason, though, I got my hands on The Great and Secret Show from a friend who had bought it, but found it impossible to get through. It wasn’t a problem for me, I was hooked a couple of pages in, and finished it in one all-night sitting. Imajica and Weaveworld followed, and to date I love “hidden world”/”urban fantasy” as a genre, as exemplified by mid-period Clive Barker, as well as Neil Gaiman and others. I think I also liked the mixing in of sex that Barker delighted in. I already felt instinctively that sex, violence, and magic were closely intertwined, and his novels confirmed that for me.

There are other watershed moments, like when I discovered David Cronenberg (I think I was sitting completely still and slack-jawed through Videodrome), and with it the metaphorical power of horror, but in general, these are the things that shaped me.

There are a bunch of classic horror that I didn’t get around to until I was already a full fledged horror fan, and sought them out for completeness, including George Romero’s movies (not entirely true, I’d seen Monkey Shines in the 80s, but that doesn’t quite count), most of John Carpenter’s production (I like the old stuff, generally hate the newer), and so on. The slasher stuff never interested me much, and some horror was too sadistic for my tastes; I empathize too much with the protagonists, I think.

I keep learning about horror. As I’ve taken more of an interest in movie production, I’ve started analyzing more, which leads to some of the articles on this blog. I’m interested in fear as an emotion, and the evolutionary psychological reasons for why certain things are scary, as well as the metaphorical power of art-horror. Fear is a very basic human emotion, and one of the most commonly manipulated. I think it must be understood to be overcome, and one of the ways to understand it is to challenge it, poke at it from the safety of a movie screen or a printed page, to try to understand ourselves.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 2:59 am and is filed under Horror, Meta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.