My Horror Movie Obsession

Where to start? Well, I have been into horror movies for a good chunk of my life. It all started when I was 6 years old. Here in Chicago, we did not have cable till well into my teen years. But we did have this service called ON-TV. It was a converter box that, well, you just turned on. And it ran movies. And late at night, it ran pornos...but that is for a different blog...

So, my mom (who is not really a horror fan) was watching the Brian DePalma film, Dressed To Kill. Was a very giallo/Hitchcockian thriller starring Michael Caine, Nancy Allen, and Angie Dickinson...I came in the room just as Angie was about to get slashed in the elevator (sorry for the spoiler, but the damn film came out in 1980...you should have seen it by now)...My mom tried to get me out of the room to no avail...I told her I could handle it...Well, sure enough, the scene goes down and I freak out...I ran out of the room screaming and crying...LOL...Anyway, my mom calms me down and gave me the whole "movies vs reality" speech, which, even at that young age, made a lot of sense...So basically, I was hooked.

Over the next couple of years, I had seen various horror movies such as Salem's Lot, Carrie, The Shining, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween 1 and 2, Friday the 13th 1 and 2, etc. My parents were always cool with me watching horror movies as long as I didn't act up. It kept me in line actually...because if I fucked up, bye bye horror movies...So I guess they figured I could handle it...Even though they both hated horror, it was pretty cool of them to let me keep going with it...

Then it happened...I saw what became my favorite movie of all time...The Texas Chainsaw Massacre...My mom actually watched this one with me. See, we had this great "mom and pop" video store across the street...I wish it never went away, but thanks to greedy corporate scumfucks like Blockbuster and Hollywood, most have went the way of the ghost...So back to TCM...fuck was I blown away. Never did a film scare the shit out of me, tense me up like it did, yet make me laugh...and I still get into arguments with people who diss the movie as a mindless gore fest...um, yeah...there were like three drops of blood in the whole film...but that was the beauty of it...your mind ran away with it...Amazing!!!

Later in life, when I finally upgraded to DVD, can you take a wild guess what the first DVD I bought was? You got it...And I can't tell you how many times I watched it...sometimes back to back, the second time with the commentary track going...

A few years ago, I saw a TCM reunion at Cinema Wasteland in Cleveland, Ohio...it was so great meeting the cast that was there, listening to their panel, asking them questions, taking pics, the whole thing...Then they did a screening in the film room...the people that were with me were cracking up as I was either mouthing the words during the film or just sitting there with an ear to ear smile on my face...No other film did this for me...In fact, I may go watch it again now...



And don't even bring up the Remake to me...