Movies that shaped the person i am today.

Horror movies, the staple movie diet of my childhood.


I grew up on movies like Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, and Children of the Corn.


Horror movies have been with me my entire life. My father and I would go down to the local video store, Crossroads Video, and rent horror movies without my mother's knowledge. She wasn't too keen on her 5 year old watching violent and gory horror movies. But this was the bonding time i got with my father. We would go upstair (where he slept for as long as i can remember) and i would lay either on the floor or the pullout sofa and while my father sat as his desk and got drunk, we would watch horror movies together. And not just any old horror movies. Only the good ones. Only the classics. The 1950's chillers like The Thing (from another world), The Day the Earth Stood Still, Swamp Thing, The Blob, The Fly. Also lots of movies with Jamie Lee Curtis in them. My father loved Jamie Lee Curtis and he loved every movie she was in. From the first Halloween to Prom Night to The Fog to Terror Train. But it wasn't just Jamie Lee Curtis that we would watch. He really loved the old 80s slasher flicks. He loved the silent masked killer. The Jason's and the Michael's. Now i understand why my mother didn't want me to watch these types of movies, but i loved them. I loved being scared. I loved hanging out with my dad.


I don't know if it was just my dad thinking i was old enough to watch this type of movie or if it was his way of saying "fuck you" to my mother or if it was him being drunk and making a bad judgment call. i still to think day don't know the answer. But it wasn't just horror movies that we would watch together. We would watch things like Full Metal Jacket, Predator, Escape from New York, The Terminator and The Running Man. Anything with violence in it.


For the most part, these movies never scared me. In fact one of the first real things i was scared of was from a Superman movie. But there were the occasional scares. Poltergeist, the first horror movie i ever watched, spawned a HUGE fear of clowns that is still with me to this day. So to say that they never affected me is a lie, but not in the ways they would affect most children at that age. 


My mother said she knew i was a weird child when at the age of four, i asked the doctors if i could keep my tonsils after the surgery. I didn't get to keep them, but they did get a picture of them for me and i took it in for show and tell in pre-school.


To this day my favorite kind of movie is horror. The bloodier the gorier the better. 






Oh and Sleep Away Camp had the best movie ending known to man