When Richard initially asked me to contribute to Doomed Moviethon I was honored; and yet I was so daunted that I dragged my feet on the article for over three years. First there was the question on which film to write about; so many films in my youth, teen years, and adulthood have represented horror to me that I didn’t think I could do any specific one justice. That led to how to present my entry. Should I be funny? Should I be serious? Will I need a thesaurus? All this pushed me backwards into the quandary of how to even get started. Well, I decided when all else fails just be yourself and tell about what you know and tell it in the way you’re most comfortable. So, here I am. Typos, bad English usage, and all.

Hi, I’m Nafa and I am a casual sentence-writer, full of inappropriate verbosity, and have been weaned on horror. Yes, I am a horror weanie.

Horror films for me began at a very early age. I can’t tell you exactly when or what the first horror film to capture my imagination was, but there’s a good chance it was one of the Universal Classic creatures and more than likely it was Bela Lugosi’s suave Dracula or Boris Karloff’s misunderstood Frankenstein’s monster. I can say this with almost utter certainty because both creatures were featured in Abbott and Costello films, and I was all the Abbott and Costello fan as a child (and though the Frankenstein monster was played by Glenn Strange in Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein, Karloff did appear in Abbott And Costello Meet The Killer). And a steady diet of films on my black and white television where Hammer horror films, big rubber Toho monsters, 1950s B-movies, and early cinema silent creeps continued to feed my imagination.

The local theater had special engagements on the weekends and during the summer that my mom would take me to (she gets credit for having a huge influence on my love of monster movies). In between the screenings of Gone With The Wind or Doctor Zhivago (both favorites that I saw on the big screen and both had some pretty horrific scenes), they would show pseudo-documentaries about the supernatural (much like the “In Search Of” series). The stories about life after death, the search for Bigfoot, the curse of the Hope Diamond, and stories like that were much scarier than what was on my little TV because these things were real. (Anything with an Orson Welles-like narration is gospel, right?) The smaller television budget for the films meant that their vision of Hell came across as cheaper and grittier, and ultimately scarier. The Devil wears plaid not Prada, duders.

However, the biggest influences on my young psyche at this point lay in the stills from my mother’s film books. Lovely large bound tomes of Hollywood greats intermixed with images from all manner of scary film, both famous and lost and everything in between. Not having seen most of the films in the books, my mind would wander as to what the creatures in these pages would sound like, smell like, and move like. The imagination is amazing. I still have these books. The image of 1920s The Golem ranks high on my on my list if frighteners, not so much for his menacing size and foreboding manner but also for the fact that he looked very similar to a bully from school. Though I’ve never seen the actual film, Lon Chaney in London After Midnight remains an iconic standard of one the scariest moments on celluloid.

Actually, as a child I was fascinated by all things Lon Chaney and the many roles he created. And the literary influence didn’t end there. Thanks in part to my Chaney fascination, in kindergarten I was given a book about monster movie make-up and how to make you look like the classic creatures. I read it cover to cover and tried to emulate looks with one of my mom’s eyeliner pencils, but to little success. A few years later (around 3rd grade) I started reading biographies on Vlad Tepes, the real Count Dracula, and decided that I liked the Lugosi one better.

My first real brush with contemporary horror was on the early morning drives to Los Angeles International Airport so my father could catch the red-eye to Florida. On the route to the airport from the interstate (and in the shadow of the Mattel toy company building) someone had put up on the walls a seemingly endless stream of posters for the film Maniac. At 2:00am, the sleepy mind of a 10-year-old can make a simple movie poster in the mists of downtown LA the indelible measuring stick by which all horror films will be judged… even without seeing the film.

Fast forward a few years to my early teens. My family had just moved to the other side of the country and in our new house we had a wonderful new invention: cable television. Though we subscribed to HBO, my friend Chris taught me that neat little trick about how to rig the cable box to get other free cable channels with just a folded reader-response card from a magazine. Oh the tricks suburban American kids learn. I often wonder how they networked this kind of information in the days before the internet. But I digress. HBO opened up a whole new world to me, the world of the slasher flick. And as many of you know, the early 1980s was a very fertile time for scary movies, and HBO was my conduit to this arena.

So many films passed through late night cable and fueled our adolescent fright-receptors. A favorite was always the Friday The 13th series, especially Part 2. That played for what seemed like an eternity and Chris and I must have watched it a dozen times. One night when we were having a sleepover at our friend James’ house we convinced him to watch the film with us. Now James was a good foot taller than Chris and probably 4 inches taller than I was. In the climactic scene where Jason comes through the window we had convinced (probably paid) James’ little sister to jump out behind the curtains and lunge at her brother. She did, James freaked out, and Chris and I had to go home early. (On a related note: I have a lot to say about the role of the moral, even holy, warrior figure in horror and how Jason is actually doing God’s work but that’s a treatise for another time).

I would be at fault if I didn’t mention some of my other favorite stand out films of this era: Rawhead Rex (the priest is amazing in this), Evilspeak (complete with Satanic and murderous swine), The Keep (World War II demons and all), Happy Birthday To Me (one that I fell in love with again in the age of rentals), and Motel Hell (again, 1981 was a good year for horror-pork). Oh, and props to Kari Michaelson and the tub scene from Saturday The 14th – r-r-r-rowr.

It was several years before my family got a VCR and by then the trend was truly in full swing. (I do recall our first rental: Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.) Our card got good use at the Carrollwood Video View though it was mostly used for comedies and the occasional Sci-Fi classic. One rental worth mentioning was The Emerald Jungle, which turned out to be Umberto Lenzi’s Eaten Alive repackaged and trying to cash in on The Emerald Forest (a vastly different film). Something this film did teach me was that I did not care for the realistic exploitation genre. Though I would eventually sit through the entire series of Faces Of Death and Inhumanities (much better than FOD), I never found any joy or entertainment in the faux reality genre, and even less in animal cruelty.

This experience, however, did not curb my enthusiasm for horror as I found out when we got a new video store membership to Video Movie World. In the days before the chain video rental monopoly Video Movie World was the movie watcher’s Shangri La, and the centerpiece of their empire was not the curtained off room in the back (which I wasn’t allowed to enter until I was 18), but the back wall that was filled with shelf after shelf full of horror films – a full 6 feet high and 30 feet long. I didn’t take advantage of this new boon straight away, though Cyd, Heather, and I would indulge in theme weekends and tear through such titles as Chopping Mall, Night Of The Creeps, Sleepaway Camp, and Phantom Of The Mall: Eric’s Revenge. The art on the video boxes triggered that part of me that had been disturbed by the Maniac posters in LA, and to this day I vividly remember some of the box-art better than the actual films (Night Of The Demons, American Gothic, Q).

It wasn’t until I met my friend Scott that we decided to tear our way through the back wall. It took the better part of a year but we conquered most of it. From the early 1980s HBO-fodder such as Graduation Day (I’d like to buy a disembowel, Vanna) to the classics like The Exorcist (which we watched clutching Bibles and pillows…seriously) and Fulci’s Gates Of Hell (City Of The Living Dead – an almost untouchable film) to the films of the time like the Hellraiser series. In fact, it was during a viewing of the first two Hellraiser films that Scott and my friendship nearly came to a sudden end.

In between the two films, Scott and our friend Christina went out for a cigarette. I, being mischievous and a jerk, placed one of my guitar chords weaved in a thin aluminum chain up in a ceiling tile above Scott’s chair. A piece of string was tied to the end of the chain and threaded behind and under his chair. They returned and a few minutes in to the next film I tugged the string to make the chain rattle faintly, piquing Scott’s sense of alarm but not setting it off. When the first terror strike happened in the film I pulled the string, the ceiling tile gave way and the pointed end of the guitar cable came straight for Scott. He jumped, screamed, ran outside, and wouldn’t come in for about 20 minutes. Christina and I were in tears – at that point it was the most amazing thing we’d ever seen. Scott forgave me and learned to trust me again eventually, silly boy. As a strange footnote, Scott had that same reaction when I took him to see The Crying Game. Again… seriously.

Around this time as well, one of the clerks from the Alternative Record store (a very influential and important Tampa music store in the 1990s) had a horror film review show on the local public access channel. The show, Danse Macabre, was the only touchstone that most of us had to discovering independent films besides sending in a money order and the coupon from the back of Fangoria. On weekend afternoons and nights the show would replay highlights from obscure gems like Truth Or Dare (though honestly Madonna’s is more frightening to my soul) to classics like Zombi 2. Occasionally they would have an in-store viewing party. I have a vague recollection of there being an in-store show by the notorious GG Allin around the same time, but they may have been two separate events. Though short-lived, Danse Macabre brought the finest moments of otherwise unavailable horror straight to your television for free and I am probably one of many locals who are indebted to its existence.

In the mid to later 1990s, after Danse Macabre went off the air and Video Movie World closed for good, there was a lengthy time with little new or interesting horror films. I was relegated to Blockbuster Video selections, and there are only so many times one can watch The Serpent And The Rainbow or Prince Of Darkness. Even watching my beloved Friday The 13th series over and over grew tiring. Then, thanks to Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Dreams and an under-rented Blockbuster copy of Kwaidan, the door to the world of Asian horror was kicked open wide for me. All at once beautiful, grotesque, and frightening, it was just what I was looking for. I sought out all the Japanese, Korean, and HK films I could find and was in heaven. At first there was a small amount of difficulty locating titles, but thankfully it was close to a time when Asian horror was about to break into the mainstream which meant there would no more hit or miss about releases and no more paying $25 for a 5th gen VHS copy without subtitles (though there’s something quite charming about those bootlegs). It’s come a long way to the point where now I can go to Wal-Mart at 12:30am and pick up a car battery, orange juice, and a copy of A Tale Of Two Sisters.

And that pretty much brings us up to date. Hollywood is doing a good job of keeping up with the horror trend so there’s no dearth of tantalizing offerings. I’ve become a fan of Rob Zombie’s homage to retro classics and some of the recent remakes aren’t too shabby. It’s good to see that names like Romero, Miike, Argento, and Craven can garner a dedicated fan base, and people dedicated enough to make entertaining films for the sheer love of it (Freaky Farley, I’m looking in your direction). And thanks to Richard and his infectious love for good horror, bad horror, and intercoursingly amazing horror. I’m lucky enough to have a window seat as he pilots this vanguard known as Doomed Moviethon into the wild sangre yonder. Hooray for horror!