Turn on a light

It was a dark and stormy night...

Well, it was definitely night, and therefore the darkness is implied. It probably wasn't stormy as I lived in California at the time and if the everyday weather there had to pick a side in WW2, it would be Sweden all year long. But I digress.

The year was 1973 and I couldn't possibly have looked more innocent; a three year old girl with light brown hair, blue eyes and Winnie the Pooh footie pajamas, standing in the middle of her living room, eyes locked on the screen of the television set as a series of disjointed images flashed and flickered past: a door slamming with wood-cracking force, a glass bottle teetering, falling and finally smashing against a hardwood floor with the finality of a supernova. But most of all, the camera freezing on the face of a woman who rather resembled my own mother; pretty, big hair, her eyes wide and glassy with shock, her mouth open in a perfect capital O of unspeakable horror. And at the age of three, I had my first clear thought, my first all-consuming epiphany:

"I want to see what that lady is seeing. I want to know what's so awful, so overwhelmingly horrible, to make her recoil so absolutely and instinctively."

Now, I'm sure I didn't think those precise words, but that was the basic gist of it. I made myself a promise right there and then, that someday I would see what she saw, know what she knew and be able to tell everyone that I too had seen the horror and lived to tell the tale.

Of course, no one in their right mind was going to take a three year old girl to see The Exorcist, the trailer for which would form my first clear, strong memory. It would be at least another decade before the opportunity would present itself in the form of a heavily edited and watered down version deemed suitable for television audiences would air. And by then there were other trailers leading me through the seventies and into the eighties, a cavalcade of images shifting and fluttering through my minds eye like loose snapshots in search of a scrapbook: a chainsaw roaring to life on a workbench in 1974, a knot of blue skinned, angry faced people lunging towards the camera with hungry, reaching hands in 1978, a small silver, mirrored sphere flying by itself down cold marble corridors in 1979. All of these images were filed away and carefully cataloged for later examination.

So here I am, 55 years later, still filing and cataloging and watching anything that even vaguely resembles horror. It became my lifetime obsession, a best friend I could turn to when the world became cruel and indifferent. I watched zero budget stinkbombs on late night marathons, familiarized myself with the classic Universal creature features and discovered new friends on HBO and Showtime. I wrote reviews in a cheap spiral notebook, making long lists of movies I'd seen, movies I wanted to see and long, alphabetical lists of titles for no reason at all, which I would have to rip up and start over as soon as a new or overlooked one came along.

Self Taught Horror Expert. Not much of a title. Sounds kind of pretentious, actually. But it's better than some of the other titles I've picked up over the years: Asperger's Afflicted, on the spectrum, PTSD survivor, etc. I tend to be - as "they" say - triggered. And I understand completely when people tell me that they can't watch horror because it's too upsetting, too disturbing, too triggering. Everyone has their own horror story, and everyone has a limit of what they can handle. That's where I come in.

I will attempt, in the entries that will follow, to trip every trigger in every horror movie I can think of, without giving away the entire plot. I will warn you if the rape scenes are too graphic, if animal torture is present, if the death and dismemberment on display are too clinically precise. But at the same time, I just want to talk about horror movies. I want to tell you about myself as well, about what it was like growing up during the heyday of horror, getting to experience big screen thrills and video rental excursions. I'll come up with a rating system and we can make up the rest as we go along.

Sound good?