“So why HORROR?”

Now that I’m in my thirties, people will sometimes ask why I so enjoy horror so much.  I’m not too surprised, since most people expect horror fans to look more like Rob Zombie than Philip Seymour Hoffman.  This usually leads to someone asking me about Freddy/Jason, or the Saw films, depending on their age.  Here’s where it usually goes from there:

When I was a kid first getting into comics, I devoured all of the same titles as other ’80s kids. Comic book stores hadn’t quite coalesced in that area of Michigan, so I did all of my geek shopping at a small stamp & coin/pawn shop between my house and school. The owner had lots of boxes with back issues in them, and when I had money burning a hole in my pocket and I was frustrated with the wait between months, I’d mine those boxes for undiscovered obsessions.

One October afternoon I came across a box packed with issues of Swamp Thing.  I paused in my digging as it occurred to me that there was a movie playing occasionally on HBO with the same name.  I’d only caught snippets of the flick, but I knew it was Something I Was Not Allowed to Watch, so the idea that there was a comic book with similarly forbidden content was surprising and enticing.  After all, comics were for kids, right?  They wouldn’t put R-rated stuff in a comic book, because kids would see it and then–holy shit, what the hell is THAT?

Better yet, the box was filled with  months worth of reading, and the series was still going.  I gathered up as many as I could afford and convinced the shop owner that my folks didn’t mind if I bought such comics. (He didn’t try too hard–he was a pawn shop owner, after all.)  His attempt only further fueled my eagerness to own these things.

Once I got home to read my new prizes, I saw that they were nothing like the comics to which I was accustomed.  I think every comic book fan has had (or will have) that moment when they flip open a comic that challenges their entire conception of the medium’s capabilities.  For me, Swamp Thing did just that.  Between all of the freaky Un-men, mind-bending plotlines and seemingly endless images of Swampy and Abby bumping pistils and stamens, those books were a perfect complement to waiting to see who Daredevil was going to fight the next month.  Add these eerie images to the Halloween season, and you’ve got one wide-eyed, excited young Steve.

There were other, similar discoveries–Hellblazer was an obvious and wide-eyed experience after that, and then there was the kid at school who loaned me his Fangoria issues, leading to–”Holy shit, what the hell is THAT?”

Far too soon, adulthood came, and then I eventually started to dig a little further in pop culture’s back issue bin and, well, now there’s the Mound of the Macabre.

So, on some level, I’m always trying to recapture that sense I had as a kid, watching what I wasn’t supposed to, enjoying others’ attempts to creep me the hell out.  To experience that eerie October feeling as often as possible.

So blame that pawn store owner.  Or Hallowe’en.

Or Louis Jourdan.