For today’s Origins of My Love of Horror, we come to one of the most insane efforts I had seen at that time, and in some ways is still incredibly odd. Director Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm came out in 1979. I caught on one of Houston’s UHF stations a year later when I was twelve years old. Even edited for television, it was a batshit insane movie. It was crazy: a tall man overseeing a creepy mausoleum; Jawa-like creatures stealing bodies; a nearly nude woman with a large knife killing people in a graveyard. All of which is just the beginning of even stranger ideas. It was a dizzying mix of science fiction and horror, with a science fiction rationale that mixed with a surreal atmosphere suffusing every frame, rewiring my brain without my understanding of what surrealism was. Coscarelli went on to make The Beastmaster, Bubba Ho-Tep, and the Masters of Horror episode “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road”. All are worth seeking out. What is your favorite mix of science fiction and horror? Do you love something even stranger than Phantasm? Let me know in the comments.
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Today’s Origins of My Love of Horror entry is one of the best television series to show up in the medium’s history. Created by Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone (called simply Twilight Zone in its last two seasons) brought fantastic concepts into public consciousness. Its tales of terror remain part of modern mythology, from the creature on the wing of a commercial passenger plane in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” to aliens with nefarious motives in “To Serve Man”. Allegorical tales like “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and “It’s a Good Life” tap into our collective fears of the monsters within us. And elements of cosmic horror can be found in the sublime “And When the Sky Was Opened”. While Serling wrote many classic episodes, a good number were penned by such masters of the macabre as Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson, and Richard Matheson. What is your favorite horror anthology series? Let me know in the comments.
For the second in my Origins of My Love of Horror series, we turn to the greatest of all vampire novels, the one to which all roads lead: Dracula by Bram Stoker. If you have only seen one of the multitudinous movies or shows based on this seminal novel—from Murnau’s Nosferatu to the 2020 Netflix series starring Cleas Bang—then you have missed one of the truly great modern novels. And I do mean modern. Published in 1897, Dracula is an epistolary novel, making up diary entries, news clippings, even telegraph messages as it tells the story of the Transylvanian count who plans to take up residence in London. It’s swiftly paced and full of compelling characters, and includes elements of romance. While one can read it as a horror novel, it easily can be seen as a thriller along the lines of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, and its different forms of media make it a prototype for Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. In addition, I’m including Tod Browning’s 1931 feature, starring Bela Lugosi. Yes, for many its elements will appear dated. But seeing it when I was eleven on one of Houston’s UHF stations was a transformational experience, providing me with a view of a world adjacent to ours, one can be seen if you twist your eyes in just the right way. What was your first vampire novel or story? Do you have a favorite vampire movie? Let me know in the comments.
It’s September, and what better way to kick off the month than discussing the origins of my love of horror, either in print or film? Like my friend Michael Louis Dixon (whose Facebook postings are OG for this particular series), I’m a horror obsessive; unlike Michael, my relationship with horror was an evolution. Regardless, for the curious, here are my firsts. I read Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles when I was eight years old. No, technically it isn’t a horror novel, but it contains elements of Gothic horror alongside its detective story; there’s decrepit family mansion, a desolate moor, and a spectral black dog believed to be a portent of death. Like I said, it’s not exactly horror. The mystery surround the tale is solvable without resorting to supernatural explanations. But to my young brain, it served closely enough.
What was your first exposure to horror? More specifically, what was your first horror/detective story hybrid? Let me know in the comments. |
Derek Austin Johnson has lived most of his life in the Lone Star State. His work has appeared in The Horror Zine, Rayguns Over Texas!, Horror U.S.A.: Texas, Campfire Macabre, The Dread Machine, and Generation X-ed.
He lives in Central Texas. Archives
August 2023
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