Menu
DEREK AUSTIN JOHNSON
  • Home
  • About
  • Bibliography
  • Contact
  • Maple Street Dispatches
  • Home
  • About
  • Bibliography
  • Contact
  • Maple Street Dispatches

Origins of My Love of Horror 4

9/4/2022

0 Comments

 
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.
Picture
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.
Picture
What is your favorite mix of science fiction and horror?  Do you love something even stranger than Phantasm?  Let me know in the comments.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Picture
    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

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    September 2022
    July 2022
    May 2022
    June 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    January 2019
    August 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    January 2017
    October 2016
    July 2016
    January 2016
    September 2015
    July 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    November 2014
    July 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    January 2014
    October 2013
    August 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    December 2012
    October 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed