They’re some of the questions I’m asked the most: how and when did you know that horror was your thing? And also, commonly, why—what is wrong with you?! Some things are beyond explanation, but the clues are always there. I grew up in the middle of fucking nowhere Massachusetts, surrounded by 50 acres of creepy woodland, with hillbilly inbred neighbors (sorry, but yes, really) who would leave my sisters and me “gifts” in our mailbox, flash us their penises at school, and spy on us from behind the trees. And there were nonhuman critters everywhere to fear as well: snakes, coyotes, bobcats, porcupines, you name it, and swarms of bats flying around at night. If you waited to bring out the compost till after dark, it felt like a race for survival to get to the faraway worm-infested heap of putridity and back to the “safety” of the house. Safety is in quotes because it’s a house that my mom informed me after we’d moved out that she believed was haunted. My room in particular: there were days when she’d hear footsteps and my floorboards creaking from above and wonder why I wasn’t at school, only to go upstairs and find no one there. But I experienced zero evidence of the supernatural, and what lived outside was a source of deeper terror. Yet we didn’t lock our doors. “If someone really wanted to get in, a lock wouldn’t stop them,” my asshole dad would tell his young children. His uncomforting presence was another reason why home didn’t feel safe.
I’ve been a movie freak for as long as I can remember. They served as the most vital means of escaping reality. My earliest filmgoing memory (or memory, period) is seeing Star Wars at age 3. I was so terrified of Darth Vader that I imagined him crawling under my seat. I sat on my feet to protect myself, yet I couldn’t get enough. I can still feel the raw exhilaration stirred up by this introduction to the cinematic dark side.
Sometimes, bad people can be responsible for providing the basis for things that positively shape one’s life. My father will be credited for my love of movies, and only that. He had a copy of Hitchcock/Truffaut on his shelf that I obsessively studied at age 6. I was particularly drawn to the breakdown of the shower scene in Psycho. Around that time, I accidentally caught the end of The Shining on TV. I thought the “Here’s Johnny” scene was just too silly, yet other bits I saw stayed with me—even if it took me 25 more years to recognize the film as the total masterpiece that it is. When I finally saw Psycho, still too young, it destroyed me. Because of that film, the 1958 version of The Blob, and a random scene I caught by mistake on TV—in which a man throws a heater into a bathtub, electrocuting a woman and her lover (I finally learned 30 years later it was from the Aussie cult-classic Patrick!)—I actively stayed away from water and drains in general. We also didn’t have a lock on our bathroom door, so I was maybe one of the grimiest kids of all time.
After seeing Horror of Dracula, too young again, I imagined the caped figure of Christopher Lee appearing in my bedroom every night, though that strangely provided more security than fear. We had a copy of the book Jaws in the living room, and the image of the shark lurking just beneath an unsuspecting naked woman swimmer was imprinted on my brain before I saw the movie (or really saw it, as my mom had actually taken me to watch it in the theater as a baby… so perhaps it seeped in?). There was also a copy of Helter Skelter on the coffee table (why???). To this day, I can’t stomach any Manson stories, except the Tarantino fairy-tale version (and I’m no fan of Tarantino). Somehow, real-life horror was too much. I was experiencing enough of that to a certain degree. Country or, more accurately, deep-woods living: purely menacing. Camping? I did it when forced to, but no thank you, not for me. Yet fictional horrors were a whole other beast. I couldn’t get enough.
When I was 8, I was forbidden from seeing Poltergeist, the movie my older sister chose to attend on her 10th birthday (it was rated PG, after all). I don’t remember a time when I cried harder as a child. But my sister ended up being so traumatized by it that she slept in my bed for weeks after, revealing every little detail—which of course just made me all the more desperate to watch it. Admittedly, I was thankful for not having a bed frame, which would allow for clowns (a true, irrational fear of mine) to hide beneath me. A little later, the same thing happened with The Evil Dead. It petrified my sister, and I learned the movie by heart without having seen it. And I absolutely couldn’t wait to do so.
At sleepovers, my friends and I play-practiced voodoo and Ouija. We watched A Nightmare on Elm Street over and over and tried to stay awake like the characters. (I blame that film for my resistance to going to bed still!) When I turned 13, the movie I picked to see was John Schlesinger’s The Believers, a film I revisit regularly and still think is highly underrated. It was especially scary because the Santería cult practices in New York, a city I visited often, were a little too realistic. As teens, my friends and I hung out in cemeteries for fun (and for a lack of places to go). We would visit an old, abandoned—and most likely haunted—resort nearby after dark for a thrill. Why would this beautiful spot in the Berkshires suddenly shutter? There were rumors of rattlesnake infestations, but our imaginations went wild. I made out with one of my early boyfriends to the awful slasher film The Prey on VHS. The eyeball extraction in The Terminator delighted me, and was rewound and rewatched countless times, while the contact-lens (and nipple) removal in The Man Who Fell to Earth got deep under my skin. Later, I watched Suspiria for the first time while home alone in our remote house on a mountain. I had to mute the sound, because the Goblin score disturbed me more than the film itself. It’s now counted among my top three horror favorites. When I became an adult and moved to the safety of New York City, there was a rule for a while: if you came to my apartment, horror fan or not, you couldn’t leave without watching Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive.
But why did the films and experiences that terrified my sisters exhilarate me? We shared the same DNA, the same surroundings, and similar life experiences. It’s a cliché, maybe, but it really does seem to break down to whoever likes roller coasters and can sleep through ear-splitting thunderstorms also by nature has a higher tolerance to fear. And I sure did. There was something about weathering unpleasant experiences that made me feel strong. It was survival. But does it make you aware and more at ease, or just numb?
Some people want to run from their fears and block out scary encounters completely. Others find comfort in facing them, and find safety in the escape of movies in general. Books can serve a similar purpose—my main literary poison back then was some Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe, and all Clive Barker, Anne Rice, and Ira Levin—offering a place to hide from life or a chance to find solace in reality. Sometimes dark memories reside in the brain like scenes from a horror movie. Are nightmares caused by images you’ve witnessed, or do scary images help you understand what you’ve dreamt? I had a terrifying recurring dream before I had ever seen a horror movie. And had awful experiences that fueled nightmares and painful afterthoughts. Now, when I think of one of the nights when my mom tried to escape my father and we worried he would come for us, as my uncle sat up all night with his shotgun, I imagine that it was Lillian Gish sitting in her rocking chair in The Night of the Hunter, anticipating Robert Mitchum’s arrival. Another evening, while I was watching Hitchcock’s I Confess in my bedroom, I heard the sound of a hunting rifle clicking downstairs. I was able to identify the noise—ultimately a drunken incident rather than a violent one—only because of movies.
I want to visit places supposedly haunted. I want the supernatural to be real. I found Dracula comforting because to be turned into a vampire seemed preferable to my childhood. Is loving horror an act of bravery or stupidity—who knows? All I knew was that I wanted to watch lots and lots of movies, and lots of horror ones. Much has changed, evolved, and grown since then, but not that. As long as there’s air to breathe and eyeballs to see with, I will never stop. 
is a writer, editor, and horror programmer based in New York. She is the editor of Bloodvine and her writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Film Comment, and Rolling Stone.
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