I was a weird kid growing up. Though I’d be too much of a scaredy-cat for most horror movies until high school (and streaming wasn’t a thing until then either, so my parents would have never allowed the introduction), I came out of the womb loving spooky things. So, in a way my Horrific Origin began at birth. My mom loves to retell the story of when I went to a church Easter festival and asked the teen girl doing face paint to draw a bat on my face. Shocked, she hesitantly suggested a chick or a bunny instead. But I insisted, and had a bat with red eyes on my cheek all day. I’d go on to draw bats on all of my drawings, at home and in school. I was obsessed with them. I’d check out non-fiction books at the library about bats. Naturally vampire bats were my favorite. Fruit bats were the cutest but the most disappointing (no blood drinking? How drab).

On our annual camping trip, I’d always beg my friend’s dad to tell a scary story around the campfire. Normally he refused, but one time he gave in and told a chilling tale about an escaped asylum patient who had a hook for a hand and was prowling the very campground we were sitting on. Adulthood would make me realize his story had plagiarized several sources, but child-me was awestruck by the gruesome tale.

What I remember most from my early childhood is the frequent disappointment I experienced when watching the Halloween episodes of my favorite shows. I kept waiting and waiting for the spooky climax to happen and the characters to actually encounter a ghost, zombie, vampire, anything – but it was in vain. The episodes always concluded with a “haha, what a silly and completely avoidable misunderstanding!” moment. Or if there was a ghost, they were friendly. Child-me was at their wit’s end with this shit.

This phenomenon in my early childhood can all be blamed on my dad. For some reason, he thought it would be a great idea to show his four year old child Jurassic Park. I know, hold your shock. Naturally the film scared the living daylights out of me and I had recurring nightmares well into high school. Always the same dream, too – a velociraptor chasing me through some cement complex, gaining fast on my tail. Despite the horrible nightmares, I loved the movie. Exuberantly I burst into a dinosaur phase during kindergarten.

I made my dad watch Jurassic Park with me all the time in a stubborn quest to nix my fear of the dinosaurs. As the years went on, I progressed from hiding my face in the couch pillows whenever the dinosaurs appeared to deliberately fast-forwarding to the parts where the dinosaurs ate people. Forgive me, child-me didn’t understand the nuance and beauty of Jurassic Park’s tale about man’s hubris and playing God. To this day, Jurassic Park is my favorite film of all time.

The rest of my childhood up until middle school would be filled with the colorful covers of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps. There’s been more published since I was a kid, but at that time in my life I had devoured every single one. I’d tear through a book in a few hours and immediately crave another one. Wherever I went, so did my Goosebumps book. Around this time I would begin writing for the first time. I would write 10-page stories, using my friends as characters, and describe us all fighting for our lives in horrific situations, such as one friend’s dad being a shape- shifting alien bug hellbent on eating us all. Said friend found this plot point hilarious. I was a little offended at the time.

Every October, Cartoon Network aired old Goosebumps episodes, and I fell in love with the visual adaptations of my favorite books. Like many kids can relate, I was traumatized by the episode where the mask gets stuck to that girl’s face and won’t come off. It was my first introduction to body horror.

Middle school commenced my two-year hyperfixation with the SyFy Ghost Hunters show. I watched every episode religiously and memorized the names of all the members. Little eleven year old me was spouting off words like “electromagnetic frequencies” and “thermal signatures” and “EMF detector” in normal conversation. At that time, my career aspirations were to follow in the TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society, the team in the show) team’s footsteps. Ghost Hunters was the first spooky bit of media that satisfied my desire for actual scary things to happen.

I wouldn’t take the first real plunge into horror until my junior year of high school. Fresh out of the clutches of my toxic Christian school and on the precipice of questioning my faith, I decided to begin my horror journey. In 2015 the only popular streaming service was Netflix and it wasn’t the monolith it is today. Thus, pirating films online was a piece of cake. My friends and I would trade sites that we knew would’ve leave your computer with a nasty virus or flood the screen with pornographic images. It was on one of these sites that I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) for the first time. Looking it up on a whim, I had heard it was “one of the classic horror movies.” Suffice to say, I fell in love with the horror genre that night.

Though I was embarrassed about it at the time, I find it charming now that A Nightmare on Elm Street scared me at the time. I had watched it while home alone and each creaking board in my house promised a jump scare from Freddy Krueger. Naturally, this would be another year-long hyperfixation. Yes, I purchased Robert Englund’s autobiography and devoured it in hours. Yes, I nearly fainted when I saw him in person at the 2015 HorrorHound convention and he acknowledged my presence. We do not speak about the 2010 remake. I refuse to accept it as canon. Jackie Earle Haley did his best and that’s all I’m going to say about it.

From this point on, I did a speed-run through the horror genre until my junior year of college, when I’d be defined as a horror expert by friends. For a while I was able to pirate a lot of horror films that weren’t on Netflix, though Netflix did have some of the essentials such as The Silence of the Lambs and Insidious. Slipping away from the overbearing gaze of my parents, I embraced horror through my computer screen late at night. In passing I asked my mom if she’d seen The Silence of the Lambs, to which she exclaimed, “Yes, it was awful! And don’t you watch that!” Through fits of laughter I told her I’d watched it a few weeks ago.

As is natural for someone on the autism spectrum, I learned as much about horror history as I could cram into my brain. To this day, the horror genre is my “special interest,” a term lovingly coined by the autism community. Mutual friends have been advised to break my socially-anxious shell by asking me, “So… what’s your favorite scary movie?” Thus commences my launch into an hour-long rant that is charming to some and irritating to many. It’s a great litmus test for finding good friends, honestly.

As I slowly came out of the closet in college and embraced my queerness, I began to realize the inherent queerness in horror. Taking film classes and learning about horror’s historical focus on The Other as the monster – the thing society detested and preached against preying upon the poster children of Living Correctly™. In these moments of study I realized I had identified with the monsters the whole time. Even from a young age, I had always identified with the villains in most media.

Learning horror history would bring me the realization that my favorite characters were always the queer-coded villains. My high school hyper-fixation on The Lost Boys (1987), particularly on the vampire David, made all too much sense now. Watching horror movies was like looking in a mirror. For the first time, I saw myself reflected in media. Now, we can spend hours unpacking the psychological damage inherent in most queer kids for identifying with villains since society has villainized them for simply existing, but then this would be an 80-page thesis paper.

I will touch on the fact that I recently realized that my fixation with the body horror genre may be linked to my experience with gender dysphoria. Nothing scares me quite like body horror. The notion of not being in control of your own body chills me to the bone. Tusk haunted me for an entire year and I refuse to revisit it. My gender dysphoria was always there, lodged deep down in my sternum, only stirred into my consciousness when I watched films like Tusk, The Thing, or The Fly. This article from them. describes the experience best.

One scene from Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor still haunts me: a quick image of a man, taken mentally hostage by an assassin, clutching at a mask of her face on his. That’s it, I thought. That’s how I feel every time I look in the mirror.

The article makes an excellent point:

“…Body horror can help trans viewers get some necessary distance from our own bodies, allowing us to see ourselves — and the overall condition of being a human being in a gendered society — from a more nuanced and multi-layered perspective. Suddenly, the problem is outside of you, rather than within.”

As someone who grew up in an emotionally turbulent home, only to go to school and be bullied for my obvious symptoms of autism, anxiety was a part of my daily life. Without it, I often feel uneasy. Agitated. Restless. So I watch horror films to relax. Turning on films like The Conjuring allows me to step back into that familiar anxiety in a safe and controlled environment. In doing so, I exorcize my daily fears and frustrations through the gory and frightening imagery on screen. Catharsis at its finest, in my opinion.

My mom often asks me “Don’t you watch anything other than horror?” Of course I do. I love many Disney films (I’m currently in a small hyper-fixation on Encanto. The song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” plays on a loop in my head), 80’s classics like The Breakfast Club, The Goonies, and Die Hard, and one specific rom-com called The Proposal. I’m also a die-hard Marvel fan who’s been in love with Loki since 2012 (and I grew up to be genderfluid, who is surprised? No one).

But horror is my one true love and, as should be obvious by all I had to say about my Horrific Origin, it always will be. Nothing brings me such immediate joy quite like discovering new horror films and rewatching my favorites.

My main goal in life is to create horror films centering on queer people and queer issues, told unabashedly and honestly. I want to make serious, heavy horror flicks and dark, campy ones with lots of blood and guts. I want to make my own The Conjuring and a queer 80s-esque slasher, heavy emphasis on queer. I want my films to provide the same feeling of relief and belonging to some lonely queer kid in the Midwest like my favorites did for me.

That’s that for this week’s installment of our Horrific Origin ongoing series–actually, that’s it for our ongoing series in general. Thanks for reading these last few months and while this is the end of the weekly installments, there’s always the chance for a one-off addition every now and then. See you then!