Growing up with just my sister and (at the time) single mother during my formative years, I was not allowed to play outside lest my mother’s worst fear of her bubbly adolescents being snatched off of the mean streets of LA would come to fruition. Because my sister had a habit of not sharing her Barbies with me I primarily took to TV instead, flipping between talk shows and cartoons during the day, as well as a plethora of things I probably should not have been watching at night on HBO. The most memorable when it comes to my Horrific Origin  being Tales from the Crypt.

Tales from the Crypt was arguably my introduction to horror, and the theme song for this anthology series still chills me to the bone. I distinctly remember being physically frozen in fear by its melody, and then being grateful for the song’s paralyzing effect, as afterward, I would then be entertained by the thrilling tales found in each episode. If I recall correctly, the theme song was about fives times as scary as the actual stories were, belying the terror level of the show, as most of the episodes that I remember most vividly were a mix of horror and comedy. Even one of my favorites, season two’s sixteenth episode, “Television Terror,” was on the scarier side by comparison to the other ninety or so episodes but was still tinged with a sick joke for its ending.

This habit of horror continued offscreen and into my elementary school days. After school hours, I would have to wait at the local library until the evening, which to my luck, had quite the collection of novels by Christopher Pike, a young adult fiction author. I was sucked in by his mix of suspense and scandalous teen behavior, and I reveled in getting lost among the descriptive pages of his stories that primarily centered around some teen, gone too soon and under mysterious circumstances. His novels were deadly entertaining to a prepubescent girl, and I was only able to be pulled away after the addition of an out-of-date but welcome VCR to our household. Subsequently, one of the best gifts I have ever received in life was a copy of Jurassic Park on VHS, which I watched every day for two years straight.

Though it is debatable whether Jurassic Park counts as a horror film, it is one film that left an indelible impression on me. It may have set out to be a science fiction adventure of a fantastical dino world, but I remember trembling in both fear and anticipation sliding the cassette tape in and pushing play. The film queues up a haunting film score and goes into its cold opening that built the perfect tower of terror as far as establishing a foundation for the cinematically epic kills to come out of this film.

I would look closely into the eyes of anyone who claims they did not jump and/or scream when that velociraptor busted its face through the bars. In the infamous scene of the T-Rex standing before her prey ready to sink her teeth in, I, for one, was quivering in my seat in a similar fashion to viewings of monster or stalker flicks right before they stab their victim. I marveled at the film’s incredible moments of beautiful graphics, which make this film a little too awe-inspiring and put-together to feel like a “true” horror film, but Jurassic Park was undeniably terrifying for me, and drew me into daily viewings like a moth to a flame.

During my pre-teen years, I was entrusted with a Blockbuster membership card of my very own and was unleashed onto its premises weekly, free to choose whatever movies I wanted — again, watching things that I often probably shouldn’t have, according to the motion picture association parental guidelines, anyway. I remember renting Casper and The Exorcist around the same time in my childhood and somehow feeling about the same amount of fear for either movie.

At this point, I was either numbed by subjection to Tales from the Crypt and Jurassic Park on repeat or was simply mature enough to compartmentalize reality versus the make believe of movie magic from a young age. Whatever the case was, and at that liminal period in life, I recognized both the terror of an uncontrollably violent and violated girl as well as the abject horror of potentially never kissing Devon Sawa at the Halloween dance. My cinema taste buds were obviously shot during my teen years, and my main horror fix came from celebrating Halloween, attending every hoe-down, costume party, and scouring every neighborhood of my city.

In high school, my parents finally started monitoring what I was watching, disallowing movies and TV channels that they deemed to be unproductive. No matter — by then, horror in film form did not have quite an effect on me, as what truly scared me were the horrors in real life and I began turning into a true-life scaredy-cat. Seeing even just an ever-so-slightly suggestive shadow at night would send me into a tailspin of horror for weeks of sleepless nights.

This perpetual state of “Cowardly Lion-ness” continued into my adulthood, marking a nearly 10 year period of horror film hiatus where I focused more so on indie films and so-called classic cinema. Having lived as a perpetual scaredy cat for the majority of my adult life, there was not much of a need to see horror films, but, in the latter years of my twenties, my love of independent cinema continued to introduce me to a wider variety of films, including re-introducing me to horror, a genre that independent cinema often ventures into.

Three years ago I began working as a Staff Writer for The Frida Cinema, an independent movie theater in Orange County where HorrorBuzz happened to host a monthly Horror Movie Night that I began attending regularly. I eventually jumped ship to begin writing for HorrorBuzz, which has given me a whole new appreciation for this underestimated film genre given life by my Horrific Origin. It’s allowed me to explore the nooks and crannies of terror by watching the diverse lineup of movies we are given to review. After a crash course in new, subversive horror material, I have thankfully been able to pull myself out of the scaredy-cat slump that had kept me from delving deeper into horror cinema for most of my adulthood.

See you same time next week for the next entry in our Horrific Origin ongoing series.