I like scary movies. Always have, probably always will. Why? I'm not sure but I think it was instilled in me as a little guy. For those of you that don't know, I have two older brothers, Greg and Kirk. A older sister named Joy. And a younger sister named Kimberly. Now the one older brother Kirk, seen below with my sister Joy, used to take delight in coming home on the weekends and dragging me out of bed (without my parents knowledge) to watch the late night horror movies that would come on. I remember Chiller Theater that would come on on Friday nights quite well!
That's where I first saw the movie Psycho with good old Norman Bates. What a great movie f
or such a little kid as myself to watch, right? Well, this went on for quite some time and I noticed after awhile that I started LIKING the movies. I saw all the old Hammer Studios classics. A lot of the old black and white classics too! I remember the older siblings would go out to see the newest horror movie that would be playing at the local theater and I would beg for them to take me. No way! I was too young. The dreaded words every kid hated to hear. Anyway, as time went on I keep enjoying whatever scary movie would come on the tv. Remember, this was before VCR's, computers or any 
of the other things we enjoy today. We watched whatever came on. My favorite one's were the Christopher Lee Dracula movies produced by Hammer Studios. He made five of those 
and I own four of them today on DVD (the fifth one has never been released). I would also beg my mother for one of the old Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines that came out back in the day when ever we went somewhere that sold books and magazines. They always focused on the old black and white classic monsters from Universal. Dracula, Wolfman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the classics! Remember being in school and getting the weekly reader papers that allowed us students to purchase books from? My picks were always scary stories or old movie monsters books. Even today I love a good scary movie. I guess it all goes back to my younger days when my brother Kirk would drag me outta bed to watch whatever with him. My son Lorenzo shares the same interest in scary movies as I do. I would let him "stay up" when he was young to watch something that was on TV late when he to should have been in bed. We both like to go to the movies and get the daylights scared out of ourselves and when it's all over we laugh and say "Wow, good movie"! I guess like father like son.
That picture of your brother Kirk is about the scariest thing I've ever seen.
ReplyDeleteI always liked the movies that had a sense of reality to them. Movies that would make you think that this was possible. There was one called "When A Stranger Calls" that came out in the '80s that was especially riveting. A threatening stranger calls a girl baby sitting at someone's house asking her, "have you checked the children. In the end, she finds out the telephone calls are coming from inside the house and the children had already been brutally murdered hours before. The story actually continues from there. It had that urban legend quality.
Although the true horror movie, "Salem's Lot" is about the scariest thing I can recall. The book was disturbing, but the made-for-tv movie starring "Starsky & Hutch's" David Soul was even more so. From what I hear about your experience with the book and movie, I know you'll agree. Just goes to show you don't need all the gore to be scary.
Nick, my brother-in-law, I also saw "When a stranger calls". It was the first R rated movie I saw and I went with Joel to see. It was really disturbing as you say. And Salems's Lot? Forget about it! Scariest movie of all time! Yes, your right. That movie stayed with me along time.
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