By tyranist
I come from a pretty bland American background that tried to teach me all about "good" and the things worth pursuing in life. My parents, in my best interest, perhaps even sheltered me a bit from the things that they thought could influence me to evil. I don't blame them for that. They were trying their best to raise me to be an upstanding member of whatever community I joined as an adult.
So why am I so fascinated with the darker side? With things a little twisted, a little scary, a little more unusual than many people like?
I don't suppose that I really know the answer to that. I saw few horror movies as a lad (far fewer than Rish did at any rate) and didn't read much in the way of horror either. It wasn't until I was a teen that I really discovered the joys of Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Dean Koontz, and Stephen King. I guess that you could argue that the copious amount of science fiction and fantasy I read from the time I learned there was a library probably led me logically into an exploration of a larger world than the one I found myself in. Horror really isn't that far removed from those genres, and in fact, I've encountered stranger things there than even horror sometimes offers. Try Neil Gaiman, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Ray Bradbury sometime.
The first true horror--as in almost exclusively known for horror--author I remember is Poe. I was captivated by his dark vision of the world a hundred years ago. It seemed to me that he saw the same world I did, but the sun didn't shine quite as bright and men weren't nearly as honorable or even sane. It was then that I started trying to write poetry. I found an underlying beauty in the darkness and the night when I started to try to put words to the darker world I was starting to notice around me. In a lot of ways, I was as pretentious as I sound, but in some small way, it was like opening a door for me.
Here is where my parents probably thought they were beginning to go wrong. They didn't see the difference that I saw in looking at things with a more moribund perspective and living that way. I would argue that I was in no way maladjusted and still am not. I had just begun to see things a little differently. It was a difference of perspective.
Then I was introduced to Lovecraft. The dark world I was introduced to by Poe was suddenly inhabited by beings beyond the ken of mortal man. This put me off at first, but then I began to understand that the obsession was not with the things we couldn't understand but with how the human mind dealt with them. This was horror purely for horror's sake and, when I stumbled on Dean Koontz in the library not too long afterward, I was ready to read horror for the sheer pleasure of being scared. Dean didn't always do that for me, but at least he had compelling characters and I could spend hours in his world. What he did do for me was introduce normal men into terrifying situations. Poe's characters weren't entirely equipped to deal with the world I lived in and Lovecraft's didn't live in a world I really recognized. But Koontz's could have lived next door to me.
Then I met Rish and he forced me into the worlds of Stephen King and writing. As I was discovering yet another world outside the one we live in, I was trying to create a world of my own. I was amazed at how difficult the transition from ethereal, haunting poetry to scary prose ended up being.
Then several years interrupted both my pursuit of the darker things in life and my relationship with Rish. When we both came back we found that the old blood still ran and a thirst for understanding what frightened us still burned. We started watching horror movies together. Yet another door opened up for me. Rish had been watching them religiously for years, but I had missed so many. In fact, I could probably list all of the horror films I had seen on one side of a single sheet of paper. Rish had seen many more, but he was willing to check out what was left with me.
That's how the Horror Film Compendium was born (although we called it "The Horror . . . the Horror" then). With my parents no longer taking a role in sheltering me and cheap access to so many different versions of what people think is scary, I was ready. Together with Rish, I submersed myself in the world of horror.
That doesn't explain my fascination, but it illuminates the path I took. I'm not sure it is possible to explain why I am so interested in understanding fear and violence. Sometimes I like to think that it is a psychological release, but usually, I am just interested in finding out what scares people. It's a shame that there isn't enough well done horror to keep me submerged all the time.