My Dark Side

It's always funny when people are getting to know me and they find out what a dyed-in-the-wool horror fan I am. Nine times out of ten they're suprised. I guess most people who've heard of me think of me as the sunny singer of children's music and Christmas songs, and can't imagine that I'd rather go see a scary movie than a comedy, or read a really great horror novel than some sappy romance or historical fiction. One time, a woman came up to me after a family concert and said, "I could have sworn I saw you in the theater watching Psycho last week, but that couldn't have been you, could it?" Ha! It sure was, although I must admit that I wish I'd never seen that terrible 1998 remake.

Born into a family of horror fans, it was inevitable that I'd grow up loving the genre. It started with the old movies on TV, like "Attack of the Puppet People" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Then there were entire afternoons spent in the dark movie theater, watching triple features of the American International Edgar Allen Poe movies by Roger Corman. When I was just nine years old, my brother and I walked to the movies to see "Night of the Living Dead," the movie that ushered in a whole new era of gore. The following year, my mother brought me to the Drive-In to see "Rosemary's Baby" because she didn't want to hire a sitter.

Speaking of the Drive-In, the Winslow Drive-In, across the river from my hometown of Waterville, Maine, was where I really cut my teeth on the absolute grimmest and most disgusting movies of the 70s. From H.G. Lewis' "Blood Feast" and "Two Thousand Maniacs" to "It's Alive" and "Bloodthirsty Butchers" the gore flew across that big screen in the most depraved scenarios imaginable. I still remember one scene in the latter film- a grade Z take on the story of Sweeney Todd- where a guy is looking inside a pie crust at a chopped off women's breast and exclaims, "Can my sister have the part she likes?" I think I was eleven or twelve when I saw that, and I didn't even know what he meant! It's still stuck in my brain long after I've forgotten all the highbrow stuff they made me read for high school English classes.

Yup. Saw this when I was under the age of 13.

I was a regular viewer of "Dark Shadows," and when the show was going off the air I put up a poster in my 5th grade Catholic school classroom encouraging kids to write letters to ABC to SAVE DARK SHADOWS. The nun who taught our class let me put it up, saying, "I hope someday you'll fight for something that really means something."

Meanwhile, the reading material scattered around our house included my brother's issues of "Famous Monsters of Filmland," "Creepy" and "Eerie," as well as the wonderful Dell paperback horror and mystery anthologies published under the Alfred Hitchcock Presents brand.

I guess it was only natural that I started churning out horror stories on our old clunky typwriter when I was twelve. I showed one of them to my 7th grade Language Arts teacher and she declared me a genius. Alas, my musical interests were stronger than my writing skills and I eventually focused on writing songs, only sitting down to scribble out a scary story a handful of times over the years.

I didn't get back into regularly writing spooky tales until many, many years later, and that was at the encouragement of one of the greatest genre writers of all-time. I'll tell you howthat happened in my next blog post!

It's late...time to fall asleep to something on SHUDDER!

Nighty night! Don't let the bedbugs bite!