My earliest memories are of horror film playing at a drive-in theater. Fragments of the film, vivid color, brains in jars, stay with me to this day so many decades later. It is not surprising I grew up with a taste for horror movies. Over the long years those tastes focused and resolved into my best-loved types of horror cinema.
Ghost stories are without a doubt the horror I love best. I can’t explain why this genre appeals so strongly to me but from classic cinema and literature such as The Haunting/The Haunting of Hill House to more recent fare like The Night House, or Last Night in Soho, ghosts have fascinated and occasionally terrified me. Ghosts hold no terror for me in reality. I do not believe in ghosts and spirits. Life is a bio-chemical reaction and once the reaction stops, we are gone from this Earth. The emergent properties from out brain that we call ourselves vanishes with the cessation of life. But despite this firm, mechanistic view of reality and life, it is the ghost story that fascinates and compels me.
At the other end of my horror preferences lies the genre of Slashers.
What makes it strange that slashers so often are uninteresting or laughable to me is that they bear a close evolutionary relation to a genre I do very much care for the giallo. What differentiates the giallo from the slasher, at least to me, is that the Italian films are more centered on the mystery, the macabre, and flamboyant cinematic style while the latter is more focused on the kills, the more gruesome and outlandish the better. This is not to denigrate or belittle those who love, adore, and flock to the slasher movies. The beauty of the arts is in their diversity. We should always love what we love with shame or apology.
It is my apathy towards slashers that made films such as X difficult for me to suspend that vital disbelief that transforms a movie from something you watch to something you experience.
Each of us has the stories and genres to speak to something deep inside each of us and it the artists that bring us these fantastic fantasies I am continually in awe of.
