I’ve always been dark. My skin strangely tan for a Jew. My clothes earthily black or near it, never seen wearing anything orange, yellow, or neon. My body long and bony, sort of projecting tiny shadows all over me. And emotionally, since I was tiny, adults have noticed this cold, angry, solemn wall I’ve built against them. Plus I’ve always had this weird fascination, nearly a dependency, on everything macabre. Macabre, itself, a wonderful word. It comes from an old French term La Danse Macabre, symbolically meaning a ‘dance with death’, macabre coming from the French word for the Maccabee clan who were horribly slaughtered. Thus, the word in English refers to anything and everything horrific, gory, vulgar, taboo, or, simply, frightening. Just thinking of these words would bring a smile to my younger self’s face.

We’ll take a few steps back then. I was maybe  five or six when I discovered Edward Gorey, a wonderfully morose English artist, illustrator, and writer who by signature wrote pieces of terrible, lingering gloom. His magnum opus was called “The Fatal Lozenge”. It was the perfect alphabet book for kids like me, depicting each letter as part of some horrific story, for example:

A is for

The Apparition of her lover,
She realizes with dismay.
And later on will discover,
That he himself has died today.

Along with an accompanying illustration. These went, ranging from the tear-jerking to the chilling to the laughably over-the-top grotesque. I was enthralled. I read all of Gorey’s work, and for a short period began to talk in my pre-pubescent six year old voice, in his style of speech; rhythmic and spine tingling.

Thus around that age began my love of horror books. I was an ardent patron of the works of Stephen King, gobbling up his tales of murderous children hiding in the corn, menacing clowns, mind twisting hotels, fatal wind-up monkeys, and way too many more. I was naturally led for there to a borderline-obsession with horror films, many of which I definitely shouldn’t have seen at age seven, eight, nine. I concocted lists, ranking which of the Scream films was the best (first obviously), and worst (sixth). I stayed up nights enthralled in tales of satanic enfants, B-movies featuring rampant chainsaw-wielding transvestites, vampire love stories (not Twilight, of course, but the good, bloody, Danish kind), and the various such. I even attended the Creepshow camp in San Francisco a camp for young horror lovers such as myself, where I learned how to gauge out someone’s eyes and make fake blood. Adults then regarded me with either pleasant confusion, as if I were a bicycle riding orangutan, or with a cold wariness which I in turn reflected unto them.

Later, I unpleasantly learned the James Holmes, the suspected ‘Dark Knight’ movie theater shooter was as well obsessed with horror. It was then. at age twelve in 2012, then I began to suspect that my obsession revealed something terrible within me. Suddenly the I craved was real. It was in the world. And I was, in a way, part of it.I became ashamed of my passion of horror books and movies. I willed myself out of watching and reading horror. Discarding the tapes and books, I pursued everyone around me to in return discard my image as a horror-lover, and instead think of me as a regular, completely sane and subdue sort of guy. I thus shed a part of me, what I now regard as a phase, but what was then my life. Thinking about now, I feel like a completely different person. But in retrospect I know, really I was always the same basic person.  Before I was just sort of more comfortable with who I was.