Meet the Horror Bloggers meets...Me!

One of the best professional experiences I've had in the last year or so is my membership in The League of Tana Tea Drinkers, a cadre of highly-dedicated, highly-talented horror bloggers. I've discovered many amazing blogs through this association, and encountered some great writing, and some remarkable thinking about the genre too.

Iloz Zoc, the founder of the League, and an outstanding blogger himself, has been running a series called "Meet the Horror Bloggers" for the last few weeks, posting biographies of some of these intrepid bloggers. I've read them all with avid interest since, as a critic, I believe context is vitally important to understanding literature, film, television...everything, really. Reading this blog series, you get that invaluable context behind many blogger perspectives, and it's made for fascinating reading.

Anyway, today Iloz Zoc posted the last entry of the series, I believe, and it happens to be my bio. Here's a snippet:

It was a Saturday in 1975, and close to Halloween. As dusk approached, my parents sat me down in front of the TV and, in particular, an episode of a new series called Space: 1999. The episode airing that night was titled “Dragon’s Domain” and it concerned a malevolent, tentacled Cyclops entrapping and devouring hapless astronauts in a Sargasso Sea of derelict spaceships. In an image I’ve never forgotten, this howling, spitting monster regurgitated the astronauts’ steaming, desiccated bones onto the spaceship deck. The episode was one part 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, and one part precursor to Alien (1979). But the direction of this five year old boy’s life was set in stone during those 50 minutes.

By the time I was in sixth grade, a viewing of Tobe Hooper’s intense The Funhouse (1981) at a girlfriend’s Friday night movie rental party – a big thing in those days -- deepened my obsession with the horror genre. The film terrified me on a level I had never before experienced (or even imagined, frankly…), but I survived it. And afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about the nerve-tingling experience of being really frightened by a film, or about the specific details of Hooper’s grisly narrative. I wanted to know more, to understand more, and most importantly, to talk endlessly about the experience and what it had meant to me. Many of my friends thought I was nuts."

You can read the rest of the piece here, and I hope it provides some context for regular readers of this blog too. I want to thank Iloz Zoc for including me in the series, and for running the series in the first place. It's been indispensable.